Press

There are so many hopes invested in Andy Burnham’s premiership that disappointment is inevitable. In some cases, it is also desirable. The member for Makerfield has been co-opted by Labour’s soft left and communitarian right for their respective agendas. To govern will be to choose. But a particularly poisoned chalice has been proffered to the next prime minister, one he should dash from his lips. Of all the figures on the left who made the pilgrimage to Makerfield to campaign, the presence of Hugh Grant was most ominous. Perhaps the actor who played the prime minister in Love Actually with such élan was there to school our would-be premier on how to deal with obstreperous American presidents. But Hugh Grant is not just a more metrosexual Cary Grant.

It takes a master to untangle the web of drama being spun at the Washington Post these days. Fortunately, Cockburn knows a thing or two.  The recent drama concerns Sir William Lewis’s appointment as CEO, handpicked by owner Jeff Bezos, and the subsequent attempt by Lewis to dissuade journalists from covering his role in a long-running British phone hacking scandal (he denies any involvement), which supposedly contributed to the recent and abrupt departure of former editor Sally Buzbee. Add that to the earlier stories of Cameron Barr stepping down in 2023 as managing editor after nineteen years and the lawsuit filed by former Post journalist Felicia Sonmez in 2021, who went ham on her colleagues on Twitter and was subsequently fired.

I have long campaigned against the activation of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, as well as a second Leveson inquiry which would have examined the culture, practices and ethics of the press, so I was delighted that the Conservative manifesto says that neither will happen. The Government held a consultation about this earlier this year and the wording in the manifesto is the first official response to that consultation. I hope that this now puts the matter to bed.  If section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act was activated it would have meant that any publication not a member of Impress, the press regulator largely funded by Max Mosley, would have had to pay all the costs in a libel case even if it successfully defended a claim.

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was yesterday’s non-news. My daughter, Li-Da Kruger, has made me her plus-one on the maiden voyage of Viking Sky, the swankiest cruise ship imaginable, all spacious showers, leather handrails and the surreal experience of sitting in the hairdresser’s with a roiling sea of black water and white-topped waves rushing past. Li-Da was booked to show her documentary Belonging to the passengers as part of the cruise’s ‘enrichment programme’.

When I was young my recurring nightmare was that I would die and be reincarnated as a polo pony. I squeezed in lots of polo during the years I played, at least three matches per week, mostly in Paris, and I felt that polo ponies had the kind of deal the mass media are now handing Trump. I wasn’t mad about the people I played with either. Back then, in the Sixties and Seventies, fat businessmen who cantered hired good Argentines to carry the can, but picked up the cup after strolling around the field and yelling quite a lot. Well, now I’m over it, but have an even worse nightmare: that I might return as Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, and have to face the outraged and hysterical so-called press corps every day.

Alexander Chancellor’s ‘Long Life’ is over; but it was not nearly long enough. I was feeling rather gloomy last Friday, having just had our old terrier put down, when I opened The Spectator and was immediately cheered up by the first paragraph of Alexander’s column. It was so typical of the way that he often looked at the world, and of his delightfully quirky sense of humour, that he should relate a children’s song to the new President of the United States. Recalling Nellie the elephant and her trumpety-trump, he wrote: ‘I’m hoping against hope that Donald Trumpety-Trump will also say goodbye to the circus in Washington and return to the jungle whence he came.

Think of the scandals of the last two decades; think of who exposed them. That’s why we need to protect press freedom and why, if you haven’t already done so, you should email to register your objection to the notorious Section 40 of the Crime & Courts Act. The consultation ends at 5pm tomorrow. If activated, it would mean that publications who refuse to bend the knee to a state-sponsored regulator would pay the legal costs of anyone who sues them – right or wrong. When Tim Yeo was exposed by the Sunday Times, he sued – even though every word of their exposé was correct. The newspaper fought him because under the basic laws of justice, if the complainant is proved to be wrong, you don’t pay a thing.

Since my blog about the new threat to press freedom yesterday, and the notorious Section 40 being consulted on by the government, responses have been coming in thick and fast. A few of you have copied me in to emails sent to Karen Bradley, the Culture Secretary, many of them rather brilliant. More importantly, I've been contacted by a software designer who has agreed to make a form that we can use to send a template response to the government's consultation. This leaves us with one question: what form of words? One form has been created, here. But all you really need to do is mention Section 40 and a new Leveson report and officials are obliged to record your response. Here are three responses.