HC Deb 11 April 1974 vol 872 cc709-19

3.15 p.m.

Mr. John Gorst (Hendon, North)

In drawing attention to the need for an inquiry into the methods of regulating Press practices—in short, to the inadequacies of the Press Council—let me say at the outset that I believe that the ideal for which we should strive at all times is that a free Press should be self-regulating.

I quote words used by the Minister of State—who I am delighted is to reply to the debate, because I know that he has a most enlightened attitude to this subject—in his Minority Report to the Report of the Committee on Privacy: It is only where the intruder abuses the freedom to enquire that the problem begins… When it conflicts with the commendable interest of privacy who must draw the line? At present it is the intruder himself. This is one of the problems with which the Press Council seems to have failed to deal in recent cases. I believe that it has also failed in its attitude to practices and techniques. In general terms I believe that the Press Council has fallen far behind the times in terms of consumer protection.

My purpose this afternoon is to examine the Press Council, particularly in relation to its handling of the Lambton affair, to draw certain conclusions from this, and to suggest that there are deficiencies in the Press Council that call for careful scrutiny.

I regard the Press Council's findings on the Lambton affair as totally amoral. The council's report suggests that ends justify the means. I quote the phrase from the council's findings, that Success is an acceptable excuse for the methods which the News of the World saw fit to adopt.

The News of the World has clearly shown the scant regard it has for the Press Council. This paper was rightly censured by the council but on entirely the wrong grounds. The council censured it for inadequate supervision. It did not censure it, as it should have done, for the methods it used.

The contemptuous attitude of the News of the World was summarised in its editorial the following Sunday when it stated: The censure need not be taken too seriously. The very fact that the News of the World could make such a remark calls into question the efficacy of the Press Council.

On the subject of the Sunday People, which was the other part of the Press Council's inquiry, I believe that the council reached many conclusions for the wrong reasons. Indeed, some of the council's examination of the evidence was highly dubious. For example on page 27 of the report reference is made to the payment of £6,000 to some of the principal people involved. It says that an initial payment of £750 was made and the balance of £5,250 was to be paid on publication. Yet later on page 33 of the report, it is stated that The Sunday People bought evidence with the intention of confronting Lord Lambton with it. Really! How naive and disingenuous can one be? If the purpose of buying the evidence was in order to protect the Sunday People, what on earth was the point of making a down payment initially and another one on publication? One would have thought that the evidence would be bought outright.

Later the Press Council Report deals with the Sunday People defence. It notes that the Sunday People was uneasy about the diligence of the authorities in carrying out investigations. Again the Press Council is totally naive. It went on to say: It is not for the Council to investigate this question of diligence. One wonders why. After all, if the Press Council is not to probe the explanations which are put forward by people who are defending themselves, it is a very weak and dilatory form of inquiry. I think that the whole of the Lambton affair as investigated by the Press Council illustrates certainly that the council gives the impression of preferring to whitewash the Press rather than to defend the public. It gives the Press and not the public the benefit of the doubt, and, worse still, it seems to demonstrate a totally immoral attitude.

In passing, it is interesting to note that the Prime Minister, when making a statement to the House a few days ago on the subject of land speculation, remarked: For several days now she"— referring to Mrs. Marcia Williams— has been subject to an intolerable degree of newspaper harassment on her doorstep, including an unauthorised entry into her car, and the incitement of children to hammer upon her door."—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 8th April 1974; Vol. 872, c. 30.] Without going into the rights and wrongs or, indeed, any aspect of the Prime Minister's statement, what gives one very little confidence is the fact that the Prime Minister himself appears to lack confidence in the efficacy of the Press Council as a watchdog because neither he nor any of the other participants have apparently thought it expedient to refer the matter to the Press Council. Even if for very good reasons, which one can understand, they would prefer not to press the matter with the Press Council, I regard it as intolerable that the Press Council has not yet shown any inclination to take any action itself to make inquiries into the conduct of the Press on this matter.

