Press ‘stitch-up’ is blamed on No 10
Minister points finger over failure to reach deal
CULTURE Secretary Maria Miller last night blamed Downing Street for the failure of the Government to reach agreement with newspapers on regulating Britain’s 300-year-old free Press.
She suggested it had been a disaster for Cabinet Office minister Oliver Letwin to be sent into Labour leader Ed Miliband’s office in the early hours last March to stitch up a cross-party deal over takeaway pizza with lobby group Hacked Off in attendance.
Aides said months of painstaking work towards a system which major publishers would sign up to had been undone at a stroke.
Mrs Miller’s remarks, which will cause consternation in Number 10, came as she told MPs that the newspaper industry’s rival proposals for a Royal Charter to establish a new system of self-regulation in the wake of the Leveson inquiry into media standards had been rejected. The plan would have meant a new independent regulator having strong investigative powers and the right to impose fines of up to £1million f or wrongdoing, up- f r ont corrections, with inaccuracies corrected fully and prominently, and independence from the industry and politicians.
But a committee of senior politicians advising the Privy Council concluded yesterday that the industry plans did not comply with some of the ‘ fundamental principles’ of Lord Justice Leveson’s report.
The three main parties will spend the next 48 hours locked in private talks before unveil- ing on Friday the final version of a Royal Charter, which will be imposed with or without industry agreement.
Newspaper publishers said that they were ‘deeply disappointed’ and pointed out that Lord Justice Leveson had himself rejected the idea of Parliament setting up a body to oversee regulation when he said in his report that ‘one of the fundamental requirements f or the regulatory body is independence from the Government.
‘Any Parliamentary process would be likely to be perceived
‘Deliberately excluded’
by the industry, and possibly the public, as Government interference in the independence of the Press.’
The newspaper i ndustry warned that nothing ‘could be more controversial than a Royal Charter imposed by politicians on an industry which is wholly opposed to it and which would fatally undermine freedom of expression’.
Senior MPs said the Government must not threaten free speech and try to force the Press to sign up to new regulations that it opposes.
Jacob Rees-Mogg warned that there was no precedent for the power of the Crown being used to impose a Royal Charter on an industry without its agreement.
Conor Burns, MP for Bournemouth West, said the newspaper industry was right to hold a ‘deep suspicion’ about the process of creating a new regulator after it was ‘deliberately excluded’ from the key meeting between senior politicians and Hacked Off.
Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston said that the regulation was ‘far more about protecting the powerful than the public’ and suggested it would mean a ‘ slide towards selfcensorship by the Press fearing litigation’.
Spectator magazine editor Fraser Nelson said it would ‘have no part in any government-mandated regulator’ for the Press.
‘Spectator readers would be appalled if we signed up to some kind of regulatory hierarchy which had politicians at the top,’ he said.
‘They expect us to be holding these guys to account, not dancing to their tune.’