Press here to detonate...

What kind of media do we want? They say a nation gets the media it deserves but that cannot be right - Britain is absolutely not that bad! Yes of course we want a free press. But what does that mean?

When I started out as a journalist in 1959 we had a fairly clear idea of what a free press was. Most people knew too that what we had was not exactly as free as we would like. Aristocrats like Beaverbrook, Harmsworth and Northcliffe owned most of it - the rest was in the hands of newer money such as Cecil King or Roy Thomson.

No one kidded themselves that these moguls did not exert influence but for the most part it was in the political field and known about, if not understood. And frankly little has changedin this area. Of course I abhor Murdoch but I wasn't all that keen on Maxwell either and I find it hard to discuss what has happened to the Express. Whatever Harmsworth is today it seems to go on forever - good job since part of my pension emanates from there. 

But over the years things have changed a great deal and power and influence has had a growing and worrying impact. Yet it is not there that the recent scandals have erupted. This time it is simply the extraordinary and illegal lengths to which some media has gone to 'get a story'. It is this bad behaviour that has led to Leveson

So the mendacious and hypocritical fears being expressed by the same popular (there's a laugh!) prints after Leveson and the possibility of some statutory support for the new Press Complaints body is laughable as well as dangerous. For it was not a free press that was either at risk or even in question when these benighted and tricksy hacks and their frankly evil bosses decided to break the law and buy information and tap phones. What was wrong was that it was AGAINST the public interest for these know-nothing sharks to intrude not only into the lives but the griefs of innocent people and to interfere with the due process of the law. 

We can only hope that it is this due process that has restrained Lord Leveson from proclaiming in more detail and stronger terms on the relationship - the propinquity even - between these hacks and certain police officers and others. His honour may be redeemed by events in the next few days. If not, bigger questions about his propinquity may be raised.

Indeed, had the laws which these newspaper broke been properly exercised against them at the time even Leveson may have been as unnecessary as Cameron makes him appear.

But to the core issue. He says rightly that the Press Complaints system is broken - that is not new news; most of us were of that opinion a long time before all this started. So indeed a new one is needed. And the dreadful experiences of the victims of the media wild west of recent years show only too clearly that this body must be independent and capable of investigating complaints. That however is not enough on its own and David Cameron must surely know this in reality. He is surely only in denial or at least under the influence.

For we have been here six times before in recent decades. And every time the press has been given a last chance. So many last chances, so many lost opportunities you might think.

Now is the time for a much more powerful and capable complaints body as Leveson says. And it does not require any interference by politicians now or in the future in what the press is allowed or able to do IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST. What is required is simply that this body is a legal body, with power to investigate, power to apply for warrants for searches and the power to act as it finds necessary - under the rule of law. In the extreme it might need to apply to magistrates for a warrant to force a witness to co-operate.

None of this statutory support needs to state in any way what  ever Cameron and the media may say. But it is essential to have a safe haven for victims of press excess to report.

And here is the crisis that we now face, entirely of Cameron's making. He is singing the media tune AGAIN. He has been got at or he looks and sounds very much like a man who has been got at..... 'Don't you worry Dave old chum; come the election and we'll see you right - as long as we don't get any of that nasty statutory stuff to spoil our little game'

I might sound a bit paranoid here but lets face it - he did say BEFORE Leveson he would implement the report. He is now saying he will not, despite his promise to the Dowlers. Little Cleggy doesn't seem to agree, along with many more.

Cameron, we know from all the u-turns, is incompetent and unfit to govern and he has a cabinet packed with people with their own dodgy agendas or simply, as the Widdicombe said of a less unsavoury character, something of the night about them.

The good news is that the victims are campaigning against him and that is political dynamite. I give him a few more months before either he comes to his senses or his cosy little coalition collapses round his silver spoon stuffed neck.

Oh and I wrote this elsewhere. I'll say it again: "Reading what my former colleagues have to say this morning about Leveson I feel the need to apologise to all my friends for the utter mendacity and hypocrisy of all, bar the Guardian and Independent. They make Cameron's pusillanimous and craven speech to the house take second place in the annals of infamy. Sorry for even having been a journalist (euch!)." 

Even Simon Jenkins decided to sully his reputation by arguing, nay pleading, for another chance. Shame on you Simon.

Technology to blame for the street of shame?

When I finally put pixel to plastiscreen over the Leveson inquiry I took the view that maybe things are different today. But I have thought longer and harder and now take a different view. . I still weep and cringe with shame; still ponder what on earth has happened to what we charmingly thought of as a profession. But then I wondered; is it really so different?

Maybe it is just the technology that has changed our behaviour. We can do now what we would have done then, so we do?

