What a Burnham Premiership Could Mean for the Future of Press Reform
Dr Adrian Quinn on why he has hope for the revival of the Leveson Inquiry part 2
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The Makerfield by-election has been described as the most significant by-election in British post-war history.
One way in which this could turn out to be the case is on the subject of press regulation and reform.
In March, I boarded a train in Leeds, my home of 15 years and travelled to my former home, Liverpool, birthplace of the UK’s likely seventh Prime Minister in ten years.
Shortly before arriving at Lime Street Station, Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester boarded the train with some friends. I’d seen him travel this route before but hadn’t spoken to him. This time I decided I would.
“Mr Burnham,” I said, as we stepped off the train and walked towards the barrier. “Can I say something to you?”
My strong hunch is that he expected me to say something about the recent by-election in Gorton & Denton, where Keir Starmer and Labour’s National Executive made sure he could not stand.
“If you want to,” Burnham replied. He may even have expected to be on the receiving end of some abuse and that’s only natural.
“I did what I could to make Leveson 2 happen,” I said. “And I know you did too.”
“I haven’t given up on that,” Burnham replied, before I could go any further.
“Would you do it?” I asked.
“If I had the influence,” he replied.
We smiled and shook on it and got on with our Saturdays.
He did not say, “…if I become Prime Minister.”
Supporters of the reforms to press regulation that Sir Brian Leveson outlined in 2012 were watching Makerfield closely. Hugh Grant, board member and donor to Hacked Off, the campaign for a free and accountable press, appeared at the Burnham HQ at a rally in Makerfield shortly before polls opened.
A Burnham premiership might just lead to the reversal of the decision of Theresa May’s Government to cancel Leveson 2 prematurely and over the protest of its chair.
Sir Brian Leveson, a scouser himself, agreed to run his inquiry in two stages, so as not to interfere with criminal trials into phone hacking, of which there were many, most notably those of Andy Coulson who was convicted and Rebekah Brooks who was not.
What the Leveson Inquiry Was About
Leveson 1 was about:
“The culture, practices and ethics of the press, including contacts between the press and politicians and the press and the police; it is to consider the extent to which the current regulatory regime has failed and whether there has been a failure to act upon any previous warnings about media misconduct.”
Leveson 2 intended to look into:
“The extent of unlawful or improper conduct within News International, other media organisations or other organisations. It will also consider the extent to which any relevant police force investigated allegations relating to News International, and whether the police received corrupt payments or were otherwise complicit in misconduct.”
Not everyone was happy with this arrangement. Though part one was riveting (every living Prime Minister who could gave testimony) part two was always going to be the scrappier bit of the inquiry, because of the cumulative nature of the evidence generated by the various criminal trials. “It is a significant feature,” wrote Leveson in 2018, “when comparing the evidence of one to another, that conflicting (and often irreconcilable) accounts were given by people working within the same organisation.”
Though it was the Conservatives who officially brought the axe down on Leveson, it’s said that Labour was, on the quiet, not unhappy that Leveson two got the chop. Once back in power in the summer of 2024 – and following Prince Harry’s successful claim against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) the previous winter – Keir Starmer confirmed that Labour would not be reviving Part two of Leveson, saying it was ‘not a priority.’ This is despite the fact that in his ruling in the Prince Harry case, Mr Justice Fancourt found that the practice of phone hacking had continued at MGN right up to 2011 and even went on during Part one of Leveson.
That fact alone would seem to justify a Burnham Government reconstituting Leveson two.
But Burnham, like his possible Chancellor Ed Milliband, was always a high-profile outlier. In an impassioned speech in the House of Commons in May 2018, Milliband pleaded with fellow MPs to vote in favour of an amendment that would have forced Leveson to proceed to stage 2, calling it “a matter of honour.”
In government, the pair would surely have the support of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown who just two years ago wrote to the head of the Metropolitan Police, calling for a new criminal investigation into phone hacking at News International.
What Has Burnham Himself Said About Leveson 2 in the Past?
