HOW PM BETRAYED BRITAIN’S FREE PRESS
. . . and the bitterly ironic twist: was it a Rebekah Brooks ploy which gave Cameron the idea for the Leveson Inquiry?
As revelations continued to spill out about phone-hacking at the news of the World, rebekah Brooks tried to seize the initiative. according to a senior executive who works for a rival newspaper group, the news international chief executive assumed that her tabloid wasn’t the only one guilty of listening in to celebrity voicemails.
‘ rebekah was desperate to have anything that would spread the news of the World virus into the whole of the rest of the industry,’ he says.
‘she said words to the effect of: “let’s all get together and say we were all at it; we’re going to take part in this truth and reconciliation commission and we’re going to put it all on the table so that we can move on.” ’
Her idea, floated some time before the furore over the hacking of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone, was dismissed out of hand. But one person at least appeared to take inspiration from it: David Cameron.
Under constant attack for employing former news of the World editor andy Coulson as his communications director, the Prime Minister — as he privately admitted later — felt labour had him ‘on the run’.
He desperately needed to regain the initiative, and Brooks’s ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ seemed the ideal device. thus, in July 2011, he announced a turbo-charged version of what some industry figures claim was essentially her scheme.
Chaired by lord Justice leveson, it would become known as the leveson inquiry, with a wide-ranging remit to investigate the ‘culture, practices and ethics of the Press’.
Former Metropolitian Police Commissioner sir Paul stephenson saw it as a desperate measure.
[sir Paul resigned from his post at the height of the phone-hacking furore, suffering from poor health. earlier, it had emerged he had taken hospitality from a health spa linked to a former news of the World executive.]
sir Paul says: ‘it’s that classic leadership trick, which a number of us pull when we’re in deep difficulty, to say: “this is disgraceful and we must have an inquiry.” ’
‘i think they deliberately spread it wider to try and take the flak away from the decision to employ Coulson . . . i think there was a very strong agenda there to spread the heat around.’
Cameron’s own pollster andrew Cooper concedes that ed Miliband, recently appointed as labour leader, had been driving the agenda at this point. ‘We felt a lot of political pressure,’ he admits.
THe inquiry, which began that november, laid bare in excruciating detail the intimate relationships between news international executives and politicians. a year later, leveson called for a new Press regulator, underpinned by statute and with the power to fine newspapers up to £1 million.
to the media, this stank of state regulation, unseen in Britain since 1695. For Cameron, too, it crossed a line — and he rejected the idea out of hand. ‘We should be wary of any legislation that has the potential to infringe free speech and a Free Press,’ he told the House.
at this point, tortuous negotiations began between political parties, the Press and the pressure group Hacked off to find a middle way.
in a Downing street meeting with newspaper editors, Cameron made it clear he was definitely going to find a way to avoid a Press law.
‘[But] he refused to tell anyone what it was,’ says former tory Party communications director Guy Black. ‘then he left the meeting in the hands of oliver letwin.’
By his own admission, letwin — the tory Policy Minister — was an odd choice to conduct the negotiations. as talks with the industry dragged on, he made little secret of his frustration.
‘i don’t know why i’m doing this. i hate journalists, i hate all journalists,’ he wailed at one point. it was a strange thing to admit to a room full of editors.
in mid- February, Cameron convened a meeting of editors and proprietors to secure their backing for letwin’s new plan: a Press watchdog established by royal Charter, which appeared to take the matter of Press regulation out of the hands of the Government.
‘the Prime Minister seemed very pleased with the outcome, as were we,’ recalls one who was at the meeting. ‘He said: “i fought hard to maintain the freedom of the Press. now i want you to get behind this document.” ’ once it was published, the Prime Minister said, it would be ‘set in stone’.
However, it soon transpired that, far from being set in stone, the scheme had no support from other parties. editors had been sold a pup. ‘letwin had insisted throughout that he was liaising with the other parties,’ recalls one media figure involved in the process.
‘ We’d ask from time to time: “should we go see [deputy labour leader Harriet] Harman? should we go see the lib Dems . . ?” to which letwin replied: “Don’t worry, i’ve got it all sorted — you would only complicate matters.” ’
Meanwhile, ed Miliband and lib Dem leader nick Clegg began working together to produce something tougher. exasperated with the whole saga, Cameron dramatically walked out of cross-party talks.
‘this is all too important,’ he told one friend. ‘Freedom of the Press is in danger. i am going to go down fighting to protect a Free Press . . . i am going to face them down and dare them to produce their own proposals on statutory controls.’
His bold words suggested he was preparing for a spectacular showdown with Miliband and Clegg.
intrigued, editors waited for the big bust- up. it never came. Following his theatrical announcement, Cameron suddenly went ‘absolutely quiet, disappeared and we heard no more about it’.
in the end, an alternative system was thrashed out under the supervision of Hacked off.
Privately, Cameron presented the compromise reached on March 18 as a triumph for Press freedom and claimed credit. ‘i’ve just achieved a great victory for you,’ he told one newspaper executive. ‘i’ve managed to get some protection in place to ensure the code is still written by journalists.’
this was deeply misleading. What emerged instead was — in the eyes of the majority of the Press — little more than a ‘Hacked off charter’. Crucially, it would involve an element of state regulation, or what the Prime Minister called a ‘relatively small legislative change’.
HavinG declared — for the first time in his entire political career — that he was ready ‘to go down fighting’ on a principle, Cameron had given in. Far from marking the end of the process, his decision triggered a new stand- off with newspaper editors, who threatened to boycott the new body.
all the way through, Cameron’s handling of the phone-hacking crisis had exposed a characteristic weakness in his approach to the premiership. the decisions he made appeared to be driven by the need to ‘get through the day’ rather than by a consideration of longterm implications.
‘ i thought he got everything wrong,’ says a key figure involved in the process. ‘ the way he set up leveson was wrong. Frankly, putting oliver letwin in charge of anything is a terrible mistake.
‘Marching everyone to the top of the hill in March, saying it was all set in stone, was almost a disaster. and then backing this Hacked off charter, which three days earlier he’d said he was willing to die in a ditch to avoid [ state regulation] . . .’
the tory leader’s approach, he believed, was influenced throughout by his need to offset the big mistake of bringing andy Coulson into Downing street.
‘i think that embarrassment, and his obvious concern about the political downside of it all, has coloured every single decision he’s made . . . which is: “i have to protect myself from people saying i’m too close to all these monsters.”
‘in those circumstances, rationality leaves you.’