2.05pm: Thomas went to the PCC editors’ code of practice committee with a suggested revision for point 10 on (on clandestine devices and subterfuge) in early 2006.
The exact revision was rejected by the committee, Meyer says, but the existing code was beefed up.
Meyer says this was a “constructive” reaction from the PCC “which bore fruit”.
2.02pm: Meyer is asked about a meeting with the Information Commissioner’s Office in January 2006.
He said in the meeting that the PCC “could not be seen as a general regulator”.
However, he says he repeatedly told the former information commissioner, Richard Thomas, that his office and the PCC could “complement each other” in their work.
2.01pm: The inquiry has restarted and Sir Christopher Meyer has resumed giving evidence.
1.22pm: Here is a lunchtime summary of today’s evidence so far:
• The former chairman of the PCC, Sir Christopher Meyer, has denied “inaction” over newspapers‘ Madeleine McCann coverage.
• Meyer said he told Peter Hill, the former editor of the Daily Express, he had to resign in wake of McCann libel payout.
• Meyer warned against statutory involvement in press regulation and against fines for newspapers.
1.13pm: If you’re looking for lunchtime reading, Dan Sabbagh has posted this analysis of News Corporation’s response to developments at the Sun and elsewhere:
Neither Rupert Murdoch, nor his son James, were told about the impending arrests of past and present Sun executives until the Saturday morning when they were taking place. The information was kept tightly within News Corp’s Management Standards Committee (MSC), run by Lord Grabiner, Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg, and whose operation is based at a separate building from the Wapping tower where the company’s three newspapers are housed.
If you think that hard to believe, then consider this. The all-powerful MSC reckons that it cannot tip anybody off outside its ranks – because to do so could tempt whoever had been told to pass the details on. Nobody wants to see a Murdoch, or anybody else senior at the company exposed to the slightest charge of perverting the course of justice. So nobody – not Tom Mockridge, the CEO, nor Dominic Mohan, the editor of the Sun, knew: they just to have pick up the pieces.
Except, the MSC does not exist in isolation. Joel Klein, the lawyer turned News Corp education supremo, did know what evidence the MSC had turned up in its ongoing trawl of some 300m emails: he sits on the company board. And Klein, and Grabiner and Lewis et al must take their cue from somewhere: it seems obvious from what has happened that they have been given an instruction (in broad terms) to get to the bottom of what has happened at Wapping, regardless of who might be affected. There are not many places such an instruction can come from: either News Corp’s board or executives called Murdoch.
That marks a significant shift. Earlier this month, Mr Justice Vos complained about News Corp’s policy of disclosure in the phone-hacking civil cases at a high court hearing. The presiding judge said that News Group Newspapers, the News Corp subsidiary that publishes the News of the World, had made “an admission of sorts” as regards its initial responses to the allegations in which News Corp “put out public statements that it knew to be false”, that it had “deliberately deceived the police” and had destroyed evidence of wrongdoing including “a very substantial number of emails” as well as computers.
You can read the full article here.
1.07pm: The inquiry has now broken for lunch.
1.05pm: Meyer emphasises: “We never saw the substance, Mr Jay.”
1.03pm: Meyer tells the inquiry that the Daily Mail’s former managing editor, Robin Esther, appeared before the Commons culture committee and said there was nothing underhand going on, referring to the What Price Privacy Now? report.
Jay asks Meyer if he was being “a bit sneery” when he thanked Thomas for an “interesting read” when handed What Price Privacy Now?
“Yeah, a bit,” replies Meyer.
1.01pm: Meyer says Jay is giving the impression that the PPC was “inert, sitting there slackly with mouths hanging open”.
However, he says the substance of the information commissioner’s investigation was never revealed, even to a parliamentary committee.
He adds that the PCC went into negotiation with the information commissioner to come up with a guidance note, but it got caught up in legal arguments.
12.58pm: Meyer said he would have had to have had “supernatural powers” to have known the implications of Operation Motorman in November 2003.
He says that Thomas gave him an impression that journalists would be taken to court over the Operation Motorman evidence.
