Heavy price we all pay for anti-Press hysteria

WITH the jury discharged after one of the longest criminal trials in British history, the Mail is at last free to ask a question of enormous public concern.

In all the hysteria that has surrounded the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, hasn’t something gone grievously awry with the priorities and sense of proportion of politicians, the police and the Crown Prosecution Service?

Let us be clear. This paper deplores the interception of voicemail messages. It may not be the most serious crime, but it is a crime nonetheless – to be punished like others of similar gravity, under laws that existed long before the Leveson Inquiry. But one glance at the expenditure of manpower and resources on the marathon trial that ended yesterday, and the police investigation leading up to it, shows the jaw-droppingly disproportionate scale of the authorities’ reaction.

Leave aside the price Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has paid for the scandal, with the closure of the News of the World and payments of £270million in legal fees and compensation to hacking victims. Since 2011, the Met alone has spent almost £ 33million on Press- related inquiries – well over 40 per cent of its annual budget for Homicide Command – while at one point 195 officers were diverted from graver crimes.

Add the costs of the eight-month trial, and the bill comes to well over £100million. Yet even after this massive effort and expense, the CPS assembled a case so threadbare it could prove only one charge out of 14 denied by seven defendants.

Meanwhile, at least 12 more trials are in the pipeline, involving up to 40 accused. They are among 96 journalists arrested since 2011 – many in melodramatic dawn raids – while some have been on police bail for months, their careers in limbo, waiting to hear if they will be prosecuted. Which brings us to the chilling role played by the Prime Minister in turning what should have been a routine crime investigation, confined mainly to one company, into a frenzied assault on the wider newspaper industry. As Mr Justice Saunders reminded the jury this week, David Cameron’s pretext for launching the Leveson Inquiry – a Guardian report that journalists had deleted Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages – was without foundation.

All too clearly, however, his real motive was to divert attention from his own gross misjudgement in appointing Andy Coulson as his director of communications (with clearance from that serial blunderer, Jeremy Heywood, since promoted to Cabinet Secretary).

He did this, against strong advice from senior figures in the media and politics, in a naked bid to cosy up to Mr Murdoch’s empire ( though he should take no sermons from Labour, after Tony Blair’s abject courtship of the mogul). To compound his folly, he has now earned a highly unusual rebuke from Mr Justice Saunders for jeopardising a fair trial by leaping in with his apology for appointing Coulson while the jury was still considering a charge against him. (And how significant that the judge also praised newspapers for their restraint).

As for the fallout from Leveson, the vast majority of papers and magazines have agreed to be bound by the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

This will be by far the toughest regulator in the free world – while, crucially, maintaining 300 years of freedom from political control.

How telling that, yesterday, a prominent Labour supporter of state interference in the Press told a series of lies about IPSO, impugning its independence and claiming it would be the industry’s puppet.

Need we say more than that the speaker, with so much he would have liked to keep secret about his expenses and philandering, was none other than Lord Prescott?