After all, the Prime Minister of this country, whether he is a Conservative or a Labour Prime Minister, is at least entitled to some sort of regard in terms of the practices of the Press, irrespective of the merits of what is being investigated.

I therefore turn now to discuss what should be done about this situation. Should the Press Council be abolished and should it be started again with some other machinery? Should it be reconstituted in some way; or should it be reformed; and if it should be one or other of these options, who should do it?

I have made my position clear on that. I believe that the Press Council should be putting its own house in order—or that the Press, which is, after all, its paymaster, should be putting the council in order. However, if the Government, after looking into this matter, find that the Press is not willing to make improvements, they have a duty to conduct some form of inquiry into some of the criticisms which I have made and some of the questions which I am about to ask.

I suggested earlier that the Press Council was behind the times. It is behind the times because, in this country and beyond, the consumer protection movement has overtaken the Press and the Press Council. In its activities, the Press Council is out of date. As a defender of the freedom of the Press, it does an excellent job, but as a protector of the consumer it is, I believe, less than even inadequate.

I do not believe that the distinguished judges who have been its chairmen are in any way correct when they say that the Press Council has teeth. I quote here from what Lord Devlin, its first chairman, had to say when he gave up office in 1969: The theoretical defect that the Press Council was without 'teeth ' was cured by the at first unco-ordinated decisions of editors invariably to publish adjudications against their newspapers. The attitude of the News of the World gives one good ground for doubting that.

Lord Devlin's remarks were echoed the following year by his successor, Lord Pearce, who said: To be compelled to print in your own newspaper an account of a matter … is a strong sanction. It may be a strong sanction on some newspapers, but it is not a strong enough sanction to deal with the situation which arose, for example, over the Lambton affair.

Ought there to be, as it were, an extreme long-stop? One wonders whether the Goverment will in the end have to consider whether there should be a licence to print newspapers—a licence to print, which a Press Council with real teeth, should have the ultimate opportunity, as a last-ditch sanction, to withdraw if a newspaper continually flouted the acceptable practices of the day.

I come now to certain aspects and practices of the Press Council which, in my view, need examination, and I refer, first, to its independence. Admittedly, the Committee on Privacy encouraged the Press Council to have more lay members, and this has been done. I wonder whether the council has gone far enough. Indeed, I wonder whether there should be a much greater separation, in the interests of independence, of the Press Council from the Press.

In particular, one thinks of the financing of the Press Council. First, one questions the origin of its funds, and second, whether they are adequate for the council to do all that should be expected of it. Is it working fast enough? Over the Lambton affair, there was a delay of nine months, which seemed quite intolerable, when other inquiries were able to produce results in a fraction of that time.

The initiative which other consumer protection bodies take on behalf of consumers is singularly lacking from the Press Council as at present constituted. There is no protection afforded to the public unless a complaint is put forward by an aggrieved party.

We know, and I have instanced the case of the Prime Minister, that many people who are aggrieved want only peace and to be left alone to forget what was perhaps an intolerable experience. Many of the actions which might have been the subject of complaint are not complained about. The Press Council should do more to initiate action of its own. It has done so on only a handful of occasions. On the Lambton affair it appeared to move only after pressure from myself and a handful of other people. The Christine Keeler memoirs and the photographs of the Queen are the only occasions on which I can recall the council taking the initiative without a complaint having been made.

I wonder whether the time has now come for a reconstituted Press Council to be given a greater protection of privilege for those it calls as witnesses. If that happened it would be a great step forward because some of its hearings could be held in public, particularly when they deal with general rather than specific matters in which there is an element of distress to the aggrieved participants. The Press Council must make a significant change in its attitude towards taking part in the public discussion of its activities. At the moment it seems to shun contact with the public. When I took part in a television discussion on this matter with the Minister of State the council was unwilling to take part. It shunned the discussion completely, and I have had similar experiences on other occasions.

I therefore leave it with the Minister to say what action the Government can take and what steps he is prepared to initiate. I urge him at least to consider an inquiry into whether this body is adequate in the current climate as a protector, not just of the freedom of the Press but also of the rights of individual members of the general public.

