Why we won’t sign

Anyone picking up a newspaper in recent days will have noticed that the press has been writing a lot about itself. Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into press practices and ethics has created anxiety at a time when newspapers were already haemorrhaging sales and influence. David Cameron’s government’s response to the report is nervously awaited, and a group of 42 Tory MPs is urging him to seize a ‘once-in-a-generation’ chance to regulate the press. They threaten to rebel if he doesn’t. The Prime Minister will be vilified whatever he decides to do.

As the oldest continuously published weekly in the English language, The Spectator has seen this all before. The technology changes, but the principles do not. We lambasted the Sunday Times in 1829 for putting the free press at risk with sloppy libels. We are also familiar with the Nick Clegg trick: to declare commitment to a fierce and independent press, while trying to undermine it. In 1833 we criticised the vainglorious Lord Brougham, then Lord Chancellor, for seeking to ‘rivet fetters upon the press which he has so often eloquently eulogised as the main bulwark of our liberties’.

What is new in 2012 is that so many parliamentarians seem unaware of the principle at stake. In their letter demanding regulation, the 42 Tories express bafflement at the ‘obsessive argument’ against statutory regulation. But there is a reason why leaders from Thomas Jefferson onwards have ‘obsessed’ about press freedom: it is, as Churchill put it, ‘the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize’.

No right-thinking person can fail to be appalled at the hacking scandal. The -Leveson inquiry has given us a shocking glimpse into a 21st-century crime. The boom in mobile phones and email accounts has led to a massive black market in illegal information.