In the winter of 2016, when he was Shadow Home Secretary, Burnham wrote to ministers demanding that it should go ahead. Speaking to Radio 4, Burnham took on the notion that part one was too costly when he said, “we’ll only get the full value of that money if we see the job through. The Government’s only done half the job.”
“The Prime Minister [David Cameron] promised in the House of Commons that there would be a second stage of the inquiry and he was right to suggest that.”
Burnham seemed to make me that same promise at Lime Street Station.
Ten years ago this month, the UK voted to leave the European Union. This historic decision led to the immediate resignation of David Cameron and in time gave the Conservatives the excuse they needed to bail on Leveson 2. With the exception of far-seeing MPs like Ken Clarke, the party’s heart was never really in it. At the general election of 2017, the Conservative Party Manifesto pledged not to proceed with the second stage of Leveson.
Cameron had earlier promised victims of press abuse that he’d implement Leveson unless it was ‘bonkers,’ but he soon rejected the recommendations of the Leveson Report. On the day of publication in November 2012, Cameron said the Leveson reforms would involve crossing the Rubicon of writing elements of press regulation into law of the land. Instead, we got IPSO, ‘the sad little regulator,’ as Alan Rusbridger calls it, which has, to date, not mounted a single investigation into press standards, despite the letter S in its name.
Costly and Time-Consuming?
In officially closing the inquiry, Matt Hancock characterised Leveson as ‘costly and time-consuming.’
The bill to the taxpayer for the first part of the Leveson inquiry has been grossly distorted, even in Parliament. On a snowy first day of March 2018, the then Culture Secretary Matt Hancock brought the axe down on part two and quoted a combined figure of £48 million for the various police investigations, plus part one of the Inquiry. But in a letter to the Government a few weeks earlier, Brian Leveson confirmed that the cost of part one was £5.4 million. For comparison, the Sir William Henry Bragg Building at the University of Leeds where I work was recently refurbished to the tune of £96 million. One building, at one university, in one English city cost almost 18 times more than the Leveson Inquiry.
As for time-consuming, Leveson accomplished part one within 17 months. The Iraq Inquiry took seven years and the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday took 12.
The Jewish Chronicle reported on ‘the devastating emotional impact’ Inquiry had on Sir Brian and the entire Leveson family.
At the halfway point of my journey from Leeds to Liverpool, my train stopped at Victoria Station in Manchester, which now needs to elect a new mayor. Northerners like me know that Manchester Arena was built in the air space directly above the station. I made a point to be quiet and remember the 22 lives that were lost there, nine years ago last month.
In January 2018, Sir Brian indicated that in part two of his Inquiry he intended to consider the reporting of the 2017 Manchester attack. “It deserves full attention,” Leveson wrote, as do “many other subsequent allegations of intrusive and inappropriate reporting which, at the very least, give rise to the argument that the current regulatory regime still lacks teeth in this area.”
Here, Leveson is saying that Manchester Arena happened on IPSO’s watch.
So too did the death of TV presenter Caroline Flack in 2020. A petition calling for an inquiry into the behaviour of the tabloid press at the time of her suicide has exceeded a quarter million signatures.
This summer, we await Mr Justice Matthew Nicklin’s ruling in the privacy case brought by Prince Harry and several others against Associated Newspapers, publisher of the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. “The ruling will take some time,” we’re told.
The conclusion of this latest court case, paired with a likely Burnham premiership, seems like a natural time to reconstitute Leveson 2, which has a feeling of unfinished business about it.
Adrian Quinn is a member of the School of Media & Communication at the University of Leeds.
Since presumably much of the initial work of Leveson II will consist of compiling court transcripts of the various relevant trials & checking for conflicts in the evidence, it may even be easier than Leveson I.
IPSO is not up to its job, hardly surprising as the pseudo gamekeepers who pressed hardest for it - rather than an effective system of regulation in compliance with the values of a liberal democracy - included the most notorious of the media poachers. It was thus set up to protect them and to fail wider society, and in that it has clearly succeeded.
The UK needs far more effective media regulation. Getting on with Leveson 2 quickly is necessary in the terms that Sir Brian Leveson has re-emphasised. Its existence and eventual report may also be sine qua non to helping create the political space which will be necessary to enact effective media regulation.