Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Let me make a bit of progress, and then I will give way to the hon. Lady. The relationship between the police and the media is a problem the world over, too, but we have to ask—and hon. Members have been asking this today—why ours seems to have become quite so cosy, so leaky and so potentially compromised. Similarly, there is nothing peculiar to Britain about the potentially unhealthy relationship developing between media proprietors and politicians. That leads to my third point, about trying to turn these noble sentiments of ““never again”” into action. None of this is easy, and a point that must not be lost in this debate is that to over-regulate the media could have profoundly detrimental effects on our country and our society. We must not miss this in the frenzy about the dreadfulness of hacking at this point. Without a public interest defence, the so-called ““cod fax”” that uncovered Jonathan Aitken's wrongdoing might never have emerged. To give another example, are we seriously going to argue in this House that the expenses scandal should not have come to light because it could have involved some data that were obtained illegally? So, we need to step very carefully into this area.