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Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Edinburgh
<[email protected]>

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A Press Free and Responsible is the first book to be written about the Press Complaints Commission. Teachers and students of media law will regard it as a welcome addition to the rather sparse literature on self-regulation in the media.

The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Modern History and author of a life of the Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone. Here he has turned his attention to a contemporary institution, but adheres to a chronological approach. His Prologue and Introduction concern the prehistory and the forerunner body, which was the Press Council established in 1953. Then, in seventeen chapters, we follow the fortunes and activity of the Press Complaints Commission from its inception at the beginning of 1991 to its tenth birthday at the start of this year. It may be considered as an authorized biography: the project was suggested by the Director of the Commission, and undertaken on the promise of unrestricted access to the Commission’s archives and freedom from interference.

The book is designed to serve as a historical record, but this is not to say that it is merely a dry institutional history. The author has a nice turn of phrase and is not above resort to colloquialisms. So we are told that the behaviour of the Sunday Sport journalists who contrived access to a hospital ward where the television actor Gordon Kaye, badly injured in an accident, was lying ill, was “a spectacular own goal”, occurring as it did while the Calcutt Committee was deliberating on the future of press freedom. With incidents of that kind, “ the 1980s were identified as the pits of British popular journalism”, thus rendering inevitable the replacement of the Press Council with something stronger.

Whether the replacement would have to be strengthened, legal protection against the press was a real issue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Within as well as outside Parliament, there were many advocates of a privacy law. Others supported the enactment of a right to reply law, and a third possibility lay in making the regulatory body statutory and giving it stronger sanctions such as the power to fine offending newspapers or journalists. Against this background, the Press Complaints Commission began life with its back against the wall, and its very survival in doubt. Professor Shannon well portrays the atmosphere of crisis which persisted through the early years. Problems and setbacks had to be ridden out, attacks had to be answered, criticisms had to be parried, and Ministers had to be appeased and cajoled. If sometimes misfortune attended the Commission’s best efforts, there were other occasions when circumstances were fortuitous. When David Mellor threatened to be one of the less tractable Ministers, the exposure by The People of his liaisons with a “resting” Spanish actress (if that is the right term in the context) hastened his resignation. When Sir David Calcutt QC, in his review of press regulation two years after the Commission had been established, was savagely critical of the reporting of the marital troubles of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, he failed to take due account of the Commission’s difficulties when newspapers had either been reporting the truth or had been publishing what reached them from sources close to the parties, and his conclusions appeared draconian.

The first Chairman of the Commission, Lord McGregor of Durris, had himself been deceived at an earlier stage over complicity in royal reporting, but by 1993 was rather less naïve. Interestingly, we learn that McGregor thought lawyers made bad members of self-regulatory bodies, because they focused attention on the language of rules instead of addressing the spirit, and the PCC in his period included none amongst its members. Lord McGregor’s defences and attacks seem to have been quite effective, and this book’s verdict on him is perhaps a little harsh. His weakness, which became increasingly dangerous, was a tendency to rush to judgement. Some of his outbursts were imprudent. Some pre-empted due process. In 1994, when his support amongst the Commissioners and their paymasters in the Newspaper Publishers Association and the Newspaper Society fell away, McGregor was persuaded to resign before the end of his extended term.

His successor was Lord Wakeham, a celebrated political fixer whose parliamentary experience as a party manager and as a Minister seemed like a godsend to the still embattled body. There is no doubt that Wakeham has been skilfully opportunistic as well as an adroit strategist. His more proactive role in seeking agreement on coverage of the children of the Prince of Wales may also be counted as a qualified success, although it also raised questions about the nature of his position.

The author suggests that by summer 1998 there had been a turning point, and a more confident Commission had come of age. The inference is not unreasonable. Calls for legislation specifically to protect against the press had become rarer, although they were still sometimes uttered by long-standing critics of self-regulation such as MPs Clive Soley and Gerald Kaufman, Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC (whose own reforming chairmanship of the Press Council had been truncated), and Geoffrey Robertson QC (whose “polemical skills in demonstrating how much worse the cures being proposed would be than the disease” could paradoxically help to justify self-regulation, as the author cleverly perceives).

How much of this success should be attributed to Lord Wakeham is another question, and if the author was slightly harsh on McGregor, he is perhaps slightly too complimentary towards Wakeham and the officers of the Commission over the last three years. For one thing, as he recognises, New Labour’s conversion to non-intervention may have owed something to the understanding that Rupert Murdoch may have had claims on Blair for services rendered. For another thing, there has been a kind of intervention, albeit not aimed specifically at the press. The Human Rights Act 1998, notwithstanding the sop offered to freedom of expression in the convoluted provisions of its section 12, promises to be the vehicle for an extended protection of privacy interests along with much else.

For the most part, Professor Shannon deals satisfactorily with legal points when they arise. The strength of his book lies in its detailed account of the operation of the PCC over its first ten years. It has the advantage of using views from inside, which are then located within the wider and parliamentary debates. Some more general assessments are tentatively essayed in the final chapter. However, the literature of the law and social sciences has not been employed, and readers will not find, for example, discussions of regulation techniques as such or any rigorous analysis of the Commission’s jurisprudence. They will find an eminently readable and informed account of an interesting body which, as the author appreciates, has an almost impossible task. As a quotation for the title page, he aptly selects the plaint of Lord McGregor, following interviews with more than a hundred MPs of all parties:

“To my murmured question, ‘How can a press free to behave responsibly, be prevented from behaving irresponsibly in a free society without censorship?’ I received no persuasive answer.”