A chance to escape Murdoch’s embrace
by Alistair CAMPBELL
In 2009 I attended the wedding of News International chief executive
Rebekah Brooks. The ceremony took place by a lake, at a country estate.
I stood next to TV presenter Piers Morgan, while Paul Dacre, Daily Mail
editor, was a few yards away. Rupert Murdoch was closer to the action.
David Cameron hung back up the slope. Gordon Brown, then prime minister,
arrived late, with all eyes turning to him as he walked down to the
lake.
At the reception I had a brief conversation with Cameron. I said I
hoped he would not win the upcoming election, but that if he did, and if
he wanted to act to improve political debate and standards in the press,
I would support him. For some time the journalist in me had known that
the relationship between politics and the media was not serving the
public. But it was my first-hand experience of this developing culture
of abuse and negativity that convinced me Britain’s press and 24-hour
news were making it more difficult for elected leaders to govern.
“It’s got worse, hasn’t it?” he said. I replied that he would be a
much stronger prime minister were he to take office not feeling he owed
anything to the big media groups. At that point Murdoch joined us, and
we changed the subject. Perhaps we should not have done so. That we did,
however, illustrated something of the dishonesty at the heart of what
are essentially political and commercial relationships.
British Premier gets tough on
unethical media |
Executives
who sanctioned phone hacking and other illegal activities at the
News of the World and other newspapers will be barred from
running any media organisation in Britain, David Cameron has
announced.
In an attempt to regain the initiative on the phone-hacking
scandal amid Tory criticisms of his performance over the past
week, the prime minister said Lord Justice Leveson would take
charge of a two-pronged inquiry into the “disgraceful” affair.
Cameron, who faced criticism for having dinner in Oxfordshire
with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch over the Christmas period,
also said he would consult the cabinet secretary on amending the
ministerial code to ensure greater transparency.
The prime minister, whose aides were playing down the prospect
of a judge-led inquiry as recently as last week, said that
Leveson would lead a “robust” inquiry set up under the 2005
Inquiries Act. Cameron, who agreed the broad terms of the
inquiry with Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg on Tuesday night, said
it would be able to compel proprietors, politicians from across
the spectrum and police officers to give evidence under oath.
“The inquiry will have the power to summon witnesses including
newspaper reporters, management, proprietors, policemen and
politicians of all parties to give evidence under oath and in
public,” he said.
Cameron, who spoke just under two hours before News Corp
announced it would abandon its bid to take full control of BSkyB,
said the inquiry would have two strands: first, a full
investigation into wrongdoing in the press and police, including
the failure of the first police investigation into allegations
of hacking. This part of the inquiry will not begin its work
until the criminal investigation has been completed. Cameron
said this would examine “the extent of unlawful or improper
conduct at the News of the World and other newspapers and the
way in which management failures may have allowed this to
happen. This part of the inquiry will also look into the
original police investigation and the issue of corrupt payments
to police officers. And it will consider the implications for
the relationship between newspapers and the police.”.
The second strand would be a review of the regulation of the
press. Cameron said self-regulation had failed under the Press
Complaints Commission, and that this should be replaced by
independent regulation rather than statutory regulation.
The prime minister said this strand of the inquiry would examine
“the culture, practices and ethics of the press; their
relationship with the police; the failure of the current system
of regulation; the contacts made, and discussions had, between
national newspapers and politicians; why previous warnings about
press misconduct were not heeded; and the issue of cross-media
ownership.” |
It is not easy to do what Ed Miliband, Labour leader, did last week,
making himself an enemy of some of the media’s most powerful forces. He
was right that Labour got too close to News International. But he was
also right that, given the media bias against us, he knew why we tried
to level the playing field.
System of regulation
In my own defence, and as my diaries show, I argued for some years
with Tony Blair that we needed to act on the culture of our media. At
one point he ticked me off, asking that I not make my views so obvious
in front of Murdoch, his son James and Les Hinton, then chief executive
of News International.
Ultimately, Blair thought the press had become a problem but that
given all our other priorities, people would not understand our taking
them on. He also thought it would look like revenge for the fact they
had turned against us. And there were political considerations too:
trying to govern, and win elections, is hard enough without the press
being against you.
I accept that, for all of us, at times media support was something we
courted at the expense of positions of principle on media issues. But
that trap has now been sprung.
The latest revelations have forced the police, News International and
the government to act. The police will now be more vigorous. News
International will continue with their kamikaze crisis management, which
one day will be studied as a textbook case of how not to do it. But the
most important developments are the prime minister’s dual inquiries into
press practices and a new system of regulation.
These mean we now have a once in a generation opportunity for a new
settlement between politics, the media and the public. Nobody can argue
that we have the press we deserve. Pressured by technological change, a
dominant strain of Britain’s media has gone into a spiral of decline, in
which this scandal is only the most dramatic development.
Cameron did not look comfortable announcing the reviews. He has
personal relationships at stake and, given he hired Andy Coulson as his
communications director, his judgement is too. Already the backlash from
parts of the press has begun as they seek to maintain that anything but
toothless self-regulation is an assault on a free press. But Cameron
must stand back from all of that, and ask himself: “What is the right
thing to do?” He did some of it last week.
The judicial inquiry should be far-reaching. The News of the World is
far from alone in the use of dubious and illegal practices, as widely
ignored reports from the Information Commissioner have shown. Parts of
Britain’s media remind me of the trade unions before Margaret Thatcher.
They feel untouchable. As I say above, Labour could and should have done
more to deal with ‘the feral beast’. But just as the MPs’ expenses
scandal emerged from the failure of Thatcher’s government to tackle MPs’
salaries, so the system by which she showered honours on editors and
owners - a practice to which we put an end, with a rule that no serving
editor could be honoured - means she too has something to answer for.
Whatever the past, it is Cameron who must lead the country to a
better place. Miliband has shown himself capable of playing a good and
principled part. And so should the public. Ultimately political debate
will only improve if the public want it to, if they channel the anger at
recent events into an assessment of what kind of papers they read,
whether they really want to live on a diet of celebrity, trivia,
negativity and abuse. To coin a phrase, we’re all in this together.
The author was Downing Street Director of Communications under Tony
Blair and a former journalist. |