That never happened. “It was all a bit of an anti-climax,” says Meyer.
He says that editors were informed of the PCC’s meetings with Thomas.
“We were extremely worried about this … but we were also concerned that when the court case came it was nothing as advertised,” he says.
12.57pm: Jay asks Meyer what he meant by notes from Thomas that say: “watershed. Scale of problem endemic. Knowledge of proprietors”.
Meyer says he has no idea. “We’re getting into Bletchley Park territory,” he adds, referring to the famous enigma code-breaking facility.
12.56pm: Financial Times media correspondent Ben Fenton has just tweeted:
[Meyer just corpsed over a Rosetta Stone joke. Jay has joined him. It really wasn't very funny.] #leveson
12.54pm: Meyer is having trouble reading speaking notes from Thomas.
Meyer: This is like interpreting the Rosetta Stone, this. It’s not possible.
Jay: It’s not quite that hard – it’s not in three languages.
Meyer: [Laughs]
12.52pm: Meyer says he went “on and on” at Thomas about being allowed access to the evidence behind its Operation Motorman report.
He says the PCC would have been able to “sharpen and hone” guidance to newspapers and “it might even have informed chances to the code of practice itself”.
12.51pm: Meyer said the PCC would have given the ICO evidence “whatever protection it needed”, and suggests the commission was hamstrung in what action it could take.
Meyer says he told Thomas at a meeting: “Give me names, give me evidence. Just using inquiry agents isn’t good enough.”
Thomas was the only person that could provide the PCC with the evidence of illegal use of data by newspapers, says Meyer.
Do you think I would have spent good PCC money on meetings with Mr Thomas at restaurants just to hear him burbling away? No, I wanted beef, Mr Jay, I wanted red meat.
12.46pm: Meyer is asked about his dealings with the former information commissioner, Richard Thomas.
He says that Thomas “laboured under the misapprehension” that the PCC had power to enforce the criminal law.
The PCC published guidance on the Data Protection Act in 2005, Meyer says.
Thomas told the PCC in December 2003 that “there are going to be journalists caught up in this; there are going to be court cases”, according to Meyer.
Meyer says he wanted evidence on who was hiring inquiry agents “and he [Thomas] was unwilling to do that”.
12.41pm: Meyer tells Jay that people have confidence in the PCC which “you seem, frankly, to ignore”.
Jay says he is merely putting suggestions to the former PCC chairman.
Meyer reponds:
I hope you’ll forgive me if I do from time to time push back, rather than sit here like a coconut.
12.40pm: Meyer suggests that the newspaper industry would quickly begin to ignore the PCC if its chairman exhorted papers to act responsibly every time a contentious story broke.
Jay suggests that the PCC should stop the press coming up with stories to fit the supposed facts.
Meyer replies:
“No. It is as if you say to the police ‘you are useless because you can’t stop crime’. Or to bishops ‘you still have sin’. These are ridiculous arguments.”
Christopher Jefferies. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
12.34pm: Jay suggests that if the PCC had taken a more proactive stance with the McCanns, it would not have gone so far in the 2010/11 Christopher Jefferies case. Eight newspapers paid damages to Jefferies for libellous allegations made against him following the murder of Joanna Yeates.
Meyer disagrees, saying “don’t drag me down that path”.
He adds that he was no longer PCC chairman at the time of the Jefferies case, saying he rejects Jay’s attempt to draw parallels between the two cases.
Meyer says that the PCC has had success with media scrums and “stories relating to police sources”.
12.32pm: Meyer says in February 2008 he agreed with the McCanns that launching libel actions against newspapers, rather than going to the PCC, was the right course of action.
12.31pm: “The PCC made it its business from the very beginning to say, ‘we are here to help’,” Meyer tells the inquiry. He adds that help was taken up “but only in an ancillary way”.
He says that if the McCanns did not want intervention, “You must respect complainants’ wishes.”
12.28pm: Meyer says it was “screamingly obvious” what had gone wrong in relation to the McCann saga.
