Bernard Ingham: Read all about it... a dire threat to free democracy

They did not seem to understand that our blessed state of freedom confers on the daft, the obtuse, the obsessed, the sensational and the just plain nasty the right to express their views within the laws of defamation and, assuming that they still exist, pornography.

Mrs Thatcher was altogether more secure. “You can’t have a free society without a free Press,” she used to say, admittedly sometimes between clenched teeth.

She was, of course, insulated by her indifference to the media. She did not read newspapers or imbibe much TV or radio. It was a waste of good reforming time.

It was up to me, as her chief press secretary, to keep her abreast of the good, bad and indifferent being retailed on air and in print. Otherwise, she could have looked out of touch on the floor of the House of Commons.

I mention all this because the Government has to decide soon whether to hamstring the media, even to the point of putting some organs out of business. In short, will it or won’t it activate S40 of the Crime and Courts Act, which, to Parliament’s utter shame, reached the Statute Book after the 2011 Leveson Inquiry into the Press following the phone-hacking scandal?

It is frankly incredible that a British Parliament could have voted to establish a state-approved regulator called Impress, which claims to be independent but is bankrolled by Max Mosley, who had the misfortune to have his sado-masochistic orgy with several prostitutes revealed by the Press.

But that is only half the story. If S40 is activated, any newspaper not signed up to the state-approved regulator will be liable if someone launches a complaint for paying all the costs, even if the case is thrown out by the courts.

On this evidence, Parliament has as uncertain a grasp of fairness as of democracy. The backers of the legislation are in urgent need of intelligence tests.

Ah, but you may say, newspapers make a mint out of selling lurid tales about the so-called great and the good. Why shouldn’t they fork out when people are aggrieved?

The answer is that the Press already run risks in the libel courts if they get their facts wrong. And they also belong to an independent regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, chaired by a former Appeal Court judge, with the power to impose fines of up to £1m.

What more do our politicians want, especially when the phone-hacking scandal was exposed and the forces of law and order let loose on the journalistic trade?

It is also time they realised which side their bread is buttered on. Our free Press has probably never been in such a parlous financial state in my lifetime. Its income from advertising is being swiped by the internet. Advertisers too often manage to confuse me by shoving an advert on screen while I am trying to absorb an article.

Local papers up and down the land are in much worse financial condition than the national Press. They simply do not have the resources to survive a complaint under S40.

Do our Parliamentarians wish to neuter them completely so that they print only their benign offerings and ignore their expensive foibles such as abuse of Parliamentary expenses, which readers have to pay through taxes?

You may say that I’m a terrible hypocrite in all this since I was No 10 Press secretary. I was waiting for that.

When I went to No 10 in 1979, I made it clear I would play it straight if the media did. I did not spend my time complaining about stories unless they were without factual base. And I most certainly did not attack media opinions unless – again – they were not founded in what I understood to be fact.

Indeed, one Cabinet Secretary testified that I thought the media had a job to do and wanted to help them do it.

All this means that Theresa May has a wonderful opportunity to hand our democracy a marvellous New Year present: repeal this misconceived, punitive and damaging legislation forthwith and consign S40 to the devil it represents.

Otherwise, she will be damned for generations to come and the Mother of Parliaments will, through its own fault, end Britain’s accreditation as a free democracy.

Do we really want to be lumped with Russia and assorted tyrannies across the world?