Why The Spectator won’t sign the Royal Charter

Whatever else is said about David Cameron’s hand-ling of press regulation, there can be no doubt that the deal he struck on Monday demonstrated masterful sleight of hand. Just days earlier, his differences with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg had seemed irreconcilable and the Prime Minister was heading for defeat in the Commons. But then, overnight, everyone united around a compromise: a state regulator which insisted it was no such thing. It was the political equivalent of Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’; Britain’s first piece of legislative surrealism.

The Royal Charter’s ornate, 17th-century language is part of the obfuscation. It begins: ‘To all to whom these presents shall come, greeting!’ That is in a way appropriate: the last time England had state licensing of the media, in 1680, people did speak this way. There follows a 22-page, 111-point charter laying out how the press in Britain is to be governed. Not authored by the government, apparently, but by a monarch by dint of her ‘especial grace, certain knowledge and mere motion’.

At first, the newspapers treated news of the charter with stunned silence. What started out as a sensible attempt to regulate the 21st-century press somehow ended up lost in the 17th century. The language was kept deliberately vague to allow every political party to claim victory: if no one knew what it meant, how could anyone object? But one thing was clear: a cabal of politicians had gathered in an office until 2.30a.m. on a Monday morning to stitch up a deal, with the campaign group Hacked Off in the next room. They were acting on a shared premise: that the press would at last be theirs to regulate.

It was Nigel Lawson, a former editor of this magazine, who observed that the most dangerous moments in our democracy come when all parties agree.