My hunch is that David Cameron has been forced to retreat, facing a defeat in the Commons
Share 113
inShare0
Email 
David Cameron, who appears to have buckled over statutory regulation of the press. Photograph: Nick Ansell/PA
Who has won and lost the overnight closing stage of the battle over press regulation? Patrick Wintour sets it out here. But it may not be clear until MPs see the small print as the dust settles later on Monday, perhaps not until the new system beds down – or doesn't. The tax-exiled press lords are threatening a breakaway regulator, though that may be a bluff. It usually is when called.
The great names of John Milton, John Wilkes and George Orwell are being invoked as champions of free speech by rightwing newspapers which would happily have locked up all three, and probably campaigned to have Milton's head on London Bridge in 1660. Long-haired highbrow? Poet? Blind leftie? A perfect target for tabloid abuse.
Way beyond a Private Eye parody, the Sun front page invokes Churchill. Imagine what the Sun would have loyally done to Churchill and his louche habits in the 30s at the behest of a Tory PM in cahoots with its proprietor? But it was Churchill who wearily observed much later that the press's long-fought right to report parliament would soon turn into parliament's fight for the right to be reported. And so it has proved.
In purely party-political terms (not very important in the larger scheme of things), my hunch is that David Cameron has been forced to retreat a little by the parliamentary maths which would have defeated him in the Commons. Why so? Because his culture secretary, Maria Miller, was dispatched to tour the studios, telling BBC Radio 4's Today programme that ministers have saved the country from Labour's "extreme version" of regulation. The lady protests too loudly to be convincing.
Miller's claim is self-evidently not true. As the Guardian's measured editorial explains, the real differences on the regulatory regime are modest and twofold: whether the proposed royal charter (Oliver Letwin's ingenious compromise format) needs what George Eustace MP (another Tory) calls a "dab" of statutory underpinning to prevent it being nobbled in either direction; and whether the press should be able to veto appointments to said body. (It shouldn't.) Tory rebels – a brave stance this – say they will not buckle. So Cameron must.
Even if MPs accept Eustace's dab of underpinning – there are already semantic debates and the Guardian's tireless live-blogger, Andrew Sparrow, is on the case as usual – it will be arms-length stuff. Labour's Harriet Harman says there will be "a bit of statute" to prevent the charter being amended by less than a two-thirds majority of MPs, a high hurdle indeed. Thank goodness for the Daily Beast (irony alert coming!) that those high court judges and the European court of human rights will (probably?) still be there as final lines of protection for the press.
In any case, if the label "extreme" is to be attached to the political response to Leveson, it can be attached to a feature of the judge's blueprint which all three parties support in one form or another, that of exemplary damages. They have the potential to be damaging – to Private Eye for instance, as the never-knowingly-understated Nick Cohen wrote in the Observer. New constraints on police officers to brief the press – a much-abused but vital back-channel – is another backward step. There are several which the Guardian, FT and Indy – not in the Fleet Street pack – accept, too.
Such flaws can be fixed with goodwill within an agreed framework by which the press and wider media – Leveson never really got to grips with online media; he's an old-fashioned print man – agree to be held to account for their failings like everyone else nowadays. After all, the press is very keen on accountability for others. In the excitement it is sometimes forgotten that it remains open for the press to justify shady means used to achieve ends which are in the public interest, as the late News of the World's interest in Pakistani cricket fixing was.
To judge from some of the more hysterical warnings in the rightwing press, 300 years (where do they pluck that silly figure?) are about to end. The warning has been reinforced for days in news reports, editorial columns, columnists by the dozen, reinforced again online and on Twitter. On days like today, press freedom in most papers sounds like the freedom of salaried journalists to agree with the proprietor's view – the editor-in-chief Paul Dacre's in the case of the Daily Mail.
I am sure that such a stern puritan as Dacre pays his UK taxes like a gent. The press lords who own most papers live abroad for tax purposes. I have yet to see one of their columnists writing against the Miltonian grain (as Simon Jenkins so often goes against the Guardian's and Cohen did on Sunday), though the Sunday Telegraph's Matthew D'Ancona sounds suitably agnostic.
In the ruck there have been accusations that Hugh Grant and his more shrill cohorts on the Hacked Off campaign (like the rest of us, not above criticism) threatened Labour with a verbal duffing if it backed down from its previous stance, adopted quite bravely by young Miliband – who shared his determination with the Observer. The Mail printed what it claimed was Hacked Off's draft press statement.
Well, maybe. But as noted here the other day, if you were being threatened up a dark ally by Grant or Rupert Murdoch and his posse, which one would most scare you? The BBC's Nick Robinson, usually pretty reliable, I'd say, reported on Monday morning that the newspapers may not have been in the room for the political talks, but were certainly on the phone. They have all been in for talks at No 10, too.
It doesn't greatly matter whether Cameron, Clegg or Miliband has "won" in a tactical sense over the press charter. They will blame each other – "give me a majority if you don't want this horse-trading", Cameron may say. But all have reason to fear the press for what it has done to them in the past. Some of the attacks have been justified, many far from it. Over a long career I'd guess that fewer than half the press onslaughts on politicians' integrity, conduct and policies are justified and the ratio has got steadily worse. As Tony Blair's valedictory "feral beast" speech put it, not only does people's behaviour have to be incompetent, their motives must be venal too in Fleet Street's books.
Be that as it may, the freedom of the press matters most, freedom under the law. Some columnists say this is the right remedy: the laws of libel, corruption (bribing coppers and witnesses, hacking phones), sub judice and much else only need to be enforced, and there is no need for more. But we have seen so often how such laws are manipulated or sidestepped.
It is not the Camerons or Grants who suffer most. It is the ordinary citizens – the Dowler family – who get most brutally turned over. The press has constantly promised to reform its self-regulation, as did doctors, lawyers and the rest until public demands for reform overwhelmed them. It imposed the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority on the politicians and is now tackling the police service – at last. It's our turn too.
In any case, the most potent threat to the robust traditions of a pretty free press, warts and all, in Britain – and elsewhere – does not come from politicians, but from markets and the consumers which shape them. It has long been obvious in the US whose press is – despite the entrenched protection of the first amendment right to free speech – far tamer than ours for what are basically commercial (local monopoly) reasons. Remember the pre-war lack of debate there over Iraq in 2003?
Since then the online revolution has hungrily eaten away at the business model which has sustained the press for 150 years (a mixture of sales and ad revenue). No one yet has devised a new winning formula – but we will.
Meanwhile they are shedding jobs all over Fleet Street to sustain profits or stem losses – last week, this week, next week – and the supply of rich men willing to sustain a newspaper for the prestige, pleasure or fun may not last for ever. Once it was colonials like Lord Beaverbrook, the gallant Roy Thomson or less gallant Rupert Murdoch. Today the accountants rule. It's them, not Milton, we should all be worried about.
