The tabloids are always telling MPs to stand up for ordinary people - and on Monday they did
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David Cameron speaks to MPs during the emergency debate in the House of Commons. Photograph: PA
Today's Tory press is hedging its bets on the dramatic cross-party deal for regulating the industry. It's easy to mock the notion of Fleet St's more expensive suits waiting by the red telephone for instructions from Lord Copper, but I don't blame them. They may not like the principles, but they are entitled to be wary of the half-sketched details.
As the Guardian's editorial points out, they haven't spared much space either for the day's timely reminder of why their own formula for beefed-up self-regulation – "marking their own homework," as David Cameron put it – fails to persuade fair-minded students of the Street of Shame.
Backbench MP Siobhain McDonagh had her phone stolen from her car in 2010 – after the phone-hacking scandal broke. Two years later, in 2012, the police told her the Sun had accessed her messages. Yesterday it paid up. I'm sure there's an account somewhere in today's edition but I can't find it. It's not in the outraged ("a grim day") Daily Mail either.
But in the day's excitement let's spare a little applause for parliament. Cameron's application for an emergency debate to enshrine the delicate deal he'd just cut with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg (and do so before anyone could take an axe to it) was a tribute to the power of ordinary MPs and peers on all sides. They threatened their party leaders and the party leaders blinked first.
When the Mail says "for the first time since the 17th century there will be political interference in British newspapers" it's talking hyperbolic nonsense, as well as sidestepping newspaper interference in politics (they used to demand openly a veto on cabinet jobs). But MPs pushing around the government of the day and the party bosses is something all too rare for long stretches since the mid-19th century.
Trouble-making – that's partly what MPs are for. Not all the time, that would make for ungovernability, but enough to keep Whitehall on its toes. In the long years I have covered these proceedings I have never quite seen the "standing order No 24" procedure for an emergency debate – instantly granted by the Speaker, John Bercow – deployed in this way, and by the prime minister no less. We had a foretaste last autumn when Clegg rose from Cameron's side and contradicted his coalition partner when Leveson first reported.
This is how it used to be when I first sat in the press gallery in the mid-70s at a time when Jim Callaghan's Labour government was slipping towards minority status, living from hand to mouth, not in a coalition but via stitched-up deals and improvisations (with Ulster Unionists and others Nats as well as the then-Liberals) that kept it afloat for three years until the inevitable nemesis.
Jim's nemesis turned out to be Margaret Thatcher, who ushered in 30 years of (mostly) over-mighty executive power, bolstered by huge majorities, John Major being the unlucky exception. The chaos of the 70s is all recalled in James Graham's gripping play, This House, soon to return to the National Theatre.
After the three party leaders had their say, all quite gracefully dipping their hands in the blood of their hastily concocted compromise, MPs were quickly back to making boring, self-justificatory speeches.
It's all here and Simon Hoggart's mockery is here. So what? It's Simon's job to mock and MPs job to be boring and responsible much of the time. But what they have shown in the past week or so is the kind of muscle which the post-expenses reforms of 2010 (greater power for backbenchers and their select committees) was meant to achieve. So was the election of a new cadre of MPs. Andrew Tyrie's banking commission has been no City/Treasury pussy cat.
Over Leveson it was the action of opposition and crossbench peers, amending bills in the Lords to exert pressure on the government, which threatened to derail the coalition's legislative programme – and thus forced Cameron to act.
The Daily Beast squealed, but the tactic worked. No 10 tried to apply its own defibulator to the Leveson impasse last week by cancelling Cameron's talks with Clegg and Miliband. They called his bluff back – assisted by 20 or 30 Tory rebels – by stacking up a majority to defeat him.
Very 1970s! Remember, it was two leftwingers, Jeff Rooker and the late Audrey Wise, who combined with the Tory whip on the budget bill, to impose index-linking ("honesty in taxation") on their own minority government and the Treasury: it became the Rooker-Wise amendment.
Backbench MPs have had a terrible press lately, much of it deserved, but not most of it. Peers are usually ignored unless they are caught claiming unjustified expenses or running off with their secretary. Lord Puttnam, who put the Leveson squeeze on No 10 last month, has been given the sort of kicking Fleet St's critics routinely expect.
"Why don't we know who's funding Hacked Off?" a libertarian Tory MP angrily asked me yesterday. We do know some of them – Joseph Rowntree in unlikely alliance with Hugh Grant – but fear of being done over by the press is a powerful incentive for anonymity, I explained.
On press regulation, MPs have decided there may be safety in numbers and are finally calling time in the last chance saloon. Not on a free press, but on rogue elements – as Tom Stoppard, a student of seriously repressive regimes in his native former Czechoslovakia, wrote in Monday's Indy.
There is plenty of small print to hammer out, but even the tabloids are always telling MPs to stand up for ordinary people like the Dowlers, the McCanns or Bristol landlord Christopher Jefferies.
On Monday they did, except the powerful vested interest they stood up to wasn't the energy cartels, the shabby habits of banks, the police or town hall bureaucracy. It was the press. Not convinced? Well, ask yourself how a grieving family will feel about this headline today?
