It is not every day that an institution you have just joined and for which you share responsibility is lacerated by the prime minister, his deputy and the leader of the opposition. Less than 48 hours after I attended only my second meeting of the Press Complaints Commission, it was being variously described as ineffective, lacking in rigour and toothless – and those have been among the milder epithets used.
Having practised law for 30 years, I should not have been surprised. When individuals face the threat of imprisonment or career and political annihilation, it is not difficult to see why a self-regulatory body such as the commission, with a workforce of fewer than 20 and a budget of less than £2m should, as if by telepathy, have unanimously been identified by a variety of protagonists – and not just in Westminster – as a patsy.
In one sense the commission can now see it had it coming. In 2009 it accepted in good faith assurances made about phone hacking which were in substance the same as those given to parliament, to the police and indeed to the prime minister when he hired Andy Coulson. Unlike the police, however, the commission has never had forensic powers of the type that might have entitled it to test the veracity of the assurances it was given, and it was therefore right that, immediately after news emerged of the phone hacking of Milly Dowler, the commission frankly and with no little embarrassment acknowledged that it could not stand by the pronouncements it had made two years earlier.
Much of the criticism directed at the commission in recent days has not only been flagrantly self-serving but also wilfully misleading, not least the charge that the commission is run by editors in their own interests. Quite the reverse, for the majority of commissioners are lay men and women. We have no police powers although we include a former chief constable among our number; we are not a court although a retired Old Bailey judge was appointed to the commission at the same time as me some weeks ago. We work part-time, but we adjudicate upon every draft determination made by our fulltime staff. You will not hear the defence run in this office that this is all someone else's fault.
In the face of the selective amnesia shown in recent days by those who should know better, a reminder of the commission's core functions may be illuminating. The commission assists more than 20,000 people a year and annually investigates in excess of 5,000 complaints. Those who come to it are often among the most vulnerable in our society: a war widow wishing to grieve in private, a parent seeking to protect a child from unwelcome intrusion or a victim of crime concerned about the possibility of jigsaw identification. This is what the commission does. No one else discharges this role, certainly not high court judges, and it would be a disaster if that work were now to be jeopardised by the power play taking place amongst the country's elites.
Odd to tell, some of the commission's critics have also satisfactorily availed themselves of its services in the past. They know who they are and no doubt stand ready, when the forthcoming inquiry into press ethics takes place and robust arrangements are made for the protection by the chair of their confidentiality, to bear witness to the support they were given.
No politician can compel the commission to commit institutional suicide, but the repeated cheap shots directed gratuitously at the commission in recent days have unquestionably damaged it and put at risk its vital and generally unsung work of providing access to justice for those who cannot afford heads of communication or celebrity lawyers to speak for them.