On 13 July, the day I announced in the Chamber the terms of a new inquiry into hacking – and the day that News Corp mercifully withdrew its bid for BSkyB – I was taken to task by Miliband over my friendship with Rebekah and my hiring of Andy.
I then went back to Downing Street and had the sobering and difficult task of meeting the Dowler family. They were charming and understanding, but passionately wanted something to be done. It was one of those days where you just can’t believe what your day entails. As well as PMQs, the statement and the Dowlers, I had a meeting with a terminally ill teenager who was campaigning for more bone-marrow donors, a Eurozone crisis meeting with the chancellor and the governor of the Bank of England, interviews with the media, an audience with the Queen, and – perhaps proof that the symbiotic relationship never stops – a dinner with journalists from the BBC, NBC and ITV.
Even with the inquiry announced and the BSkyB bid stalled, the pressure on my position was building. Labour felt they had ‘got us’ over our links to Murdoch and employing this ‘evil’ guy in Downing Street. I could sense the pitchforks. I knew I hadn’t done a deal with Murdoch nor offered policies for favours. I knew I hadn’t known about Andy and hacking. But in such a dynamic, messy, high-emotion time, you just can’t tell what will happen next – and you worry. That the pressure will build, that you’ll lose the confidence of the party.
In August I was at Heathrow ready to depart for a long-planned trip to Africa to promote trade and British interests. Parliament was about to shut down for the summer and I had answered my last PMQs of the session. Surely, I figured, it was time to move on – Craig agreed. Not a bit of it. We were two hours into the flight when Craig went to the cockpit to take a call from Jeremy Heywood, who told him that the Met commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson had just resigned over hiring the News of the World’s former deputy editor, Neil Wallis, as a communications adviser. Wallis had been arrested days earlier on hacking charges.
On the same day, Rebekah Brooks was arrested. More and more questions were arising from the select committee hearings. Miliband was calling for Parliament to debate these developments.
I made it to Nigeria and South Africa. But I skipped Rwanda and Sudan, and returned on Tuesday evening before Parliament met the following day.
I answered a mammoth 136 consecutive questions, the most in parliamentary history. I got through the exchange, but I was vulnerable on the BSkyB bid (what more could I say than that it was a red herring?) and on Andy Coulson (what more could I say than that I had trusted him?).
I downloaded my feelings – a conflicted mix of contrition and self-justification – on tape a few days later: ‘The worst thing I can be accused of is believing someone I shouldn’t have believed. I didn’t bring someone into government who then did terrible things in government, but I do feel … it shook me in that it’s very personal because you feel your own integrity is being questioned, your decision-making, your judgement. The weird thing is, I’m not cross with myself for getting into this mess. I mean, with 20/20 hindsight I’d have made a different decision, but I can see why I made the decision: he was good, he was a nice guy, he did a good job for us, but it was a risk I suppose we shouldn’t have taken, that’s the truth.’
Less than a year later, the inquiry was under way. I’d sit in my study in Downing Street watching the latest witnesses giving evidence – from Hugh Grant to J.K. Rowling, Tony Blair to John Major, and of course Rupert Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks – and Andy Coulson.
It was before Rebekah’s testimony in May 2012 that text messages between us were disclosed. Some of the coverage was mildly embarrassing but essentially harmless. Great fun was had over the fact that I routinely used ‘LOL’ to mean ‘lots of love’ when it actually means ‘laugh out loud’. (Danny Finkelstein told me later that he realised I was getting it wrong when I sent him a text saying ‘LOL’ after the death of his father.)
Other texts caused a bigger political fuss.
One was Rebekah wishing me luck before a conference speech in 2009 and saying we were ‘in this together’. A lot was read into this, but its origin was that I had complained about some press coverage, in the normal way politicians do. She was reminding me that whatever irritation I may have felt about an individual item, her paper was invested in our success.
Another text involved me talking about Charlie letting me ride Rebekah’s horse. The newspapers obsessed about that horse. It was simply too marvellous an image: the racehorse trainer, the flame-haired ex-tabloid editor, the prime minister and the police horse called Raisa. It really wasn’t that remarkable. Neighbours in the countryside arranging to meet up, a chief executive of a right-leaning newspaper group supporting a centre-right party leader.
But people read the chatty tone as conspiratorial, and the very fact of the exchanges as inappropriate. Everything was viewed differently through the prism of hacking, the failures of press regulation and a relationship between media and politics that had become too close.
At the same time as all this was being revealed, I was busily preparing my evidence and responses to the twenty-four questions the inquiry had sent to me. Soon I was swearing that oath in the Royal Courts of Justice, before five hours of questioning from Lord Justice Leveson and the inquiry’s counsel, Robert Jay.
I felt caught between two contradictory conspiracy theories.
The first was – and still is – put about by Gordon Brown: that in order to win the support of the Murdoch press and prise them off their support for Labour, I had made specific policy promises. It was put to me in the questioning, for example, that our policy to ‘trim back’ the BBC was done in exchange for the support of News International and James Murdoch, who was particularly anti-BBC.
