Give the PPC teeth

It was hardly the wicked and threatening clarion call that worried and

But the House of Commons media committee (which has more than its fair
share of MPs with a grudge against the press) did tentatively push for
privacy laws this week.

It called on the Government to "reconsider its position and bring forward
legislative proposals to clarify the protection that individuals can expect
from unwarranted intrusion by anyone - not the press alone - into their
private lives."

They'll be lucky. "The Government continues to believe self-regulation is
the best regulatory system," responded culture minister Tessa Jowell.

"That does not mean there is no room for improvement." So not much change
there.

Not quite. The Government has its own reasons for not wishing to go down the
privacy-law route: it does not want to be pushing such legislation through
Parliament in the teeth of press opposition in the run-up to the next General
Election, when it will need all the newspaper support it can muster.

But, one way or another, unwarranted press intrusion is about to be outlawed
as never before - even without a privacy law.

Such laws would have been a wrong turn, anyway. They are almost impossible
to draft without impinging on legitimate press investigation, as French
newspapers have discovered to their cost.

They have had the greatest difficulty - assuming they ever wanted to -
shedding light on their presidents' shortcomings.

I'm glad we're not going down the privacy route.

But the Commons committee and the Government are right to say that, if
self-regulation in the form of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) is to
have public confidence, then the press still has much to do to put its house
in order.

For a start, PCC rulings condemning intrusion need to be much more
prominently featured - on the front page if that is where the intrusion was
originally displayed.

Editors would hate that, and be all the more careful as a result. The PCC
needs more prominent, robust and independent lay members - and fewer editors
policing their own code.

Editors guilty of regular breaches of that code should not be allowed to sit
on the PCC at all.

It should also have the power to fine erring newspapers, especially repeat
offenders. The PCC and newspapers argue that that would lead to the
involvement of m'learned and expensive friends; but if each side was simply
limited to one solicitor each (and no overpaid QCs) where fines might be
levied, the cost would not be high.

Editors have every incentive to toughen selfregulation because they are in
the process of facing court-made privacy laws anyway. As this column
explained last week, the introduction of Article Eight of the Human Rights
Convention, which gives everyone a legal right to privacy, is resulting in a
series of court rulings which are giving Britain a framework of privacy law
even without legislation.

A number of cases involving well- known names such as Anna Ford, Naomi
Campbell and Jamie Theakston have already established that the courts will
prevent or censor publication of any private information obtained in
circumstances where, as one legal authority puts it, "a reasonable person
would think the information should be treated as private".

Sometimes the celebrities have won, sometimes the press.

It was the fear of falling foul of such a ruling that encouraged The People
to settle out of court with Sara Cox, the Radio 1 DJ pictured nude on a
private beach on her honeymoon.

The Commons committee argues that such judgemade law is the wrong way to go
- but it need not be.

Germany has developed reasonable privacy precedents through the courts, as
did France before its privacy law came in.

One reservation about privacy laws by courtmade precedents is that we do not
have enough judges imbued with the importance of a free press.

Too often they have been prepared to censor or side with those who have a
vested interest in curtailing press freedom, even when there is a clear
public interest in publishing.

In my battle to publish Peter Wright's Spycatcher in The Sunday Times in the
late Eighties, I had to go to the European Court in Strasbourg for
vindication.

British judges either wanted to jail me or only supported publication
because the "cat was out of the bag" after publication in the US.

So we had better get our own PCC house in order to avoid court rulings
wherever possible. And if judges are now to call the shots on privacy
matters, newspapers and their editors had better start making the case for a
free press, if only to "educate our new masters".

The Guardian splash that was made of straw

It turns out that the famous meeting between Jack Straw and Colin Powell in
New York's Waldorf Hotel just before Powell's key address to the UN - and
splashed across the front page of The Guardian - never actually took place,
as the paper acknowledges.

At first, it was said to have taken place on the eve of the UN meeting.

But Straw did not fly out until the morning of the UN session. So he saw
Powell just before it? Sadly no; not even Concorde could make that schedule:
the UN Security Council assembled at 10am local time.

Collapse of stout splash.

It was at this non-meeting that Powell was supposed to have shared his
concern with Straw about the quality of American and British intelligence on
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which he was about to reveal to the UN.

The Guardian even reported subsequently that a transcript of the meeting -
the so-called "Waldorf tapes" - was doing the rounds of Nato capitals.
Despite such wide distribution, the transcript never surfaced in the public
prints - now we know why.

The newspaper's fallback is that, at some stage before the UN meeting,
Powell and Straw did press each other about the quality of their respective
intelligence reports.

But since so much hung on this intelligence, you would expect them to do
that. The Guardian non-splash was dramatic because it implied Powell had an
11th hour loss of faith in the intelligence he was about to unveil to the UN.
Not so - though given that we have not yet found any weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, he would have been fully justified in worrying if the
spooks knew what they were talking about.

Mirror Mirror against the wall

Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey (pictured) has finished her review
of the troubled newspaper company. The outcome? Not a lot. No sale of the
group's national titles, though that is what many shareholders wanted, since
Trinity, whose base is in regional newspapers, has never shown any aptitude
for running national papers such as The Mirror.
No disposal of its ailing Scottish titles.
No sale, even, of The People, for which Express owner Richard Desmond once
offered £65 million (before starting his own Sunday Star red top) - only a
promise to make it more distinct from the Sunday Mirror (again).
No wonder Trinity shares fell almost 10p on Monday and Tuesday.
At least Ms Bailey now has Mirror editor Piers Morgan firmly under her
thumb, which might be good for Mirror sales (they rose two per cent in May) -
but it sure makes Fleet Street duller.

NoW's jail break

The News of the World clearly thinks it has provided a public service by
having a journalist use bogus credentials to get a job as a warder at the
jail where Soham murder suspect Ian Huntley is being held - and maybe it has.
The reporter twice guarded him at Woodhill prison in Bucks, and even managed
to smuggle out pictures of Huntley in his cell - which the NoW duly published
over seven pages. The prison clearly has serious flaws in its recruitment
procedures, but I'm not sure of the implications.
I suppose some madman could have done the same as the reporter and proceeded
to wreak revenge on Huntley. But it seems a long shot. Not that the NoW
deserves hasty condemnation: like many journalistic enterprises these days,
this called for fine judgment. Call it a borderline case.
What was not borderline in these days of terrorism was when this newspaper
placed an undercover reporter in Heathrow to test its security - and ended up
in court for its pains. (Evening Standard won.) The NoW had better have its
defences in place.