Each and every one of those commissions and inquiries was sparked by the abuse of unaccountable power, and I would say that that is what we are seeing today. People sometimes say, “It was a newspaper that exposed phone hacking.” They are right—one newspaper exposed phone hacking—but Lord Leveson is very clear on this: none of the other papers exposed it, and there was almost a conspiracy of silence. He says:
“There were what are now said to be rumours and jokes about the extent to which phone hacking was rife throughout the industry, but (with one sole exception) the press did nothing to investigate itself or to expose conduct which”,
if it had involved anybody else,
“would have been subject to the most intense spotlight that journalists could bring to bear”.
That one exception was Nick Davies from The Guardian, who wrote a story on 9 July 2009 saying that the huge scale of the settlements being paid to some people in respect of phone hacking suggested that a cover-up had taken place. What did the Press Complaints Commission
do about it? Did it then think, “Perhaps we should take a second look at this and investigate it”? No, it did not. As Lord Leveson points out, the PCC “condemned the Guardian” for running the story, which is extraordinary. I think that the Leveson report was a good report.