Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations for reform of regulation of the press sparked widely-varying reactions among journalists, politicians, campaigners and victims of intrusion.
Civil liberties group Liberty - whose director Shami Chakrabarti served as an assessor in the inquiry team - welcomed the principal recommendation of a more robust and independent press self-regulator, but said it was unable to back the last-resort alternative of compulsory statutory regulation.
Ms Chakrabarti said: “Leveson’s main proposal makes sense for the public, press and politicians alike.
“The press sets up a robust body - independent of Government and serving editors - and earns legal protections from needless challenges in court. The public gets confidence of greater access to justice and redress when things go wrong.
“What nobody needs and Liberty cannot support is any last-resort compulsory statutory press regulation - coming at too high a price in a free society.”
Head of the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) Lord Hunt said: “I do not want the message to go out from this country that the UK is bringing in a press law but we do have to make a fresh start with a new body and that is what I’m going to reveal.
“I did sense that Brian Leveson wants the press now to get on with it. He embraced a free press. What we have to make sure now is the press do not let him down. There is a huge opportunity here and we must seize it.”
Former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley, who successfully sued the News Of The World for privacy damages over claims that he was involved in a “sick Nazi orgy”, said it would be “astonishing” if the Government did not implement Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations.
He said: “It certainly is a very thorough document and it’s in many respects better than one could have hoped.
“It would make the situation much better than it is now and what he has done is more or less give the press what the Hunt-Black proposals would want, but underpinning with a statutory to make sure there’s no backsliding and no cheating.
“The only real omission is that if you want to stop something coming out because you find that they are going to breach your privacy, you would still have to go to court to do that, which of course is very expensive.
“I think it would be astonishing if the politicians didn’t implement the report because no responsible politician could allow the current situation to continue.”
Former Labour deputy prime minister Lord Prescott, who won a payout over phone hacking by the News of the World, welcomed, as “a victim of our free press”, the inquiry’s “excellent” findings.
He said the report accepted the recommendations he had made to Lord Leveson’s inquiry but questioned if the findings would go the way of previous reports on reform of the press.
“Are you prepared to consider in the legislation that will come before this House a sunset clause that makes it clear, if they fail to carry out their promises, we have the authority in that Bill, to carry out a statutory framework?” he demanded.
Lord Strathclyde said Lord Prescott was right to say that Lord Justice Leveson had “comprehensively exposed a failure in the PCC which can no longer continue”.
Tory former lord chancellor Lord Mackay of Clashfern said there was a “unique opportunity” to go ahead with an “extremely well thought-out system for giving the press the right of self-regulation, which is seen to work in the public interest”.
He said: “I would have thought the sooner we can get all-party consent for this ... the principles and the essentials of the legislation can surely be put in place very quickly.
“We owe it to people to do this as quickly as possible to prevent this kind of thing happening again.”
Lord Strathclyde said there was now an opportunity for politicians to work together on a cross-party basis to “bring about some extremely good results as quickly and effectively as possible”.
Bob Satchwell, executive director of the Society of Editors, warned that detailed statutory underpinning of regulation could be dangerous.
He told Sky News: “What you can’t have is too much detail in any kind of statutory underpinning, that’s where the danger lies.
“Most politicians, once you give them a little nose into something, will try to find a very much wider thing down the line.
“We might have benign politicians now, but 10 years’ time? That’s the problem.”
Labour MP Chris Bryant, who was a victim of phone hacking, said: “The biggest condemnation in this document is of politics over the last 30 years, because Lord Leveson said we have all failed and sometimes we failed to act because we were too frightened about what would be written in newspapers about us personally or about our party politics.”
PA