Well, thank you very much. Thank you.

Yes.

Okay.

Because I'm tired, I wouldn't mind reading it, actually, seeing as it's in my statement. It's my conclusion. I just say:

"I don't want to see the end of popular print journalism. I wouldn't want a country that was fawning to power or success ...

There is one final point.

Yeah, well, I hope people read it.

No. I mean, it's a strange form of interview, in the sense that I wish I'd been able to read my two statements out loud first, because, you know, we haven't really -- it's all been me defending positions in them without anyone knowing what the statement ...

Yes. We sort of went over them. I give you -- well, paragraph 86, in a nutshell, it seems clear to me that it should be unacceptable and illegal to deprive a person of their fundamental human right to privacy unless there is a real public interest defence. It's not ...

Well, you know, you see them glamourising themselves as, you know: "We might be a bit naughty but we get the story", but when the story has been obtained by hacking the phone of a murdered school girl or of the family of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, I don ...

Yes.

That is what I'm saying. Yes, exactly that. I do believe that enshrined in our bill of rights, you know, article 8 is a person's basic expectation of a right to privacy, and I don't think that you should have to give that up just because you ...

Yeah, of course, that would be fine. Absolutely fine. But I'm talking here about intrusion, and I have heard the defence quite frequently from tabloid papers: "Oh, well, you know, if you have ever talked about your private life, then you have no defence, you have no right to ...

Yes.

Yeah.

I would argue that's another myth put about by tabloids. What made me attractive to other the filmmakers was that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" made gazillions at the box office. That's all they care about. After all, a couple of films later, as I say, I was ...

No. That is another --

No.

Yes, it's another very common defence of what I would call the privacy invasion industry; some people would call it at tabloid press. What I say is the myth is that people like me want to be in the papers, and need them, and therefore our objections to privacy ...

Okay.

I say that there are certainly cases where there is a public interest defence. If you're a politician who campaigns on a family values platform, then it's definitely a public interest to have his -- and he's being -- you know, having an extramarital affair or he likes to ...

I -- I.

If you establish a meaningful regulator, if you have your privacy abused or you're libelled, you should be able to go straight to the regulator and skip the whole court process, especially if you're not a person of means, it's a wonderful thing to be able to ...

I think it depends on that and on establishing a proper regulator.

Yes, I just mentioned that.

Yes. There's a lot of squealing, again from the tabloid press, about these injunctions and so on and they say it muzzles the press and it has a chilling effect, et cetera, and I just make the point, well, first of all, no one's taken a privacy case ...

Well, I mean I come to that sort of at the end of my statement, yes, that is when I say that I think there are midways that could make everyone happy.

The press is, after all, the only industry in this country that has a profound influence over other ...

There are forms of -- if you take at one end of the scale state regulation, and you take at the other end of the scale no -- well, self-regulation, there are various gradations in between, including what some might call co-regulation, which would be regulation by -- say a panel that both ...

You are, yes.

Sorry, say that again? You're actually on myth four, I think:

"Any attempt to regulate the press means we're heading for Zimbabwe."

Which is another of these arguments like "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" that we often hear, and I simply make the ...

Well, it is a commonly voiced opinion that you cannot in any way regulate or improve or legislate or -- for the worst practices of the worst of journalists in this country without damaging free speech, without muzzling proper journalism, and the metaphor that's endlessly bandied about is: be careful ...

Yes, and I'd just like to echo what I heard from one of the earlier witnesses, that given the cross-fertilisation of journalists in the tabloid world, it's highly unlikely that they only practise dark arts for one title. They were always swapping titles and I can't believe ...

Yes.

Yes, well, I did and I was wrong.

I'm sorry, yes.

Where, say, my phone is hacked but so is my assistant's, my -- you know, my brother's or my father's, whatever it might be. Innocent people having their privacy invaded just because they're in the -- it's collateral damage.

And then I talk about innocent people who ...

Yeah, I talk about particularly vulnerable people who have been victims of trauma, such as the Dowlers who we saw earlier today, or the victims of the London bombings or families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Then I talk about collateral damage.

Yes.

Yes. This is where I go through my ten myths.

But for the parts that are not based on misreporting, it is perfectly fine to hate me. I have become very accustomed to that. It's been extremely fashionable for a long time and that is what I expect in this country.

I haven't seen all of them, thank God, but I'm sure, as I said earlier -- you keep coming back to this point -- they are based largely on a lot of misreporting.

Mm-hm.

The visit to the baby and all that kind of -- didn't know the facts, and it is possible that as many of my friends, professors of journalism who have rang me up and said it's clearly a deliberate hatchet job because you're speaking against the tabloid press ...

Yeah, it's fine. It's sad that it's based on so much lazy reporting, you know.

Right. Well, that's fine.

Yeah.

I think that's right. There are certain pockets of quite toxic yellow journalism around the rest of the world, but on the whole, it's still done with a certain elegance, an elegance that we've lost in the last 30 years in this country.

I don't know the answer to your question, I'm afraid, in terms of international. All I can tell you is that not just in my opinion, but in the opinion of other people who are quite well-known around the world and who, for instance, sometimes do tours, publicity ...

Yes, yes.

That is true. That is true. But I think, if I'm right, in France there's various laws -- for instance, you can't take someone's picture in a public place, and that does give a much more humane, civilised existence to people in the public eye despite the ...

Yes. You're probably right. Or to somehow kill the market for those pictures. I think, you know, there would be no rogue paparazzi if there wasn't big national papers paying for their pictures, and so I'm not quite sure which end of that you attack first.