Toby Young Toby Young

Free the press!

The Leveson inquiry has put fear into the feral beasts of the tabloids – and that’s not in the public interest

The Leveson inquiry has put fear into the feral beasts of the tabloids – and that’s not in the public interest

Listening to Kelvin MacKenzie give evidence to the Leveson inquiry on Monday, the most striking thing was not his admission that he’d never given much thought to journalistic ethics nor even his impersonation of John Major, good though it was. Rather, it was his claim that News International should have been fined for lying to the PCC about the extent of phone hacking at the News of the World. ‘In the end newspapers are commercial animals,’ he said. ‘I would be in favour of fines — and heavy fines for newspapers that don’t disclose the truth to the Press Complaints Commission.’

This is significant because it’s hard to imagine how a press regulator could impose large fines on newspapers without that power being granted by statute. After all, if the fines were voluntary, why would anyone pay them? In other words, the most famous tabloid editor of the last 30 years, a man not known for his obeisance to the powers that be, is recommending statutory regulation of the press.

That’s a remarkable turnaround. For those of us who love the red-tops and consider them a useful counterweight to the self-importance and arrogance of the ruling class, Kelvin is something of a hero. The Sun under his stewardship (1981–94) was everything a good tabloid should be: irreverent, funny, rambunctious, saucy, anti-Establishment. It seemed to spring from that same place in Britain’s psyche as Carry On films and Donald McGill postcards. Things must have reached a pretty pass if even Kelvin is acknowledging that the party must come to an end. It’s as if an archetypal British outlaw, the tabloid equivalent of Jerusalem’s Rooster Byron, has finally decided to embrace respectability.

This is the real threat posed by the Leveson inquiry — not that Lord Justice Leveson will recommend full-blown statutory regulation, though he has declared that simply ‘tinkering around the edges’ of existing regulation won’t be nearly enough.

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