This was ridiculous. We had frozen the BBC licence fee at a time of national economic emergency, when most departments were having to make 19 per cent cuts. What’s more, the BBC had totally overreached itself – a taxpayer-funded public broadcaster which was paying its executives eye-watering salaries and squeezing commercial competitors in areas like travel and publishing.
There was also the implication that I had put Jeremy Hunt in charge of reviewing the BSkyB bid in order to get a favourable outcome and the support of James Murdoch. Which must have meant that I rigged the Vince Cable faux pas.
At the same time as being accused of being in the pocket of the press, I was being accused by said press of launching this inquiry to spite them. That was the second conspiracy theory: Leveson was a dastardly attempt by me to settle scores with the papers that had given me so much trouble.
I can see why they might have thought this. Once I had decided we were having an inquiry, I did make a virtue out of necessity. I am certain the press’s fury is what lay behind some of the bad headlines at the time.
The Leveson Report arrived on 28 November 2012. All the charges against me were knocked down, one by one. No evidence was found of wrongdoing or impropriety by me or by Jeremy Hunt. There was no evidence of News International offering support in exchange for policy favours.
The next hurdle was responding to Leveson’s recommendations. He had proposed a new system for press regulation: a self-regulating body (an improved PCC) with a ‘statutory underpinning’, meaning that legislation would be put in place to make sure it remained independent and effective. Unlike the PCC, the board of this new body would not include any serving editors. The board, independent of government, would draw up a new standards code. Fines for breaching it would be substantial. Individuals would be able to complain without having to pay a fee, as before. Papers would have to publish more prominent corrections and apologies. There would be an arbitration service for a low-cost alternative to legal settlement of issues. This would only be open to publications that were members of the new self-regulatory body – those who weren’t would face ‘exemplary damages’ in court.
Craig conceded that if we didn’t back the Leveson findings we risked b
eing on the wrong side of the argument, in the court of public opinion and in Parliament. But he was clear what would happen if we did implement them with statutory underpinning: ‘You will be the prime minister who put in place a press Bill. That crosses the Rubicon – and it’s not something which history is likely to treat kindly … None of us should be under any illusion that [the press] will bear a grudge, and they will fight dirty.’
I knew the PCC had to change, and that we had to take on board most of what Leveson was saying. But I absolutely did not want in any way to put Parliament or the government in charge of what the press could and couldn’t do. Press licensing in England ended hundreds of years ago, and rightly so. Free speech and a free press were key components of our democracy. Politicians had to be able to speak to the press. The press had to be able to protect their sources. There was no way I was going to let that end.
Some might say – and some do – that broadcasters are regulated by a body established in statute by lawmakers, so why not the papers? The answer is that there is limited access to the broadcast spectrum, and that TV is a more powerful, potentially dangerous, medium.
But the idea of statutory regulation for the printed press is seen by many as a step too far – and I agree. Any statute introducing even an element of state-sponsored regulation could easily be expanded in future. And I have no doubt that a press 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.
So I found myself stuck in the middle, trying to get something the press could live with that didn’t damage democracy, that satisfied the victims and pressure groups like Hacked Off, and that stopped anything like the hacking scandal from happening again.
But my biggest challenge would be getting something that the Lib Dems and Labour could agree to. They were keen to stay as close to the Leveson blueprint as possible, and to legislate accordingly.
Nick Clegg was adamant that we should implement press regulation by legislation. As Oliver Letwin points out in his excellent memoir, it was strange to see a Lib Dem leader defending the conservative principle of personal privacy while the Conservative leader was standing for the liberal principle of keeping the press free from statutory regulation.
One Wednesday I invited Ed Miliband into my office after PMQs and told him how worried I was about statutory underpinning. He said there was no other way of doing it. In public he would portray my reluctance as a betrayal of the victims and evidence that I was in thrall to the press barons.
It all seemed impossible. But then Oliver stepped in with the ingenious idea of using a Royal Charter, rather than the law, to sanction the new press self-regulator. Many public bodies operate under Royal Charter, like universities, the BBC and the royal colleges. It was a neat solution: it meant there would be some oversight of how the regulator was established, but not of the type that would give MPs or government any control over the press.
However, while this was going on, Lib Dem and Labour MPs and peers were attaching Leveson-style amendments on the statutory regulation of the press to random Bills going through Parliament. I was exasperated. The contamination of government business left us having to delay urgently needed legislation and put the coalition in jeopardy.
On Tuesday, 12 March 2013, during a meeting with Oliver and me, Nick put it plainly: ‘You have to realise that no piece of legislation matters as much to me as this, and I am prepared to fuck up all the legislation in order to get what I want on this.’ It was the only time we nearly came to blows, and staff outside raised their eyebrows as they heard shouting inside my office.
