Afterword: Lessons of the Leveson Inquiry into the British Press

Abstract

Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, set up the Leveson Inquiry in July 2011 in response to widespread horror that the News of the World had hacked the mobile phone of the murdered Surrey school girl, Milly Dowler. The inquiry’s purpose was to review the conduct of the British press, although it would be hard to peruse the report delivered by Lord Justice Brian Leveson in November 2012 without being struck by how much it also concerns the conduct of the Metropolitan Police Service. Throughout its history, the Sunday tabloid that the budding Australian media magnate, Rupert Murdoch, acquired in 1969 thrived on crime stories; without close ties with the police it could scarcely have become what it long was: a byword for lurid sensationalism. Yet the relationship between the News of the World and Scotland Yard can never have been more collusive than during the paper’s latter years under Murdoch’s ownership, the period that was to culminate, in July 2011, with Murdoch’s ruthless closure of the 168-year-old British scandal sheet, which had become a toxic scandal in its own right.