The Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke QC MP

¶5.1 Kenneth Clarke QC MP provided a number of different perspectives. In particular, as Lord

Chancellor and Justice Secretary at the time, his Cabinet portfolio included a number of matters of central concern to the Inquiry, including substantive and procedural law on both the civil and criminal sides, access to justice more generally, and data protection law and policy.

¶5.2 He said this about the political response to Operation Motorman:31

"That was the startling thing, but I don't think you can put that down to the Information Commissioner. The Motorman reports were pretty startling, and rather going back to what I said before, what is known in the bubble and what's known outside, I think every knew that private and confidential information was fairly readily available in the outside world as long as you were prepared to pay for it, and the Commissioner produced these two reports and not much was done about it, but it goes beyond, I think, just the penalties and the powers of the Information Commissioner. Q. You say not much was done about it. What other reasons do you think exist for why not much was done about it? A. Well, it's no good mentioning my pet theories because I don't know for sure, but what this Inquiry is looking into, how far was it a desire, for one reason or another, not to upset the people who were happily indulging in all this? I won't go further. It's not totally new, all this. When I was first appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, I had to move my bank account because my bank complained to me that journalists were trying to bribe the staff of the village branch where I had my bank account. It would have been regarded as perfectly customary in those days, I think particularly as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who had been appointed had views which weren't shared by some the editors of the more vigorous newspapers. So that and various other things happened. And in business everybody was perfectly well aware that if you wanted to engage in these sort of practices, it was terrible easy to get details of I the private information of your competitors or rivals, and journalists joined in the same thing. The scale of it appears to become startling. Motorman sort of made people aware this had now grown to a very profitable and large industry, and even following through the newspapers the evidence given to this Inquiry, the scale has certainly shocked me, when I would have thought I was fairly worldly wise on the subject in previous years, but I had no idea it was going on on this monumental scale."

¶5.3 Mr Clarke spoke in these general terms about relationships at senior levels between the politicians and the press:32

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¶PART I | The Press and Politicians

"Well, what falls in force with your remit is as it were the proprietors of it, isn't it? I mean, how far is undue influence being exercised for commercial, well, political, other reasons? The politics are quite difficult because in the end it is for the politicians to decide how far they're going to allow a particular powerful group to influence policy. If I'm sounding – every democratically elected politician in every part of the world I've ever known easily falls to criticising the press, so if I sound as if I'm criticising the press, my criticisms are actually aimed equally at the ministers. LORD JUSTICE LEVESON: I understand that. A. When taken to excess, this terror of the tabloids and this subservience to the media doesn't give any success to the politician who does it. You may win some temporary praise, but you make stupid decisions in government and they turn on you eventually when it starts to fall apart. You still come to the same ruin in the end unless you actually make a decent fist of the good governance of the country. ... Well, in my opinion the power of the media has grown, is excessive, and ought to be diminished, although I think the remedy is as much in the hands of the politicians as others. On the other hand, I still want to have a free media, an aggressive media, an irreverent media, and one that continually questions the government's own estimate of itself, so you have to get the balance right between those two."

¶5.4 Of particular interest was the example that Mr Clarke was able to provide relating to criminal

justice policy over recent years which, in his view, 'has been a response to tabloid newspaper complaints'.33 Overall:34

"If the tone of the newspapers had been different for the last 15 years, we'd probably have 20,000 fewer prisoners in prison. I hasten to add that's not a scientific estimate, it's just a way of illustrating my opinion."

¶5.5 He also challenged the theory that the endorsement of political parties from time to time by

The Sun really made much difference to the political fortunes, since Rupert Murdoch and his newspaper tended to align themselves with perceived winners and to change sides 'when it was obvious that the horse they're riding is about to collapse'.35

¶5.6 On the way forward on press regulation, Mr Clarke observed:36

"I think we're all agreed, I don't know, you've had many witnesses now, that whoever the regulator is must be totally independent of both government and press in their activities, that they should have some authority, and the ability to require the relevant

¶I media organisations to subject themselves to the authority, and that they should have

the power to impose penalties so there is some practical effect. Financial penalties, I imagine, the most part. It's when they break the criminal law, it should go off to other courts and other jurisdictions to deal with that. If that needs statutory underpinning because you won't get everybody to produce something like that and join something like that, submit to something like that and comply with something like that, then you're going to need statutory underpinning..."

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¶Chapter 7 | Further Political Perspectives on Relationships with the Press

¶5.7 Mr Clarke subsequently reverted to the Inquiry in writing on 26 July 2012.37 Of particular value

was his comment about the care needed when considering remedies for press misconduct in the wider civil law context, and his view that a measure of statutory underpinning for a new regime "would not be the freedom of expression Armageddon some commentators would have you believe".38