I had one strong card left in my hand, which I decided to play. Two days later I pulled out of talks on the Royal Charter. There would be a backlash from Hacked Off. But there would also be praise from the press – which neither Labour nor the Lib Dems wanted. It brought them back to the table.
I got Nick to come to the flat at 3.30 p.m. on Sunday, 17 March. I told him we would accept his version of the Royal Charter, but with two changes: editors and serving journalists must be in the majority on the code-of-conduct writing committee, and the recognition body itself would not be a regulator.
From the Labour and Lib Dem point of view, this was close to their version of the Royal Charter. From my point of view it was a Royal Charter, not legislation. The Rubicon had not been crossed.
The press – now in full battle cry as guardians of free speech – would oppose virtually any proposals for meaningful change. I knew that this deal would look messy, but I judged it was better to make the compromise. We would avoid all those defeats, and anyway the coalition was splitting – indeed my own party was splitting, with twenty or thirty MPs threatening to vote with Labour.
But Ed Miliband couldn’t make up his mind on the offer. That Sunday evening Oliver went over to Miliband’s office in the Commons, to find him still sitting with Nick and members of Hacked Off. Oliver made a final concession, which involved changing the law on costs and damages in libel cases to give the newspapers an incentive to join an independent regulator which had been certified by a Royal Charter body. What the papers would hate about it was the free arbitration service for libel claimants and front-page apologies to those libelled.
Oliver called me at 3 a.m. and told me that he, Nick, Miliband and Hacked Off had agreed to a Royal Charter that would create a ‘recognition panel’, which would in turn verify a proper replacement for the Press Complaints Commission. It would sanction the new regulator, but it would not second-guess its work. It was very clearly not a second or state regulator.
We had lost the battle by giving in to some of their demands. But we had won the war – we got them off the dangerous idea of state regulation.
As for the response from editors, I spoke to several over the weekend. I knew some of them would blame the whole course of events on me, and they did. But these things had happened at their papers. They had to accept responsibility and accept change.
The Royal Charter on self-regulation of the press was granted on 30 October 2013, incorporating Leveson’s recommendations. Independent self-regulatory bodies would be founded that would be recognised and audited by a Press Recognition Panel (PRP), which was established on 3 November 2014.
Most newspapers took a different path, signing up to a new Independent Press Standards Ombudsman (IPSO) regulator, which is not recognised and will not apply for recognition. Only a handful signed up to the Independent Monitor for the Press (IMPRESS), which is recognised. To date it has no national newspapers as members.
I had believed that we could come up with an answer that would provide closure on the entire issue – and I regret that we didn’t. I see why the press rejected our compromise, but I can’t help feeling that one day they may think that was mistaken. We had found a middle way between self-regulation and statutory regulation. If there is another crisis over press behaviour, and their regulator misses it, they will still be accused of acting as their own judge and jury.
On 24 June 2014, Andy was found guilty at the Old Bailey of conspiracy to hack phones. Rebekah, Charlie and a number of others were cleared. I gave a statement: ‘I am extremely sorry that I employed him. It was the wrong decision.’
Can I really claim, after this story of messy muddling through, that the situation is any better than what I inherited? The Leveson arrangements for regulating the press were never put in place. The press and politicians are as close as ever. And most of the prosecutions failed.
I take a more positive view. The process forced the press into admitting that they couldn’t go on as they had been doing. They set up a somewhat more effective self-regulating body, which does at least ensure more appropriate apologies and has a genuinely independent chair, and recently announced a low-cost alternative to legal settlement of issues. The law also now allows for exemplary damages to be awarded by the courts in cases of particularly egregious defamation. This
never would have happened without the inquiry.
In terms of the relationship between politicians and the media, there are now unparalleled rules for transparency – ministers must declare every editor and proprietor they meet.
When it comes to prosecutions, decisions are made by the Crown Prosecution Service. Frankly, the decision to prosecute journalists for paying for information in the public interest was misdirected – it’s a journalist’s job to find out important things and print them. But there is no justification for public officials to take payments, and it is right that people who did so have been punished.
The strange thing is that, even just a few years on, talking about red-top scandals seems almost archaic. The quandary today is over the internet, to which Leveson devoted just a few pages in his two-thousand-page report. He dismissed internet regulation because the public supposedly take online content with more of a pinch of salt. As he put it, ‘People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular assurance or accuracy.’
How wrong that was. In recent years we have had allegations of foreign governments pumping out fake news stories to sway election results; thousands of young people recruited to extremist causes by terrorist propaganda; hackers stealing and dumping private information online; and distrust in the ‘mainstream media’ compared with the supposed online truth-tellers. It’s all the same issues – privacy, libel, harassment – but this time we are fighting in a virtual world and on a global scale. If anything, the established press and broadcast media are even more important in acting as a bulwark against fake news. We need trusted, responsible sources more than ever.
Besides, the printed press does still have a huge influence on public consciousness, as we would see during the debate over Britain’s membership of the European Union.
For the Record Page 34