The transcripts of the official inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. More…
No, sir.
Yes, I heard that debate and discussion you had earlier. Just to clarify my advertising point, the way that newspaper advertising broadly works at the moment is that newspaper groups use this currency, whether it's through ABC or NRS or some other currencies, which is almost a stamp of ...
I don't mean to imply that at all. I understand the PCC up until this point to have been a mediator with regulatory reputation, and I think there is now -- I don't disagree with the emerging consensus of the need for the industry to have a regulator, a ...
How would you require the son of PCC to get that control?
Correct, correct, and I think there my thinking is focused really on following the money. Businesses tend to make decisions where the money increases rather than decreases, and logic would dictate that if this son of PCC was able to control the currency, the advertising currency that is so vital ...
I hope this is of some use, but I would say four things, I think. They may or may not be of use.
Firstly, I completely agree with your judgment not to rush to judgment, I mean, in terms of how to change, since it's incredibly complicated, and we ...
That's very kind. I do, and in my statement I make some references to some ideas, but that was in August, and my thinking has built on that since then. I know you asked people to go away and think about --
Yes.
I'm in danger of repeating myself, but I will repeat myself, which is that -- I think it's clause 14 of the PCC code, for me, as I've lived with all my professional drear, is as much about protecting my own sources as it is for protecting other ...
I can't assist you with that. As you know, core to any journalist -- and I'm included -- is the protection of journalistic sources, whether they're my sources or someone else's sources, and any way that I answer that question, helpful as I would like to be, would ...
Right?
I have no idea. As you said earlier in your question, I left the Telegraph in May 2010, so I've no idea if the Telegraph conducted such an investigation.
I do.
Yes. May, actually, I think.
That is correct.
I don't know the answer to that question. In line with other big stories that I've been involved with, one would expect circulation to go up, but at the heart of the MPs' expenses story was a desire to ensure that loyal Telegraph readers -- and you've already ...
I don't know, but I wouldn't agree with the premise of the question that the money paid was an investment. It was a way to ensure that the readers of the Telegraph and the broader British public were able to find out about the profound wrongdoing in the ...
I wouldn't agree with that. I'd say that the reason that we did it was because ultimately I was obliged -- I saw it as my ethical obligation to bring this profound wrongdoing at the heart of the House of Commons into the public domain, and remain passionately of ...
No, I wouldn't, and I suppose some might say that it represents one of the most important bits of public service and public interest journalism in the post-war period that unveiled and revealed such wrongdoing in Parliament that the speaker had to resign and many MPs followed after him ...
Yeah, mistakes are always an issue, and I hated it when we made errors, and I hated it even more in relation to this story, but I will say in defence of what we did that the mistake ratio here is reasonably low and I remain hugely proud of -- given ...
Apologies, yes. But the second phase I think is really quite important. So I felt comfortable with my negotiating team going to meet the source, and the source was really quite interesting because he wanted some money, which was not unexpected, he wanted some legal protection, but what was really ...
Yes. A fair point.
I don't know what the legal advice would be, but my first port of call would have been to get legal advice and --
I would obviously have got legal advice, as I got throughout this process, and I would like to think that we would have been able to find a way to bring this very important information to the readers' attention without breaking the law.
Stage one was I was told by colleagues that they had been approached by an intermediary on behalf of a source to say they had got four years' worth of MPs' data copied onto a disk. Obviously, the first question was: could we go ahead and negotiate with that source ...
Yes. I was concerned from the very beginning that it was a hoax. I used to work, as you referred to earlier, at the Sunday Times, when many years previously the Hitler diaries hoax took place, and the ghost of that particular situation still rose around the Sunday Times newsroom ...
That's right, yeah.
Yes. I mean, when a fraud hits a big company, they will often engage the services of a reputable investigations unit in order to help the company find out who did what when, and I would have expected my reporters involved in covering those types of stories to have engaged ...
Right.
I'm saying that. I'm saying that -- and it always annoys the reporter as well. They always go storming out of your office, and at the end of the day, that has to be an editor's right, to say, "It just doesn't feel right. I can't ...
Yeah.
Although it may rule out the need for lawyers, which may be troubling, or not, but I just think it would be wrong not to make it clear how important the feel is in the trade in which I've worked for the last 20 years.
No, I'd probably say it's the first two primarily. But I think -- the mistakes that I've made in my career, and there have been several, and they are numerous, have come about when I haven't followed my instinct, and that instinct can only be described as ...
I'm not sure about the third one. The emotional one wasn't necessarily --
One can take as many steps as one can to make scientific what is a creative process. Editors start each day with a blank bit of paper that they have to fill with vibrant, dynamic journalism by the end of the day, compliant with the law, code, spirit of the ...
Well, in practice, it's exactly as I state there, that it's something that any editor will ask of him or herself on a regular basis, and they should and will, I'm sure, also ask that of senior colleagues. It speaks to the judgment that's at the ...
Mm.
Yes. No, that's correct.
Yes. The key roles of the editor were really fundamentally around what to publish and what not to publish in the papers and online, around people issues that we talked about, and making sure we're getting the best out of our people, and also to ensure that the budget ...
Could I just highlight one point here, which is that the concept of the independent force in the newsroom. This structure, my belief is, is quite or was quite unusual, where the editor didn't have these functions reporting to him or her. So it's something that was there ...
Well, ultimately it would be the editor or editor in-chief, with heads of department making recommendations. And yes, you're right, there was quite a radical infusion of new blood into the Telegraph during my time there, where we tried to combine the best of the best from around Fleet ...
It would be a panel of senior editorial people. In my day, if I can recall correctly -- but this may not be entirely accurate -- it was two colleagues, Richard Preston and Simon Heffer, who brought their recommendation to me.
Uh ... younger. Even that's not necessarily correct. But graduate trainees, if one can call them that.
I was intimately involved in that process with senior colleagues. It was one of the main ways we were going to get replenishment of the gene pool, so we took it incredibly seriously ...
I'm not sure I'd agree with the interpretation of "the bottom". I mean, some of our best people very quickly accessed great work, did great work at the Telegraph right from the very beginning. So I mean, one of the key people in the MPs' expenses story was ...
Yes, and training was -- there's two issues here. We've already talked about the need for new media training and every colleague was given that opportunity, but there's also a need for ongoing training and professional development and core journalistic skills. So we were trying to really create ...
