Thank you.

No, that's fine. Thank you.

It is. It makes it very difficult.

There is absolutely both. I mean, on Sarah's law, for example, although many people questioned the mechanic -- and I completely understand that, it was controversial -- the fact is that it was again -- I put a piece of information in front of the readers that I found astonishing when I ...

That's correct, but I really do believe -- I know I keep going on about it, but it's the ordinary people's views that make a newspaper powerful, and if I can just give you one example, where the Daily Mirror ran a very good campaign that chimed with ...

Yes, I do.

Well, we didn't, actually, but yes.

'80?

I have never known anything like the anti-Sky bid alliance and indeed our natural reaction to it -- but I've never heard of every media group in the country and British Telecom and the BBC getting together against one commercial bid.

And that would be -- that's correct in terms of business and commercial interests, which is, I think, where the coal manufacturing comes in. All I would say -- I'm not disagreeing with that point -- is that from a journalist's perspective, you're not trying to get to see ...

I could understand your point very clearly, sir, because I think in every walk of life and every kind of relationship you have, there are subtle pressures. I think that's human nature. And it is up to individuals' conduct and how you respond to those pressures. So I accept ...

I'm talking about the Ministerial Code, which is changing all the time, and it changed in July last year.

Well, I think -- I think on the -- on the politicians, I do think much has been made of cosy relationships and informal contact, and I believe that if journalists meet politicians, the -- it's going to be incredibly hard to be -- the journalist to be transparent about that or be ...

Well, look, for a start, I consider myself to be a journalist and therefore I -- as I said to Mr Jay, it would be, I think the height of hypocrisy for me to complain. However, I have had those complaints from people in my career as journalism and I've ...

Well, no. Of course I think they're important. I mean, I'm happy to discuss them, but just for the purposes of this module, which was meant to be about the discussion of the appropriate relationship between press and politicians, I haven't gone into them in my witness ...

I don't think it's fair and I don't think any journalist in the room would agree with the final summing up of that statement, where you say the story's more important than the truth.

We're in an Inquiry. So you put a personal few things -- my personal alchemy, my -- did Rupert Murdoch and I swim? Where did I get the horse from? Did Mr Murdoch buy me a suit? The list is endless and I've had to refute a lot of those ...

Yes, but we're not in a tabloid newsroom now, are we?

And the Sun.

Well, Mr Jay, today you've put to me quite a few, shall we say, gossipy items, for want of a better word --

Yes, I do.

I think that -- and you've discussed this in the first module of the Inquiry -- that when a newspaper gets it wrong -- one of the biggest complaints I used to get, not necessarily about my own newspaper but about the press in general, was the prominence of apologies when an ...

Yes.

Yes.

What paragraph, sorry?

I do have some regrets about the campaign, particularly the list of convicted paedophiles that we put into the paper, because I felt that we'd made some mistakes by just going on an appearance on the Sex Offenders Act, which wasn't necessarily the right criteria. However, I still ...

Mr Jay, you seem to have taken the opinion of -- the Guardian, I think, had that at the time. I disagree with you. It is not my opinion, and I'm not going to agree with you.

No, and you have the benefit of hindsight, which I didn't have at the time. I was merely constructing a very bold campaign in order to change the sex offenders act of 1997.

No, I won't agree because I did not predict there was going to to be a riot in Paul's Grove and I didn't predict that somebody, a member of the public, would mistake a paedophile for a paediatrician. I don't think anybody could have predicted that.

No.

Well, if you published it on the basis that you knew that that would happen, yes. But it was not the intention. The incidents I can explain, as I've tried to. The fact is that it was a very serious -- there were very serious loopholes that needed to be ...

No, I think the -- I don't think anyone could have predicted the paediatrician situation. And secondly, I think on Paul's Grove estate, I think the residents were quite shocked to discover that Victor Burnett had been living there unchecked when his last words in prison were: "I'm ...

It does, sir, yes.

There were two that are written about.

Well, actually before we did it, having looked at Megan's law, there was very, very limited -- there is very limited vigilanteism. I wasn't predicting those reprisals and I felt it was the best way to highlight the central point of the campaign.

Because in 2000 when we did it -- and I think it was over a period of just two weeks -- it was a way of highlighting the central issue of the campaign to try and explain to the readers the huge gap between what they thought was the situation and what ...

Because it was -- it was the point about information. When Sarah Payne went missing, I was surprised that the police team around the inquiry were pretty sure who they thought the perpetrator might be because he was a convicted paedophile living in the community, who had just been released, having ...

Because I felt that although there were some aspects to the campaign that -- and there's always risk with any kind of public interest journalism and there's always risk with campaigns -- although there were some issues with the campaign, I was -- I think the mechanic, in a way to ...

Well, I disagreed with it at the time.

Yes, it was.

Correct.

Yes.

You said "sole" and I just wanted to convey -- I'm sure, you know, you're pretty au fait now with the workings of a newsroom, but it is important to understand the collective discussions that go on.

So if, perhaps, there had been no trust broken between them and their constituents or -- where in fact, I think you discussed yesterday, although that story was published, maybe George Osborne could have argued that it was before he became an MP. I mean, each editor's judgment is their ...

Well, I think there are many stories that newspapers haven't run about personal circumstances about public figures.

When there didn't seem to be a public interest in doing so.

Not necessarily, no.

I think I was referring there more to campaigns, which I discuss a lot in my witness statement.

Well, that is a role of an editor. An editor's judgment is part of their -- is a big part of their role.

Ultimately, everything that's published in the paper is the editor's responsibility, yes.