Save our speech

In 1644 John Milton appealed to parliament in the Areopagitica to rescind its order to bring publishing under government control by creating official censors. I wonder what he would make of Lord Justice Leveson’s report, due to be published next week, which is expected to re-introduce statutory control of the press into English law after a lapse of centuries.

The wonder is that it has happened. Thirteen months ago, as the Leveson inquiry was gearing up, the Lord Chief Justice, Igor Judge, made a moving and passionate speech defending the independence of the press. He cited John Wilkes’s assertion that ‘the liberty of the press is the birthright of a Briton’ and suggested that, despite the apparently criminal behaviour of the News of the World, a more robust form of self-regulation was still preferable to statutory control of newspapers. While not wishing to pre-empt Lord Justice Leveson, Lord Judge emphasised that he had personally selected him to chair the inquiry.

Since he was so strikingly in favour of self-regulation — a point of view certainly not shared by every senior judge — it is a fair bet that he chose someone whom he thought shared his opinion on the matter. Lord Justice Leveson of one year ago was almost certainly not a man for statutory control. Something has changed him. Some have suggested that his prolonged immersion in revelations about the wilder behaviour of the tabloid press — for example, its rough treatment of the McCanns after the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine — hardened his heart. It may be so, though in fact most of the excesses were already known about, and Express Newspapers had paid the couple over half a million pounds in damages.