Tory MPs vs free press

How strong is the Conservative commitment to liberty? Today’s Guardian front page holds the answer. A long line of Tory MPs have written to the newspaper, calling for the Prime Minister to seize a ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity to regulate the press. It is surprising as it contains several of the names I would had put down as friends of liberty. Jesse Norman, Andrea Leadsom and Nadhim Zahawi are the last people you’d expect to be writing to the Guardian demanding state action against the newspapers. The Guardian says that the signatories hope to make a  ‘cross-party consensus’ is possible. I bet they do. Politicians have always wanted to get some kind of control over the press (never more so than after the expenses scandal) but they haven’t been able to because the simple fact that the press has never been theirs to regulate. And it’s this principle which is now at stake.