I found it very interesting.

Is that it?

Mm.

I'm afraid I'm not an expert --

Well, that has great attractions, but that is also one of the attractions of the PCC to us and, to be honest, to complainants as well, that it's a cheaper and quicker way of achieving a result than going through the courts. But it's not a cheaper and ...

Mm.

I think this is a point open to debate, and, as I said earlier, the policy of the PCC has varied over the years on this issue, but currently, rightly or wrongly, they tend to take the view that a complainant has a choice of either taking legal action or ...

Yes. I mean, we're not dealing with criminal matters here, but --

Yes. And there certainly have been -- I've been involved in cases where we have -- we have dealt with both a PCC complaint and a legal complaint. But the PCC process at the moment under the present constitution is a voluntary one, if you like, and some newspapers, if an ...

It has happened. The policy of the PCC at the moment is that if people prefer to go down the legal route, they tell them that, "Well, that's fine, but you go down the legal route".

Well, it has --

Because in my view, and the PCC has sort of -- it's slightly varied its policy on this over the years. But you should not -- it's a sort of double jeopardy thing. You should not be simultaneously being sued and have to fight a PCC complaint.

Yes. I mean, the McCanns chose not to use the PCC. They actually were in the rather odd situation of going to the then chairman of the PCC and asking his advice, and he advised them, for whatever reason, to go down the legal route.

Mm.

Yes, I think you will be.

But the PCC does deal with a very large number of complaints where people are very happy with the outcome, and the majority of these are from people who are not celebrities, are not politicians and are not people who, through no fault of ...

That sometimes happens. I mean, the -- sometimes when there are third-party complaints -- I mean, these are matters, really, for the director of the PCC, but they do sometimes go to -- if a story has run, I mean the Stephen Gately case, with the Daily Mail, where there were a lot ...

Well, because if you -- people don't always want to complain.

Well, we get a lot of third party complaints.

I can give you the figures, but a lot of them are inadmissible because --

The PCC receives about 5,000 complaints a year.

Well, when you were talking about the public, I thought you meant the public at large.

They're people who have been involved in major stories and have clearly been on the receiving end of stories which shouldn't have been written.

Well, you say that, but you've heard from a lot of high profile celebrities. They're not the public.

They might be, but nevertheless the -- for any system of regulation to succeed, the people who are being regulated have got to feel that the people making the judgments have a complete understanding of the industry in which they work.

The positive thing about the present system is that when ...

Well, you have to put that out of your mind. Doctors sit on the GMC --

I actually don't think the relationship is too cosy. I think some the people who have made that comment have made it on the assumption that the majority of the Commission are editors, which they aren't.

I sit through Commission meetings. Editors are very often harder on other ...

And Daily Mail complaints.

Mm.

I think many will be aware there's a proposal that membership of the PCC should be put on a contractual basis, which I think would make it a lot more difficult for individual publishers to pull out of it. It still does depend on publishers joining voluntarily in the ...

Yes. I sit on the Reform Committee of the Press Complaints Commission, so I've given a fair amount of thought to this. I don't want to pre-empt what I hope will be the reaction of the industry as a whole, but I think it's very clear to ...

In a small number of cases. I mean, the use of him became much less frequent after February 2004.

Yeah, I think they were later 2005, but he -- apart from two payments, which we, I'm afraid, can't explain, apart from those two, we stopped using him in September 2004.

Yes.

I simply don't recall, I'm afraid.

It is to secure the future of the newspaper in a very, very difficult environment. I've seen how changes in technology and in people's habits can turn newspapers from very successful, highly profitable operations within the space of no more than four or five years into loss-making, struggling ...

Newspapers are inevitably hierarchical organisations. It can't be otherwise because the decision-making process has to be very quick and very precise. I am aware that I am, if you like, a suburban chap with a family, and the newspaper represents the things that interest me, and I hope they ...

Well, I've been a journalist for 38 years and I've never had higher ambition than to produce the best possible newspaper for the greatest number possible of people. I think our role is to inform, as accurately as we possibly can, to surprise, to entertain and campaign, and ...

My policy is to have perfectly cordial relationships with politicians, but to try and keep the newspaper completely independent of both parties, all parties, and certainly not to, as you might say, get into bed with individual politicians.

Apart from party conferences, I don't think I've ever been out to dinner with a politician.

I generally go to two out of three of the party conferences and have meetings with as many senior politicians as I can cram into 48 hours. Apart from that, I don't meet them very often.

Yes.

I can't remember the exact timing, but it was around that time that the tone of the coverage began to change and people's perceptions began to change.

Yes.

Yes.

They gave it a great deal of coverage, more than I would have thought was warranted. I'm sure they'll be able to explain to you why they covered it in the way they did.

I mean, I -- it certainly reached a point -- I'm not referring here directly ...

And it's possible our coverage just differed in tone slightly from other newspapers.

We covered it, but we were not the subject of any complaint from the McCanns.

Yes.

Probably the best answer I can give to that question is to tell you that in the last year only three stories we published gave a noticeable increase in circulation. One was the royal wedding, one was the Japanese tsunami and one was a particularly unpleasant and tragic crash on ...

There were a series of emails and phone calls between the PCC and Lord Mandelson until the end of October, when he indicated that he didn't want to pursue it. They asked for written confirmation of that, which they haven't received, but in the absence of that, the ...