The press-backed alternative to Westminster's regulation proposals is really a call for agreement and face-to-face negotiation, without which no regime will really succeed
Let's call it the Santorini Factor, after the Greek volcanic island where a phone-hacking victims' QC and Lord Justice Leveson's junior counsel spent a controversial holiday last August to explore the possibility of a relationship. Were David Sherborne and Carine Patry Hoskins displaying a conflict of interest that besmirched the whole inquiry? That's a rather excitable tabloid conclusion. But it's not over-excited to draw some calmer lessons as the press tries to kickstart the Leveson process by publishing its own quasi-royal charter.
Sir Brian Leveson, please note, didn't dismiss the ramifications of that romantic liaison out of hand. He suggested, rather, that any MP or editor concerned about Ms Patry Hoskins's and Mr Sherborne's conflicting interests approach the Bar Standards Board for a verdict. At which point, it seems sensible to look at the composition of a regulatory board Leveson trusts implicitly: 15 members, six of them barristers, nine of them lay. It goes with the flow of the "independence" the Lord Justice wanted for press regulation.
But wait. Two of the "lay" members are professors of law, at Oxford and Birmingham. And one other lay voice spent four years recently working as a complaints officer for the BSB. As for the overall appointments process, that rests with the Council of the Inns of Court – senior judges and barristers making their dispositions. In short, by the standards that Leveson applies to papers, this version of independence comes with a curled lip and a hollow laugh. Wigged Off would be apoplectic.
Now, of course, this isn't a fair verdict. Independence is a state of mind, not a CV. The BSB seeks to set itself high standards – and deliver them. But if we're dealing only in a base currency of suspicion and mistrust, then such considerations don't seem to apply. The root trouble here – for Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Fleet Street, not to mention Hacked Off – is that trust seems a dead letter in this arena. And so now we have two rival charters bidding for recognition at the next Privy Council meeting: one underpinned, one floating free. Which one will the Queen and her political advisers bless?
At the moment, there seems little doubt. The royal charter discussed with Hacked Off over Kit-Kats one late Sunday night is the only Westminster show in town. Any alternative – however laced with "former supreme court judges" and personages of similar probity – will be mostly viewed as a devious ploy to be instantly denounced. Bring on those "dabs of statute". Wheel out the rhetoric of threat and draconian law-making. But first, moor your boat just off Santorini.
Leveson's political cohorts have had a depressing few months. They've become identified – on Kit-Kat night – with dodgy backstairs dealing. They seem more anxious to stop the reporting of news (on celebrity arrests and the like) than putting it in the paper. They've spent far too much time, as the hitherto pretty supportive professor of journalism at City University remarks, "thrashing round trying to define internet sites and blogs that are 'news related' and suchlike in ways that won't work for anyone, except lawyers who can spend happy hours in court fighting over definitions".
The latest furore in local newspaper circles concerns council freesheets, which apparently need not be regulated and so will not be required to pay for the apparatus of regulation, and struggling paid-for competitors, which will. Indeed, Britain's 1,100 local papers are more of a problem for charter-mongers than Fleet Street's voluble outriders. The locals didn't hack phones or do dastardly deeds: they stuck close to their communities. Yet now they are being asked to cough up to fund a more onerous regulatory regime that includes a new arbitration service that solicitors in their own high streets will love – and pursue.
It's a dud deal. And the politicians, absorbed still in introverted perusal of drafts, should raise their eyes and recognise as much. Their charter notions have drawn surprising levels of criticism from leading freedom of information groups around the world. Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are not on the side of the liberal angels. The plan to load exemplary damages on papers that don't sign up gives global affront. It sticks in too many gullets.
The second, press-backed, charter launched last week is no soft touch. Its brief, from standards to complaints to fines to imposed corrections, is as rigorous as any in the western world. But it is also a call for negotiation and careful implementation. Will arbitration work in practice? This charter says try it and see. Will the public have confidence in the successor to the Press Complaints Commission it creates? Try it for a closely monitored year and see. Must everything hang fire while the department of culture bumbles around defining bloggers?
Press regulation is always going to be work in progress. Digital change ensures that. But now, at least, comes a serious moment of decision. The politicians can traipse along behind Hacked Off and its denunciation of "desperate" gambits. Or they can pragmatically pick something far faster than the law's grindings allow and let readers decide for themselves – aware, surely, that the press cannot be forced to join any "voluntary" charter, exemplary damages included or not.
The crucial word in all this is also the simplest: agreement. Where there is no agreement hammered out face-to-face between the parties, where the wells of trust are poisoned, then Santorini-style sniping becomes inevitable, a constant rumble of resentment that instinctively exploits any manifest area of weakness.
Traditionally, press and politicians are not merely on opposite sides, but at daggers drawn. Here's one practical alternative in a last-chance saloon where everybody needs to buy the drinks.
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