Leveson inquiry: we risk losing the baby along with the dirty bath water

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2012/jun/18/leveson-inquiry-baby-dirty-bathwater

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I'd hesitate to call most low-profile judges public figures, but someone now in the public eye whom I have recently taken a shine to is Sir Brian Leveson. He's the man tasked with sorting out the tangled web that is the press and its appropriate relationship with three important groups: the police, politicians and celebs, though the wider public, also periodic victims of the feral newspapers, is also in the frame.

He's obviously a clever and very nice man, trying to do his best in territory which is new to him and fraught with peril. Only today the Guardian's Dan Sabbagh reports that Leveson rang Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, to seek assurances that Michael Gove's remarks about the inquiry's "chilling effect" on a robust press (this all happened in February) did not signal a pre-emptive cabinet rejection of his as-yet-unwritten report.

Just as ominous, Sabbagh also reports that Lord David Hunt, latest (and last?) chairman of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), that toothless teddy set up after the "drinking in last chance saloon" row of the early 1990s, plans to publish his own pre-emptive blueprint for a revamped PCC with two units, one for low-level complaints, the other to handle the kind of proper investigation which the PCC's out-of-hand rejection of the Guardian's phone-hacking dossier exposed as being urgently needed.

Leveson is entitled to be suspicious of death-bed conversions to virtue by some of the press lords, executives and editors who have performed in his witness box. We've heard it all before, as Sir Brian now knows. But they are entitled to be suspicious of well-meaning efforts by lawyers like him to regulate an industry which – it is pretty obvious sitting in court – they don't understand.

A robust and free press is important to society, as Leveson keeps saying. Ours is far from perfect, as everyone can now see, but our blander, tamer neighbours offer little comfort. Why do you think so many of them rashly signed up for the euro, I might unkindly ask by way of illustration? And no, the Leveson crowd clearly don't understand the pressures and constraints that operate in politics either.

But they're learning the hard way. At the end of Thursday afternoon's session – you can catch it here – with David Cameron still in the witness box after five hours, Lord Justice Leveson told the court and his unseen television audience that he will not be staging hearings this week, June 18. Not that anyone should think he's taking a holiday, it's just that he and his team have much reading to do, he added.

Indeed they have. The weight of evidence they accumulate each week, those countless emails as well as the oral evidence and written submissions from assorted interested parties, is daunting. Thursday's plea for public understanding of a week off the screen is only the latest indication that Leveson is feeling the pressure of life under the spotlight in ways he only previously imagined. Dan Sabbagh's reports – the Mail's version is "Now MPs say Leveson is stifling free speech" – are evidence of that too.

It's a useful lesson for someone tasked with reconciling freedom of speech, regulation, privacy and the law in awkward corners of society. As Sabbagh explains, Lord Hunt's initiative – done in conjunction with crafty Lord (Guy, not Conrad) Black, a Telegraph executive and an ex-secretary of the PCC – would head off the need for legislation, let alone what the Irish press laws call a "statutory underpin".

David Cameron, sensible to the attractions of low regulation, favours the Hunt approach. Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg, sensitive to what light regulation did for the banking business and also more frequent victims of feral press bias, lean towards a statutory backstop to make sure that rascally newspapers do not run rings around a reformed system of self-regulation and redress.

The legislative approach – Leveson sometimes seems tempted by it – would enshrine press liberties but also require participation by all media (respectable papers like Private Eye as well as the less respectable Express's Richard Desmond refuse PCC membership) and push all privacy/libel cases through its doors.

Leveson himself is supposed to produce some workable proposals that media, public and politicians will accept to guide press conduct for the future. All this by October, at least in theory. Not much bucket-and-spade time for Sir Brian this summer, barely a glass of pinot grigio for Robert Jay QC, his bearded interrogator-in-chief.

Leveson is evidently aware that he risks his report gathering dust in Whitehall like so many before and risks his chances of supreme court glory going the same way, unless – perish the thought – he gets promotion as a consolation prize for defeat. Such things happen.

Having sat through quite a lot of evidence in court 73 at the high court in the Strand (dozed through some of it too) my own modest thoughts are that a reformed regulatory system will probably need some form of legal underpinning, but that more important is the need for much more powerful lay regulators from outside – as most other professions (we are actually just a trade) now have to accept.

More important still is that the law should be enforced, as it was not in the phone-hacking affair and much else. This is usually an under-rated remedy for many of society's ills, not more bad legislation but workable legislation that can be enforced appropriately (no prison for poor people who can't/won't pay their TV licence fee) by the police and courts.

The ways in which the police, notably but not exclusively the Met, have turned blind eyes – and possibly worse – to all sorts of excesses with no evident public interest is the most disturbing feature of the affair. People whose lives are attacked, whose phones are hacked and children harried at school, are being intimidated.

But stricter regulation and laws enforced against miscreants are one thing, unworkable codes of conduct for the trading of information between police and press, or politicians and press, are another. Leveson sometimes gives the impression that a casual two-minute chat between Clegg or Cameron and the BBC's Nick Robinson in a corridor should be logged in the same way as an hour with Rupert Murdoch. Nonsense.

You think it couldn't happen? Last year Elizabeth Filkin, ex-parliamentary standards watchdog (not a wise one in my opinion, though others disagree), produced a report on relations between the media and the Met – here's a summary – which suggested that all such contacts should be monitored and recorded, that press officers should be present. Nonsense on stilts.

Yes, there was abuse as there clearly was in cosy dealings between the fearful political elite and the Murdoch entourage. But there is always abuse where human beings operate. We do not propose to end share dealings because crooks engage in insider trading – an ex-managing partner of McKinsey, no less, convicted in New York last week – we expose misconduct.

When he spoke of a "chilling" Leveson effect on the press, Michael Gove did not mean this, though he might have done. He meant that investigatory zeal was being chilled – not something the alleged Olympic ticket fraudsters in 54 countries probably agree this morning. Both fair points all the same, though something a Murdoch acolyte would have been wiser to leave to others to voice.

My recurring fear is that Leveson, who usually keeps his considered opinions to himself, has been repelled by so much of what he has heard that he will produce more stringent responses than wise, allowing government and media to escape proper censure and reform.

Just as some tabloid witnesses have repeatedly (wilfully?) confused the public interest with anything that interests the tabloid public, so Leveson and Jay sometimes seem obtuse about why politicians and journalists behave as they sometimes do.

Time and pressure of events explain much of what happens. We have to take decisions in a hurry because media and the public expect a rapid resolution that serves the public good, Cameron and others explained last week. We had confirmed the information, it was legitimate to publish it in the public interest and publish it before a rival does, say the press.

Amid all the sleaze and grubby compromise of the daily grind, we are as capable as you judges and lawyers assume yourselves to be – and, by God, you do loftily assume it – of rising above mere self-interest for the common good, say both sides.

I'm sure police witnesses said it too, but I can't recall. But it's true enough and we should not risk losing the baby along with the dirty bath water.