3.33 p.m.

The Minister of State, Home Office (Mr. Alexander W. Lyon)

The hon. Member for Hendon, North (Mr. Gorst) has done us a service by raising this issue for wider public discussion, and I intend to approach his remarks in the spirit of furthering that discussion. He began by saying that a free Press is a self-regulating Press. That is true. I hope that the British Press will remain free within that concept. I certainly have no intention of imposing upon it some kind of Government restraint and I am a little surprised that the hon. Member should have gone so far as to suggest that there could be a licence to print newspapers which could be withdrawn in the event of bad behaviour. He set that proposal in the context of administration by the Press Council, but in order to have that power the Press Council would require some kind of statutory backing and, although an independent agency, it would need to be created by statute with a statutory power before it could take that kind of action.

Mr. Gorst

I regard that proposal as the ultimate long-stop in default of any action to put the affairs of the Press Council in order.

Mr. Lyon

I shall consider that, but in my view the idea goes much further than I would want to go—and I have been regarded as being somewhat extreme on this point.

I am about to come to the difficulty that lies before the Press. In our law the Press is no different from an individual citizen. It is free in our society only because the citizen is free in our society. It has the right to comment only in so far as the citizen has a right to comment. It has a right to investigate only in so far as the citizen has a right to investigate. Therefore, when we are talking of the freedom of the Press, or restricting the freedom of the Press, we are talking about the rôle of the citizen in relation to his fellow citizens in society.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom in any society. Such a society would be a jungle. It would be a place where the powerful would be able to override the weak. The concept of law which governs our society is that when people have rights and freedoms, if they come into conflict the law should be an instrument for regulating that conflict in a way that is seen to be just and fair to all members of that society. That is the issue at the root of the problem raised by the hon. Member for Hendon, North this afternoon.

The hon. Member hung the discussion on the Lambton case, and I should like to take that case as an illustration. For my part, I found it nauseating that the News of the World could set up a camera behind a mirror in anyone's bedroom—brothel or otherwise—in order to take photographs of what was going on in the bed. The Press Council completely evaded that issue in its discussion. It raised the general question which had to be decided in its findings about the News of the World when it said: If there is a serious public ill to be exposed, whether by the Press or by a member of the public, methods may be justified which would be wholly unacceptable in some less serious case. That is the point, but the Press Council made no ruling, no determination at all, about this practice that I find so offensive, and it did not do so because it was running away from the central issue in the case.

It is true that later, in relation to its findings about the Sunday People and the purchase of the photographs from Mr. Levy by the Sunday People, the Press Council went on to discuss the whole privacy question much more fully. It said: The issue of public importance looms just as large in considering whether or not the inevitable intrusion into privacy was justified as it does in relation to the matters already discussed. Obviously a person's privacy in a brothel whose inhabitants are such as wish to photograph clandestinely what is going on has to be regarded in a somewhat different light from the privacy of people in normal surroundings such as their own homes. But without the involvement of issues of public interest the new stories which were published would, of course, have been quite unjustifiable. It went on to say that because of the public interest in this matter, which was indicated by the remarks of the Security Commission, the conduct of the Sunday People was justified.

The first question I have to ask about that is who, in his right mind, really believes that Rupert Murdoch and his men were concerned whether there was a leak of security? I, for one, utterly reject that suggestion. All they wanted was to arouse a prurient interest in the sex life—the deplorable sex life, in my view—of a Conservative Minister of the Crown.

The fact that they were not primarily interested in drugs, and therefore the possibility of a leak of information, was indicated by the fact that in their initial account of what went on there was no suggestion of drugs. In the course of the debate in the House, when I raised the matter with the then Prime Minister, we did not know that there was any suggestion of drugs. The only issue was the sex life of a Minister—a sex life that was to be revealed to the British public in order to sell Mr. Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, and the other newspapers cottoned on to it.