The McCanns needed the press for publicity’s sake, he says, but it was a “Faustian” pact.
The Portuguese police were “leaking like sieves” and journalists were under pressure to produce fresh stories, Meyer says.
“It doesn’t need a big review to see this. It happens from time to time,” he adds. “It led to the McCanns being accused of something that is utterly abominable.”
12.26pm: Meyer says of Peter Hill: “It is inconceivable that he could stay on the commission.” He adds that the commission decided Hill should be replaced as soon as possible.
“It took longer for him to be replaced than it should have done,” Meyer adds.
Jay suggests the PCC adopted a position of “doing nothing” to protect the McCanns.
Meyer disputes this, saying that the PCC put itself at the McCanns’ disposal.
12.21pm: Meyer says it is “very unfair” to say that he acted too slowly to condemn the Express’s coverage of the McCanns.
The first Meyer heard of the Express Newspapers libel payout was on the radio on the morning it happened, he says.
12.17pm: Meyer says he told Peter Hill, the former editor of the Daily Express, “you have to resign” after the Express Newspapers libel payout to the McCanns.
“I said ‘in effect you need to resign’,” says Meyer. “He said ‘I suppose I have to but I need to consult friends and colleagues.’”
Meyer then said he should resign as soon as possible, adding: “That was the last time I ever talked to him.”
12.15pm: Meyer says he met McCann again in February 2008, by which time the couple had made a firm decision to go to law, and had engaged law firm Carter-Ruck for a libel case.
Asked about what had taken place between July 2007 and January 2008, Meyer says:
We did a lot. We were in pretty close contact with the press handlers [Clarence Mitchell] of the McCanns. We stood ready to intervene if they wanted it.
You can’t be more royalist than the king. You cannot wish to stop something more ardently than the king. But by that time I think they had chosen to go to the law.
Meyer says he he understood that coverage of the McCanns was “not pleasant”.
It was pretty violent … and it was not pleasant to read. I have to say to you – this is so important – we made particular efforts to the McCanns to make ourselves available within 48 hours of Madeleine disappearing.
Gerry and Kate McCann. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP
12.13pm: Meyer is asked about coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Express Newspapers paid out £550,000 damages after the high court found it had published 100 ‘seriously defamatory’ articles about her parents.
He says he made it “perfectly plain” to Gerry McCann that it was either the legal route or the PCC.
In July 2007, Meyer told McCann and his press handler what the options were if they believed they need to “take action” against a newspaper.
12.10pm: Meyer says that he informally discussed whether the PCC code should be included in journalists’ contracts with the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear.
The PCC was constantly being asked by the NUJ to get involved with contractual disputes between its members and employers, Meyer says.
12.07pm: Meyer is also asked about the CMS committee’s recommendation that:
An additional element of the code should be that journalists are enabled to refuse an assignment on the grounds that it breaches the code and, if necessary, refer the matter to the commission without prejudice.
He says this was also discussed but rejected.
12.00pm: Meyer is asked about the Commons culture, media and sport committee’s recommendation in its 2003 report Privacy and Media Intrusion that:
The code should explicitly ban payments to the police for information and there should also be a ban on the use and payment of intermediaries, such as private detectives, to extract or otherwise obtain private information about individuals from public and private sources, again especially the police.
He says this was never implemented by the PCC because bribery was already covered by criminal law.
“There was already a draconian sanction in law. And we couldn’t get into the business of constantly duplicating the law in the code,” Meyer says.
11.55am: Hacked Off campaigner Thais Portilho-Shrimpton has just tweeted:
#leveson I’m pleased the inquiry has contributed something with which you agree Sir Christopher [after @sirsocks praised Leveson's idea]
(@sirsocks is the name of Meyer’s Twitter account.)
11.53am: Meyer says that he came to the view that the industry dominated both Pressbof and the PCC editors’ code committee. He now believes that this balance was not right.
11.52am: Meyer gives the example of a footballer who died in the middle of a match and was the subject of intrusive photographs, about which a number of third-party readers complained.
