Leveson Inquiry

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Friday 11th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield]

My Lords, I declare an interest: I was a journalist for 20 years and still turn out an occasional column, as reflected in the register. I was also asked by Lord Justice Leveson to submit written evidence, which I duly did.

Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry scored a line across the country’s psyche like no other Government-sponsored investigation in recent times. It pieced together in raw, stark detail a story of systematic failings on the part of a significant portion of the press to adhere to even the most rough and ready ethics, of newspapers and journalists casting aside seemingly all restraint and decency when gifted by technological advances with means of intrusion into public and private lives that only very secret sections of the British state possessed when I ceased to be a daily journalist in 1984.

The events and behaviour Lord Justice Leveson investigated were searing and in some instances scarcely believable. He wielded a vivid pen in reporting. His analysis is powerful and convincing. His prescriptions have commanded wide assent and approval, bar one crucial and problematic recommendation that any new arrangements for press regulation must be tipped by the metal of statute if they are to be capable of sharp and sustained application where what has gone before was blunt and ineffectual.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, I will quote Lord Justice Leveson. He acknowledges:

“By far the best option would be for all publishers to choose to sign up to a satisfactory self-regulatory regime”.

For that I think there exists a wide consensus, but the great divide in the post-Leveson debate is, to use his words again, what kind of “convincing incentives are required” for this to happen.

I admit that I may be suffering from a degree of déformation professionnelle from my journalistic days but I remain deeply uneasy about Parliament allowing the tread of statute to touch this particular terrain of our national life. The key definition of an open society is a country in which the state has an ever-present sense of its own boundaries and limits. If, as a Parliament, we place a piece of primary legislation here, even as a backstop, will we not be propelling our country through a valve, through which we will be most unlikely to return?

The Prime Minister has told the editors that “the clock is ticking”. So it is. Public as well as political concern is quickening that clockwork and I recognise that in being wary of statute, I am out of kilter with three-quarters of the population, individuals whom I greatly respect, such as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, and the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, who has direct journalistic experience, and more seasoned journalists than myself such as Professor Brian Cathcart of Hacked Off. If I was a statute man, I would be happy with the crisp Independent Press Council Bill drafted by the noble Lord, Lord Lester of Herne Hill.

My worry is that if we reach for statute, all future developments are likely to be one-way. Think a decade or so beyond a Leveson law. Imagine a Government irritated, as Governments usually are, with a coarse and wilful press that refuses to acknowledge the wisdom, beauty and subtlety of their political programme. There is bound to be a rogue newspaper or two in operation—like rogue states, rogue newspapers will always be with us—behaving extremely badly. It will be all too easy for the aggrieved Government to argue that the first light-touch law was all right for 2013-14 and that the press behaved more carefully for a while in the shadow of the Leveson report, but that Government could argue that those lessons have been unlearnt and it is time to tighten up.

The self-dissolution of the Press Complaints Commission creates a real opportunity for improved regulation. The proposals of its chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Wirral, for a new system of contracts, with the civil law in the background to give them bite, offers the publishers the chance to bind themselves in to a tougher, tighter and more sanctions-laden system of self-regulation. I know that this can be dismissed as promising “a better yesterday”—to borrow the rather unkind description of the old Social Democratic Party from the late and much missed Lord Dahrendorf. But I hold out a real hope for that approach and for the idea of respected figures—non- governmental and non-Ofcom figures—as the validators and overseers of the new arrangements and those appointed to operate them.

I do not think that a replica of the BBC-style royal charter is at all the way to do this. The BBC charter is reviewed roughly every 10 years and the merest glance at the 2006 charter shows just how intrusive this allows Governments to be in the institutional structures of the corporation’s governance.

At the risk of sounding Pollyanna-ish, to my mind, the events reported on by Lord Justice Leveson and the clarity of his analysis have proved to be no end of a lesson to the British media. There is at least a chance of Lord Justice Leveson’s “best option” of a self-regulation that works finally coming to pass amid the ruins of the Press Complaints Commission and the old Press Council that preceded it. However, I am the reverse of Pollyanna when it comes to Lord Justice Leveson’s wish for more restraint and greater transparency between the respective commanders of our political and media classes. That story has long been one of fluctuating combat and collusion, as captured by David Lloyd George, when he said of the press:

“What you can’t square, you squash; what you can’t squash, you square”.

It will take the second coming to put an end to that.