Thank you.

Yes.

It is a nightmarishly difficult problem, it seems to me, but there's no doubt that once there's money to be made, then people are going to be much more, if I can put it this way, vulnerable to a system of outside scrutiny or monitoring, though albeit many ...

Simply commenting.

At what point does andrewmarr.com ranting on about this or that become big enough to be brought into the regulatory system, as it were?

Yes. And any regulatory system is going to find it very hard.

Absolutely.

I think just to complicate things further, if I may, I think what the world of the influential political blogger has done is introduced a new player into the system who isn't the full-time professional journalist with a press card working at Westminster under an editor and isn't ...

And it's a new place to build something.

Yes. Indeed. Indeed. But there is a gap. It's a difficult gap.

If it did no more than that, I would say that, as I say, I think newspapers are in a very, very weak state at the moment, most of them, and the thing that most editors fear above all is having to put a timely and proportionate apology into a ...

Indeed.

Sure.

Mm.

Yes.

Of course.

Indeed, indeed. It seems to me that the question there is twofold. The buy-in from the editors and the journalists who are going to be part of it, and their understanding of that, of the new regime. In other words, I think every newspaper culture is different, and these tend ...

It is, yes, the impartiality bit. And of course, you know, other requirements such as you must have more than one absolutely key source before you break a story, which I had difficulty with, because as a newspaper journalist, if I had a really good source, if I had the ...

The BBC have done it. I actually suspect the same is true of the other broadcasters as well, I don't know.

Coming from a newspaper background into this BBC world felt very strange to start with, because, really, every phrase that you use, every sentence, exactly how long you ...

I think it's a devastatingly good question, if I may say so, and I'm going to struggle to answer it, but let me try.

First of all, when it comes to my experience as a BBC journalist, I have to say that it's the BBC code of ...

Yes.

Yes.

Indeed.

It's purging. It's purging. Well, it's difficult to tell. Every case it different, isn't it? There have been cases of ministers who perhaps have been unfairly hounded out of a particular job simply because the media noise was too much and it just became -- they became ...

That's -- that is hard for me to answer. I think probably the absence of the negative coverage. It is a brutal thing when a minister is being assailed by the pack, and it goes on day after day and it's relentless.

I do think there is a case ...

Sure.

Yes.

Yes.

Mm.

Indeed, sir. In the end, one can't legislate for a perfect world in this and the sense of sort of self-respect of politicians on the one hand and quite strong internal cultures in newspapers on the other hand, where they -- you know, they really care about their relationship of ...

Yes. If I can give an example, without individual contacts, and probably a bit of wining and dining and drinking and so on, between political journalists and politicians, I don't think the public would have known about the difficulties in the Blair/Brown relationship for years and years and ...

Yes, yes. I think I come back to my original argument that in my view there ought to be a clear distinction made between proprietors and editors on the one hand and working day-to-day journalists who I'd be more concerned with on the other hand who ought to be ...

Yes.

Yes.

I think that's right, but I think in the end, and I'm talking about the world of newspapers, which is in retreat at the moment, and things will feel very different, I think, in the online world that's coming, but in the world of newspapers, in the ...

Yes, it does, but I think in both cases, once you start a general assumption that leading politicians must have every contact with a journalist logged, recorded and published, then very swiftly it won't be leading politicians, it will be the next layer down and the layer down after ...

It's not a terribly logical answer, I agree, sir, but I think once you start to push it down -- we see this in other areas too -- it quite quickly becomes a sort of general rule. If the minister -- if the Secretary of State has to have a lunch logged ...

No.

Well, I think -- I would have thought visits to the official residence of the Prime Minister, probably the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dorneywood and the Foreign Secretary, that would be reasonable. I think the public has the right to know who is being entertained perhaps over a weekend at those ...

I don't think there is -- I should emphasise that I perhaps didn't put that as well as I might have done. I'm really talking here about meetings between journalists and, for instance, the Prime Minister or the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I think to try and create ...

Yes.

No, and I mean I'm friendly with politicians, and many politicians I like and some I admire, but for me, contacts with politicians were really something that was part of my professional life. It was never easy because the time would often come when you had to in effect ...

Mm.

Yes.

Yes, I do.

Mm.

Sir, I think it's unfortunately my job at the BBC to criticise the Inquiry for whatever ideas it comes up with rather than offer my own.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yes.