I reject the idea that there was any public interest in this story, in the proper definition of that concept. I may be wrong and the Press Council may be right. Who should make the final decision whether a reporter should be sent to do this kind of thing—whether he William's house and ordered to pay children to throw stones at the door? Who should be able to decide whether Christine Keeler's memoirs reviving a sordid affair to the detriment of the man who tried to live it down, should be printed?

At the moment it is the editor of the newspaper. The only sanction operating against him is the sanction of exposure to condemnation by the Press Council, which condemns in such an inoffensive manner. It has no power to penalise or to restrict the continuation in the profession of a journalist, because journalism is not a closed profession in the same way as is the legal profession, or accountancy, with a ruling body which can expel if there has been a breach of the code of ethics.

The result is that having censured the News of the World in the Keeler case the Press Council finds that within 10 years it is back with another such case, in which the News of the World has behaved with the same lack of sensitivity for individual rights. I have to ask myself: is there any way in which one can regulate the conflict of interest and decide the issue not according to the interests of the intruder or the person intruded upon but according to a fair test by an independent and impartial body?

I have argued this case in the Minority Report to the Younger Committee, which is available for the Press to reconsider. I have not changed my views since I became a Minister. I accept that this raises serious issues of principle, which have to be considered before any legislation can be embarked upon. At the moment I am involved in a reconsideration of the whole problem. We shall take into account all the interests involved when trying to define clearly where this balance ought to be struck. We have not progressed far, and it will take time. Like the last Government, we hope to issue a White Paper in due course, allowing proper time for a full discussion of the issues involved.

Mr. Gorst

Will the Minister say whether, even if consideration is not likely to be given to the withdrawal of a licence to print along the lines I have suggested, he is indicating by his later remarks that he has in mind the possibility of the withdrawal of a journalist's licence to practice?

Mr. Lyon

It would not be possible for the Government to make that kind of decision unless we were to enact legislation which would oblige the profession to set up an institution which could regulate its practices. We are a long way from that, and I do not contemplate that that would ever happen. I fear that the matter of journalistic ethics is one which has to be left to the profession, although sometimes it is lamentable in carrying out its obligations to the public under such ethics. The possibility of the aggrieved citizen having some kind of remedy which is not available to him now, other than the mere fact of a possible censure from the Press Council, is a much wider issue than the one which we are considering.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the matter in the way he has. There is no concluded view in the Government. We are considering this and other matters in deciding our reaction to the Report of the Younger Committee on Privacy.

The Press sometimes takes the view that the concern that has been expressed from both sides of the House today is concern by public figures about their own position in relation to society and the way in which they may be able to safeguard their peccadilloes from the general public. My view is that a much more serious issue is the effect upon ordinary individuals who are not in public life, who are treated in just the same way by the Press, and who have no redress. A figure of national repute, particularly if he is a Member of the House, at least has a vehicle of publicity to rebut what is said about him in the Press. A private figure has no such vehicle.

Although the Press Council, in its report on Lord Lambton, indicated that it was his position as a Minister of the Crown, particularly in the Department of Defence, which gave the matter a public interest, I think of last year, when, in the gossip column in the Sunday Express, I read an offensive story of the relationships of the wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, who was not a Minister and was not so much in the public eye that his name would be instantly recognisable, and one of his colleagues.

The wife had left her husband some time before and had subsequently been employed by the other Member of the House as his secretary. The innuendo of the story was unmistakable. It may have been defamatory, but it was clear, defamatory or not, that it was an intolerable intrusion into the privacy of those two men, not because they were public men but simply out of a nauseating desire to make capital out of what was implied, without being alleged, as a sexual relationship, of which there was none.

When I raised with both Members the question whether I should send that matter to the Press Council, both said, "What is the good of sending it to the Press Council, which will do nothing about it beyond making the issue more public than it already is?" One reason for thinking that perhaps the use of the law would have been a more effective restraint is that that kind of story would never have been printed if there had been any legal remedy. That is one of the factors that has influenced my mind in the past in suggesting that there should be a change in the law.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising the matter.