Clegg ‘cared more about muzzling the Press than anything else’

NICK Clegg threatened to bring down the Coalition government unless David Cameron agreed to introduce state regulation of the Press, the former prime minister revealed yesterday.

Writing in his memoirs, Mr Cameron reveals his Liberal Democrat deputy demanded implementation of the draconian laws following the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking.

Mr Cameron recalls a meeting with Mr Clegg in March 2013 in which the then Lib Dem leader told him: ‘You have to realise that no piece of legislation matters as much as this to me as this, and I am prepared to f*** up all the other legislation in order to get what I want on this.’

He said: ‘It was the only time we nearly came to blows, and staff outside raised their eyebrows as they heard shouting in my office.’

Mr Cameron added that, despite the controversy over the phone hacking scandal, he was opposed to the idea of state regulation – describing it as ‘a step too far’.

He said he had ‘no doubt’ that kind of law ‘would end up being used for more than control of Press behaviour of the hacking kind. It would be used to enforce control of content’.

But with Labour also demanding state regulation of the Press, Mr Cameron said he was forced to make a string of controversial concessions, including changing the law to make newspapers liable for libel costs – even in cases which they won – unless they signed up to a new regulator established by Royal Charter.

Mr Cameron said the result was a ‘messy muddling through’, but added that the debate now seems ‘almost archaic’, as little thought had been given to regulating the internet.