The PCC did not take up the complaints because the family wanted to let the matter rest.
11.51am: Meyer is asked about third-party complaints.
He says that “first party was king” – if they did not want to proceed with a complaint the PCC would not entertain third-party complaints.
Meyer adds that third-party complaints were not ruled out by the PCC, but that they were rare.
11.47am: Jay suggests that the PCC just jurisprudence, or legal theory, build up without taking action.
Jurisprudence is “unbelievably important”, Meyer says, claiming that editors believed that.
He disagrees with Jay’s contention that proactive statements of principle would have been more effective than jurisprudence.
11.47am: Meyer says it is inevitable that newspapers will continue to run inaccurate headlines on occasion, but that the situation “was improving”.
The PCC did endless seminars on drilling the code of conduct into journalists’ working patterns, he adds.
11.43am: The inquiry has resumed and Meyer is asked about inaccurate and misleading headlines.
He says he told the industry in 2005 that the newspapers “can’t go on like this” with disproportionate headlines.
“Yes, it was a concern and yes, we sought a crackdown on it,” he adds.
Meyer says the industry knew “perfectly well” that the PCC was on to it over misleading headlines, even though the commission did not release a more formal guidance note.
11.35am: The inquiry is now taking a short break.
11.35am: Meyer says that the PCC thought custodial sentences for section 55 breaches of the Data Protection Act would have been “pretty chilling to freedom of expression”.
“If you think Mr Dacre picked up the phone one day and says ‘very helpful if you stick in the review something about section 55′ – forget it. Even Jack Straw was on his side,” says Meyer.
He asks Jay to “drop the amateur psychology”.
11.33am: Financial Times media correspondent Ben Fenton has just tweeted:
Meyer brings finger down on bundle with audible force to say “on oath” that he was not influenced by overweening editors. #leveson
11.30am: Meyer bristles when Jay says that to push for more control over complaints would have brought the commission into conflict with powerful people.
Jay asks if there was “collusion” between the PCC and editors. Meyer says he objects to the word “collusion” as it has a “whiff of poodle or lapdog”. “If you think I was sitting in their pocket, think again Mr Jay.”
“God knows I had my conflicts with the editors on all kinds of things. If you think I was sitting in their pocket not daring to do things that they did not like, think again Mr Jay,” Meyer says.
He adds that once a year he took national newspaper editors to lunch, but attempted to keep some distance from them.
“Institutionally, obviously the PCC had to be close to the industry,” he says.
11.29am: Our colleague Lisa O’Carroll has just tweeted:
#leveson ex diplomat Meyer losing cool. ‘you keep trying to put words in my mouth mr Jay.You haven’t the faintest idea when they (eds) said’
11.28am: Jay asks why Meyer did not agitate for more power over the prominence of apologies.
Meyer says he was agitating over “so much else”. He says it is much less of a problem than it was in 2003.
Jay describes it as a “real concern” to the public that the PCC cannot force newspapers to make prominent complaints.
“That was not what I was doing at the time. I had to make judgments,” Meyer says. “We pushed and cajoled on this. Had I done another three years on this that would have been my priority.”
11.26am: Meyer is asked about the PCC’s role in negotiating apologies.
He concedes that editors had the final say over what prominence to give apologies, but the PCC would have “made a fuss” if the placement was “ludicrous”.
11.23am: Meyer says he did not think that prior notiification was an urgent matter that needed to be addressed.
He denies that any lack of action was due to opposition from editors on the commission; he says they were a “completely disunited group”.
“You had a huge variation in views among the editors. There was usually more harmony among the non-editors than there was among the editors,” he says.
Pressed on this, Meyer says: “You keep putting words into my mouth, Mr Jay.”
11.18am: Jay asks if the PCC considered changing its code to include a requirement for pre-notification about stories.
Meyer says it was considered but dismissed, as there might be a public interest justification reason not to notify the subjects of stories before publication.
11.13am: Meyer tells the inquiry how the PCC could have attempted to halt the publication of the News of the World’s Max Mosley sting.
