Bernard Ingham: Don’t let politicians wreck Press freedom

“You can’t have a free society without a free Press,” Margaret Thatcher used to say, sometimes through clenched teeth.

Nor can you be a truly great Prime Minister unless you succeed in your major endeavour with your integrity more or less intact.

On this basis, we can count only Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Thatcher among the outstanding of the last 70 years. Most of the others did not achieve much, and a few – Anthony Eden, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – came to be seen as a bit dodgy.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

So far, David Cameron’s integrity is secure but his judgment in employing Andy Coulson, ex-editor of the now deceased News of the World, is highly suspect. He will for ever be remembered for his naivete, perversity or misguided generosity – take your pick – in offering Coulson a second chance.

But it will not be seen as a serious blemish if he pulls the struggling UK economy through and restores public finances.

It is nothing like the black mark that Blair quickly earned for his dalliance with Bernie Ecclestone, the motor racing nabob, or later by taking the country to war with Iraq on a false prospectus.

By the time Gordon Brown, a son of the manse, went to No 10, we had had enough of bogus piety. Brown, a thoroughly mixed-up kid, can only be considered a truly bad PM, given the unparalleled damage he inflicted on the economy.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

David Lloyd George, the old goat who reminds me of Dominque Strauss-Kahn, defied the severe morality of the day to be regarded as a pretty good PM.

He replaced Herbert Asquith in the middle of the First World War because the man from Morley was altogether too laid-back to lead the country in extremis. He used to write love letters during Cabinet meetings.

Lloyd George raises the question of how crucial integrity is to greatness. After my 24 years in the Civil Service, I believe that establishing and maintaining trust is vital.

That is all the more difficult for Cameron as Prime Minister of a peacetime coalition that is in a perpetual state of negotiation. But if he is to maintain any semblance of trust, he must not fall for today’s popular call for state regulation of the media. He must hold fast to Thatcher’s doctrine which I quoted above.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

There are some very curious notions of freedom. They do not seem to recognise that it encompasses not only the freedom to be good but also to be bad – and nastily, exploitatively, wilfully and unfairly bad in the bargain. We have to take the rough with the smooth, while cracking down on breaches of the law.

I do not believe that journalists can ever be justified in breaking the law of the land. But we have to recognise that at the best of times theirs is a rough old trade that often sails close to the wind in order to do its duty by society. Ironically, that duty is to keep society more on the straight and narrow than would otherwise be the case.

As Rupert Murdoch says, the old News of the World lost its way. Indeed, you could argue that Fleet Street in its entirety has lost its way, not necessarily by hacking but by its obsession with celebrities, most of whom can only be celebrated for riotous living.

I would also argue that politicians have completely lost their way by their obsession with the media and the way that both Blair and Cameron ran after Murdoch.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It is not the function of government to dance to the media’s tune; it is to govern fairly, decently and effectively.

If we are to improve matters, I believe we have to start at the bottom not at the top. I refer to the local Press where I began my career. We shall never have the Big Society Cameron and others want until its members know what is going on in it.

Yet local newspapers – as distinct from regionals such as this newspaper – do not systematically and exhaustively cover the activities of local councils. They no longer inform the populace of who is in trouble by reporting every court case, however trivial.

The result is there for all to see: the local abuse of power. That is where the problem starts. We know how to end it. You can’t have a free (or big) society without a free – and assiduous – Press, as the lady might now say.