Leveson: No smoking guns – but an awkward day for Cameron

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jun/14/leveson-inquiry-david-cameron-news-international

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A few trade unionists staged a protest as David Cameron's Jaguar swept into the forecourt of the Royal Courts of Justice, though the day lacked the charged atmosphere of 2003 when Tony Blair appeared before the Hutton inquiry.

The prime minister emerged largely unscathed as he brought down the curtain on the most politically significant week of the Leveson inquiry with a performance which showed that, for the moment, there are no smoking guns.

While the day may have lacked the sense of history of 2003, when anti-war protesters jeered Blair outside the same venue, Downing Street will know that the prime minister's appearance may eventually be remembered as a significant moment.

Cameron, who normally exudes confidence, signalled that he knew he was in for a potentially uncomfortable ride when he looked uncharacteristically nervous even as the inquiry had the innocent feel of a sixth form seminar on media studies in the morning.

Shortly after midday the inquiry had the reason when Robert Jay QC, counsel to the inquiry, read out a text sent by Rebekah Brooks to Cameron on 7 October 2009 on the eve of his party conference speech. Brooks concluded her text with the words: "I am so rooting for you tomorrow not just as a personal friend but because professionally we're definitely in this together. Speech of your life? Yes, he Cam!"

The text, sent days after the Sun had abandoned its support for Labour, is embarrassing for the prime minister for one simple reason. It goes to the heart of the case against him: that he was too close to News International.

The prime minister's defence – to use his phrase pinched by Brooks – is that all political leaders have been "in it together" because successive prime ministers were too close to media proprietors and particularly to Rupert Murdoch. But the Brooks text shows that Cameron's links with the former News International chief executive went way beyond Blair's and Gordon Brown's contacts with the media empire.

Downing Street says that Brown's wife, Sarah, had an equally close relationship with Brooks after organising a sleepover of female friends at Chequers. Even if that is true, No 10 knows there is one immutable fact. The music has stopped on Cameron's watch, which means that any embarrassing evidence will rebound on him.

The memo showed that the greatest threat to Cameron for the moment is an unpleasant odour rather than a smoking gun. As the evidence moved towards lunch and into the afternoon session he navigated the tricky waters around his appointment of Andy Coulson and the decision to hand the quasi-judicial powers over the News Corp bid to take full control of BSkyB to Jeremy Hunt in December 2010. The prime minister, whose only difficulty was a difference of opinion with Coulson about when they first discussed phone hacking, acknowledged that the appointment has "come back to haunt both him and me". On Hunt, he was helped when his handling of the appointment was endorsed by Paul Jenkins, the Treasury solicitor.

Jenkins said it would still have been right to make the appointment even if there had been full disclosure of the memo by Hunt, sent a month earlier, strongly backing the BSkyB bid.

As Downing Street aides congratulated the prime minister on a credible if hardly Blair-style bravura performance, they will know that there is one other area where Cameron's evidence may be seen as highly significant.

This came in the closing minutes of his five-hour session when the hearing reverted to a seminar, though this time it was rather more elevated than the A,B,C of media studies earlier in the day.

Lord Justice Leveson started to question the prime minister about his thoughts on the future regulation of the media. Cameron trotted out a familiar script about the need for a change to the current system of self-regulation, embodied in the Press Complaints Commission of 2009 which glossed over phone hacking.

But then he said that the new system would have to pass what he called a McCann and a Dowler test – that ordinary families who feel they have a grievance against the press are treated properly. "The point is it doesn't work for the Dowlers, or the McCanns," he said. "That's the test."

Leveson challenged this as he indicated that he wanted to go further and draw up rules to block intrusion when there is no public interest.

The judge asked: "Could I suggest that it's not just the Dowlers, but really encompasses all those whose privacy or rights have been intruded upon without any sufficient public interest? Would that be fair?"

The prime minister, who has some sympathy for Michael Gove's view that there is a danger of limiting free speech, said he agreed. But then he questioned the judge's thinking when he said it was important that the press should be able to investigate those in the public eye.

The roles momentarily reversed as Leveson became slightly deferential to his witness when Cameron mentioned media interest in him as he laughed about leaving his daughter in a pub. This illustrated a fundamental point – and possibly a weakness about the inquiry – that Leveson needs the support of the prime minister and other political leaders to introduce his recommendations.

Leveson does not want his report to gather dust on the shelves of journalism colleges. That means that Cameron, who wonders whether it was wise to establish the inquiry, and Ed Miliband, who sees an opportunity to highlight the prime minister as "out of touch", will have to reach a consensus.