Leveson: drinking in the 'Last Chance' saloon.......

Strewth! The Leveson Inquiry into the conduct of the Press has now been going on for more than 6 months. M’ learned friends must be raking it in.

The origins lie in the News Corp bid to acquire the balance of shares in BskyB. Vince Cable, the Business Secretary responsible, very properly referred it to Ofcom, the media regulator. But Vince got caught in a sting operation by the Daily Telegraph in which he rashly said that he had ‘declared war’ on Murdoch. Dave immediately relieved him of the decision on the grounds that he could no longer be regarded as impartial. So far so good.

Enter Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Minister.

Ofcom recommended that the bid should be referred to the Competition Commission. If Hunt had accepted this advice he would not now be in deep merde.

Instead, he decided to seek ‘undertakings in lieu’, whatever that may mean. The bid was given the go-ahead if Sky News was put under ‘independent control’ (?). My reaction at the time was ‘Stitch-up!’ With Murdoch already owning an unhealthily large chunk of the British media, TV and print, how could this possibly be allowed? This was nearly as incomprehensible as deeming ‘Dirty Desmond’, the Top Shelf millionaire, to be ‘fit and proper’ to take over Channel 5.

At this point the spaghetti hits the air-conditioning.

The Grauniad exposes phone hacking at the News of the World in connection with e murder of  a teenager, Milly Dowler. Six days later, Murdoch closed this venerable institution, the Sunday with the biggest circulation.  Three days after this News Corp withdraws its bid. Cameron sets up the Leveson Inquiry into media standards.

At this point the Law of Unexpected Consequences comes in with a bang. The Old Bill is now involved. Collars are felt. It begins to emerge that hacking is commonplace, not an aberration by the NoW.

And now the scenario changes as it is revealed that the media and politicians of all stripes are so far up each other that they might just as well be Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

We have an outbreak of anguished handwringing about the awful possibility that political parties and publishers do deals, hob-nob in country houses, scratch each other’s backs, go to fancy restaurants together. Oh, the shame of it. Who would have thought it? Politicians even had hefty retainers for writing ghosted garbage in the Sun and elsewhere.

So let’s get back to reality.

The real issue is whether Dave and his understrappers nodded through Murdoch’s BSkyB bid in return for support by News Corp. After all, Murdoch always boasted that he could determine the result of any election (remember ‘It woz the Sun wot done it!’ ?).

We are told that Hunt merely followed the legal and other advice imparted by his advisors. Nothing more. But his role was to exercise his Ministerial judgment.

Why, on his own admission, did he not do so? Why did he not disclose that he was matey with Frederic Michel, News Corp’s mouthpiece? Why did he not refer the bid to the Competition Commission as suggested by Ofcom? Was his brief from Dave to nod it through?

But we do know that at all times he has acted properly and that he is now the victim of a witch-hunt. How so? Because I read it in the Sunday Times. A Murdoch paper.

And the strong possibility that may emerge from Leveson is that the freedom of the press will be reined-in; to become more deferential for fear of losing ‘authorisation’, as in the US, or  hobbled by legal and administrative restrictions, as in France. I forecast less investigative journalism. I predict that the Red Tops will become more like the Star, our largest circulation paper which never gets it wrong because it never publishes any news whatsoever.

One thing is certain.

The media will never be the same again!

I recall that some years ago when the Red Tops were being more than usually obnoxious about Her Maj, David ‘Toe-sucker’ Mellor said ‘The Press is drinking in the last chance saloon’.

Cheers!