He says the PCC gave pre-publication advice “regularly”.
“There would have been a big debate about whether the Nazi stuff affected the central argument,” Meyer says.
11.12am: Meyer claims he has “stopped big stories from being published” on privacy or public interest grounds.
The PCC will always be charged with acting in the interest of the press, Meyer says, but one of tha advantages of being close to editors is “they respond in a different way”.
11.10am: Meyer says that if Mosley had gone to the PCC before the News of the World published its story “the whole thing might have taken a different course”.
He says he would have urged the News of the World to reconsider its public interest argument.
11.08am: Meyer says one of his credos is that “There’s a time for the law, and there’s a time for the PCC.”
11.07am: Jay asks if Meyer read Mr Justice Eady’s high court judgment that found in favour of Mosley.
“I thought he rendered a correct judgment,” Meyer says, noting that that is his personal view. He says he found it hard to believe the News of the World sting was in the public interest.
Max Mosley. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features
11.05am: Meyer tells the inquiry that then Formula One boss Max Mosley was “extremely rude” about the PCC after he decided to launch a legal complaint against the News of the World rather than complain to the commission.
If he had gone to the PCC “we around the table – the commissioners – would have had a very interesting debate … and we would have found for him,” he says.
11.04am: Meyer says “the fact there might have been a giant criminal conspiracy in the belly of the beast” was another matter from allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World which the PCC moved to examine.
11.03am: Meyer says the virtue of Colin Myler at the News of the World was that he was a fresh pair of eyes who knew the industry well.
11.01am: Jay asks about the PCC’s sanctions for failing to comply with its rulings – or worse, misleading it.
Meyer admits the PCC’s articles of association do not say that an editor is in breach of its code if they do not comply with the body.
10.58am: Meyer describes the PCC’s 2007 report as “monumental”. When Jay questions this, he accuses the QC of being “mean-spirited”.
He says the police and newspapers – “God bless ‘em” – uncovered more evidence of phone hacking than was known in 2006.
10.56am: Meyer says the decision not to interview Andy Coulson, after he left the News of the World, “was exactly the right one to take … although presentationally it has made things difficult for me”.
Meyer says the PCC had no powers to interview under oath, and in any case Coulson no longer worked for the paper.
He says it is “wholly improbable” that Coulson would have been able to tell the PCC more than Colin Myler “had been able to dig out of the system”.
Coulson “would not have had anything of value to add to the reports that we published”, says Meyer.
10.52am: The PPC decided to conduct a “lessons-learned exercise” that would offer guidance and “shed a little more light” on what had gone on at the News of the World. “That’s what we did and it was welcomed,” Meyer adds.
10.50am: Moving on to the PCC’s 2007 inquiry, Meyer says: “I was certainly confident that the inquiry we carried out in 2007 … was fully within the articles of association.”
Meyer says he was “strongly” of the view that it would not be useful for the PCC to “duplicate” the police inquiry. “At the time … it seemed pretty draconian,” he says of the imprisonment of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire.
10.49am: Meyer says that when the police looked into phone hacking of the royal family in August 2006 it was not appropriate for the PCC to launch its own “parallel” inquiry.
He adds that the PCC could make statements but no more.
10.46am: Meyer is asked about his proposals for future press regulation.
He says that in six appearances on Question Time he never got any questions about the press – and he expected some hostility. Leveson interjects to say that: “Maybe they didn’t know what it [the PCC] was.”
Only the Advertising Standards Authority was better known than the PCC, Meyer says.
10.45am: Media Standards trust senior editor Gavin Freeguard has just tweeted:
Our Ipsos MORI poll, Jan 10: 61% ‘v appropriate’, 25% ‘fairly appropriate’ to fine papers in serious cases p46 http://bit.ly/qlCvaw #Leveson
10.42am: As an example that newspapers take notice of adjudications, Meyer says that the Guardian threatened to leave the PCC in 2003 after the body ruled against the newspaper paying a prisoner for a book serialisation.
