I made clear on Monday why I have rejected press regulation as underpinned by the royal charter.
This prompted the Press Gazette’s editor, Dominic Ponsford, to ask whether I thought the Guardian should therefore sign up to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso).
Good question. Straightforward answer: I do not. I have no clue about the Guardian’s intentions and have not consulted the editor, Katharine Viner, about the matter. This is my view.
To make my case I need to sketch in a little history, beginning with the fact that David Cameron set up the Leveson inquiry because of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.*
I wrote many, many times about the NoW being a rogue paper that employed rogue journalists (such as Mazher Mahmood, now in jail for conspiring to pervert the course of justice). Other staff members went to jail, including a former editor, Andy Coulson, for conspiracy to intercept voicemails.
That title was owned by News Corporation, headed by Rupert Murdoch. His rival publishers were outraged that their journalism should be the subject of a judicial inquiry because of the NoW’s bad behaviour.
But their anger was not directed at Murdoch. Instead, they turned on Cameron and on Leveson. I couldn’t stomach that. They had circled their wagons around a man and a company that had brought popular journalism into disgrace over a prolonged period.
It was hardly a surprise. When the News of the World intruded into the privacy of Max Mosley in 2008, one of its greatest defenders was the Daily Mail. (Editors have since had cause to rue the day they made an enemy of that man).
Then, during the Leveson inquiry, it was the Mail that sought to assassinate the character of one of the inquiry’s advisers, Sir David Bell, with pages and pages of innuendo dressed up as a nonsensical conspiracy.
Down the years, the Mail and Murdoch’s red-top, the Sun, attacked the Guardian for daring to hold them, and the rest of the media, to account.
When those publishers got together in an attempt to mitigate the Leveson inquiry’s likely effects, the Guardian was rightly sceptical about their remedy.
They decided to ditch the Press Complaints Commission in favour of a sort of PCC Mark2. Despite Sir Brian Leveson making clear his antagonism towards their initiative, which was skilfully piloted by key national press executives, they were not to be diverted.
It meant that in the days and weeks after the publication of the Leveson report, there was a chasm between publishers and Hacked Off, the body representing press victims, who sought a __more radical solution.
At that point, Cameron’s government failed to show appropriate leadership by failing to bring the two sides together to forge an agreement. Each side went its own way. Then the government agreed a deal with one side (Hacked Off) and turned a blind eye to what the publishers were doing.
It was a giant political error and, in retrospect, an insult to the painstaking work of Leveson and his team. After coming up with the idea of a royal charter, and devising an incentive to persuade (meaning compel) publishers to seek official charter approval, the government washed its hands of the matter.
Did it hope all would come right in the end? Did it imagine that publishers would buckle? Did it hope that no regulator would emerge to satisfy the charter conditions?
Now, four years on from Leveson, the latest culture secretary, Karen Bradley, finds herself trying to sort out Cameron’s mess. Her new consultation process is all about seeking to avoid the consequences of the government’s failure to broker regulation that everyone could appreciate.
So I was implacably against Ipso from its formation and, in January 2014, went so far as to characterise it as the PCC with bells and whistles. And everyone knows the bells will never ring and the whistles never be blown.
Despite its supporters continually claiming that it has the capability to levy fines, the chances of it happening are remote. Similarly, no-one believes its whistleblowing hotline, enabling journalists to report unethical demands by their editors, will ever be used.
Worse, it has not really come to terms with the necessity of offering low-cost arbitration, having taken until July this year to introduce only a pilot scheme. Similarly, the standards arm has hardly been pro-active.
I accept that journalists, whether at national or local level, take great care to consult the editors’ code of practice (as inherited from the PCC). It is a beneficial part of the Leveson aftershock.
I also concede that Ipso has bedded in better than I initially expected. Its entertaining and clever chairman, Sir Alan Moses, has made a good fist of the job (although he would be seen as exhibiting greater independence from the newspapers he regulates if only he could resist attacking Hacked Off, no matter how much they annoy him).
Furthermore, I admire the sincerity with which Ipso’s staff deal with complainants. I am aware of members of the public having been grateful for the help they have received.
For the most part, it works well and uncontroversially, especially for regional and local titles. But at moments when it is called on to adjudicate on high-profile complaints involving national papers, its independence is called into question.
And there lies the central problem for Ipso: public perception. Whatever the reality, how can it persuade people that it is entirely free from interference from publishing paymasters, especially those responsible for having created the crisis that led to the Leveson inquiry?
You may well argue that the Guardian’s self-regulation system, administered by an independent readers’ editor with an appeals panel back-up, is similarly compromised. But the Guardian did not indulge in the practices that resulted in Leveson.
*At the time, it was not generally known that similar voicemail interception had been regularly carried out by staff on the Daily Mirror, Sunday Miror and Sunday People.