Back when I started out as a journalist in 1959 in a dusty old office in Hornsey, north London struggling to master a decrepit Royal upright, horizontal strike typewriter there was a one-liner doing the rounds. "To the average journalist ethics is a county north of Kent..." Not funny really, now I think about it.

Journalists were already pretty low in public esteem. My school howled with anguish at my career choice. My father - a London copper - was seriously concerned. And I was the second of his sons to take the devil's silver. When my later-to-be-wife told her head teacher her plans to join her local paper she said to her mother: "Mrs Smith, you might as well let her go on the street!"

I worked my way to Fleet Street (before I left the job) and I did indeed learn some dodgy ways to operate.

I learned how to blag information. Direct lies were rarely necessary; an innocent voice and a modicum of charm was enough. Hey presto, an ex-directory phone number.

I learned to doorstep. A charming sympathy, some soothing words and you were in. You left with a treasured picture of the deceased/victim/alleged perpetrator.

I knew ho to block a call box line so my copy got to the office ahead of the competition. I learned to read upside down and back to front so I could get what it actually said in the police Occurrences Book, court register etc. I learned to write in my pocket so the victim did not know they were on the record. And more.

Along the way I knew that direct bribery was rare but it did happen and the Soho police scandals among others proved the media was not above bribery and corruption. Yet even so it was mainly either between rogues either side of the tracks or in the search for corruption in public office.

Back at the ranch, even in Fleet Street, if a picture came in showing an unfortunate pose of an innocent person, however famous, it would be binned or at worst filed against stormier times. And only politicians stood the risk of facial postures that matched their words. Even then some degree of compassion was usually shown.

We did use some pretty hard-bitten agencies - the famous or infamous FSNA among them (those who know, will know). And, true at Heathrow, agency hacks would trail stars and wannabes through the terminal (just the one terminal and mostly just the one hack). But mostly they were at least able to walk steadily, not dodge and dash for the exits with hounds in hot pursuit.

And editors did set standards. We were expected to have decent notes and be able to back them, to check vital facts and, if we did not know but it was a reasonable guess we were expected to say so.

You could never have got away with a strange and unusually large item on your expenses - no managing editor would sign it without his boss's OK! The diarist who worked 300 yards off Fleet Street and got away for a while charging a taxi back from the Wig and Pen IN Fleet Street was found out (we reckoned that after lunch at the Wig a taxi was his only certain way of getting back to the ranch!).

So, by the mid 70s I was looking for different way to use my limited talent as a writer and crossed the tracks to Public Relations. Still not what my mum would have called 'a real job' but strangely more honest. After all, everyone knew now what my agenda really was.

Today I begin to wonder whether technology has more to do with what we see at Leveson than a worsening of moral standards.

Back in the day of no motor-drive the snappers task was to get a GOOD picture and not waste valuable film that would waste time being devved. The motor drive gave the chance to take the shot between the good ones.

Then came digital and wasting film was a thing of the past. A brief survey of the multitide of frames and the embarrassing knicker moment was on page three.

Couple this with motor bikes and you can chase you quarry to a kill; literally sometimes.

Then comes the computer, the internet, web sites, mobile phones. Anything is possible. The move from simple blagging to wholesale hacking is but a step. The change from good taste to indecent intrusion a mere millisecond. No need to doorstep; with a bit of real hacking you can be inside their voice mails, their hard drives - everywhere.

And the vast array of opportunities to be 'seen', to be 'famous' to be a 'celebrity' means there are ever more candidates to be intruded upon, scandalised scandalously. A slip of a tweet, a chump on a facebook, a nude on a tube - so much to compete with the paparazzi and the hack that they have to be really inventive now.

So here we are today with the reality that merely being famous is enough to unleash the dogs of war on you. Speaking out of turn when your are famous will get you hunted down and pilloried. And even become the victim of actual lies and invention. Never mind the hacking, utterly illegal anyway. This goes far deeper.

So shame on them and shame on me and shame on all of us. They do it, we buy it.

Hate to say it but it is time for legally backed self-regulation. Yes, I do not want a regulated media; not in a world where special interest groups already have too much power. But newspaper and periodicals are already licensed.

So let's turn the editor's code into the articles of agreement to get a license. And make breaches punishable by removing that licence.

And then make it that only licensed publications will be VAT free or in anyway protected by the newspaper libel laws. Hit them in the pocket whatever other penalty they may face. One strike and you are out even?

Meanwhile, I still say there are a few senior hacks starring at Leveson who are looking good for a while at her majesty's pleasure - and I don't mean the theatre in Haymarket but the one down Pentonville way.