10.41am: Editors did not like having to admit in their own newspapers that they had “screwed up”, Meyer tells the inquiry.
10.39am: Jay suggests that the public want the PCC to have more teeth, but Meyer does not agree.
He says that his view is backed up by polls of the public in which they said they would prefer a “fast free and fair” system to getting bogged down.
Leveson suggests that this was not a very fair poll question.
10.35am: Meyer admits he was “going out on a limb” in the speech when he said he was firmly opposed to fines for newspapers.
He says he is still opposed to the PCC having the ability to fine – in contrast to what the serving director of the PCC, Stephen Abell, told the inquiry yesterday.
Meyer said in his speech that editors fear the blemish of having a negative PCC adjudication on their career.
10.32am: Meyer denies the claim that he was “out on a limb” when he said in the 2003 speech that the PCC was functioning well.
“I had some quite significant changes to make,” he says of the PCC. Meyer says he wanted the changes to face as little political resistance as possible.
10.31am: Meyer says in the six years of his chairmanship he agonised over what the PCC’s regulation should be called.
“Self-regulation” did not capture it, he says, because it was the “lay majority” of the commission that sat in judgment of journalism – not journalists.
10.27am: Meyer is asked about his speech in 2003 on the “permanent evolution” of the press. He had been chairman of the PCC for just a matter of weeks.
“Mr Jay, I do not believe in hanging around,” he says.
10.24am: Meyer says he felt “the tremor in the land” when the Labour government enacted legislation to attempt to deal with terrorism.
“On the matter of the press of course it has to be regulated …. I’m not saying it should be free to roar around,” he says, adding: “Actually today the press is quite closely hemmed in … by statute and by the code of practice.”
10.17am: Once you allow the state into the area of press regulation, you are “standing on the top of a slippery slope”, Meyer tells Leveson.
He says that politics change and a “less permissive, less liberal state” might try take advantage of existing legislation “to do things which might be offensive to freedom of expression”.
10.15am: Meyer says he is “very firmly of the view that you do not go down the road of statute”.
10.14am: Meyer describes the PCC as a “public service” for the “99%” of complainants who are not celebrities.
The strongest shot for an editor was a “negative adjudication published prominently”, Meyer says.
He adds that the ultimate sanction would have been to write a letter to an editor, but that situation never arose under his chairmanship.
10.12am: Meyer says he believes “very firmly” that the PCC is a regulator – “it is regulation unlike anything else”.
“As you develop a jurisprudence to the application of the code of practice, judgments and rulings, you are actually telling journalists what they can do and what they can’t do. In my book, that is a form of regulation,” Meyer says.
“Fair enough,” quips Jay.
10.11am: Meyer was interviewed by the Press Standards Board of Finance (Pressbof) for the role of PCC chairman in 2003, he says.
He adds that he is a “strong believer of freedom of the press … even though I had been wrestling with journalists” in his previous incarnation as a UK ambassador.
10.06am: Sir Christopher Meyer is the first witness of the day. He was chairman of the PCC from 2003 to 2009.
Meyer is being questioned by Robert Jay QC, counsel to the inquiry.
9.47am: Good morning and welcome to the Leveson inquiry live blog.
The inquiry continues with its turn of senior Press Complaints Commission (PCC) figures, hearing evidence from veteran media executive Lord Grade, former PCC chairman Sir Christopher Meyer, and the recently-installed PCC chairman, Lord Hunt.
Hunt was appointed new chairman of the PCC in October last year, following the departure of Baroness Buscombe. In only his second outing since taking the role, Hunt is likely to be pressed on his own proposals for a radical shakeup of press regulation.
The inquiry will hear from Meyer, chairman of the PCC between 2003 and 2009 – spanning the period when the first signs of widespread illicit newsgathering methods were uncovered. Meyer is likely to be asked about his meetings with former information commissioner, Richard Thomas, who raised concerns about the use of private investigators by newspapers in 2003.
Please note that comments are switched off for legal reasons.
Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/jan/31/leveson-inquiry-grade-hunt-meyer-live
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