CENTRE POINT

You can slam one manhole cover shut, but the force of the sewage will push up somewhere

SIMON JENKINS

Can nothing be done about the British press? The answer is easy. Nothing, not even after a week as dire as this one. Noth- ing could have been done about the idiotic treatment of David Mellor, nothing about the Guardian's Aitken letter peccadillo, nothing about the renewed hounding of Camilla Parker Bowles. The public and MPs can whine and whinge and call down the wrath of God, but there is nothing that can be done.

`I am all for the freedom of the press,' says one of Tom Stoppard's characters, 'it's the newspapers I can't stand.' The line gets an easy laugh. People usually hate what newspapers write about themselves. That is why newspapers sell so well: they do other people down. Nothing sets a reader up for the day quite like seeing somebody else done down. Newspapers are packaged schadenfreude.

British papers are the best nuisance-mak- ers in the world. They strip the clothes off the rich and famous, set them in the stocks and pelt them with any filth that comes to hand. When I was on the Calcutt Commit- tee (on newspapers and privacy) I was sur- prised that so many editors even bothered to defend their more outrageous intrusions as being 'in the public interest'. To them the phrase was tautologous: whatever sells must be in the public's interest or it would not sell.

Nobody can grasp the full potency of press intrusion who has not seen the face of a tabloid news editor as a fresh target stum- bles into his sights. The look is not of con- cern over possible wrongdoing or hypocrisy, or for the nation's security, or even a sadness at the personal misery about to be unleashed. The look is of ecstasy. The cry is, 'Great!' Another round of catch-as- catch-can begins.

This month, roughly a dozen MPs have been caught dodging either their wives or the MPs' interests register. They are there- fore again demanding curbs on the press. Roger Gale, Edwina Currie and others have pointed out that self-regulation has failed to curb misbehaviour (how unlike the self-regulation of our own dear MPs!). They want the new Press Complaints Com- mission to be given something vaguely called 'teeth', or be supplanted by stringent new laws.

There is no doubt that the British press is passing through one of its periodic phases of dementia. Tory MPs should understand why. It is the sign of an industry in rude free-market health. What is causing them such anguish are merely symptoms of their beloved competition, deregulation, capital- ism red in tooth and claw.

Fleet Street at present is a case history in micro-economics. Britain has more nation- al daily papers than at any time since the war, more than any other western country. Until 1985, the press operated a de facto cartel, but with the proprietors handing over most — sometimes all — of their prof- its to the print workers. This deterred new entrants and entrenched the market shares of existing players.

In 1985 came Wapping. Hand-outs to the labour unions abruptly stopped. Unit costs plummeted across the industry and profits soared. New titles came (and some went) for the first time in half a century. For almost ten years the producer cartel held. Rivalry between newspapers was first expressed in a rash of staff poaching, bingo games and cheap offers from French hotels. This year the last wall gave way and cover prices tumbled. The gains of the Wapping revolution were at last passed on to the readers.

One thing that fierce competition tends to erode — as businessmen, lawyers and politicians will attest — is professional ethics. Codes of practice and charters of good conduct vanish in the hurricane. We might regard the details of David Mellor's marriage as private under the terms of the press code, as were the personal liaisons of the Chief of the Defence Staff and the phone calls of the Prince and Princess of Wales. In each case, an editor performed the ritual of donning a fig-leaf and claiming that national security was his sole concern. Such excuses are insults to public intelli- gence. The fact was that no regulator was ever likely to stop editors picking such juicy fruit from the tree of human unhappiness.

The issue of press and privacy thus pre- `We'll get you the best money justice can buy.' sents a paradox. Self-regulation does not work in any sense that has meaning. Yet as countless reports from Younger to Calcutt have concluded, legal sanctions would not work either. Something must be done, yet nothing can be done. Fleet Street behaviour appears to be nature not nur- ture. In Sir Bernard Ingham's apt phrase, you can slam one manhole cover shut, but the force of the sewage will push up some- where else.

I incline to the anarchic thesis, put recently by Lord Lester, that the outra- geousness of the British press is the neces- sary obverse of Britain's incestuous, cen- tralised and corporatist politics. It is the antidote to political tribalism.

That leaves the Press Complaints Com- mission trying to stack leaves in the current storm. Its best hope can only lie with the moral authority of Lord McGregor's suc- cessor as chairman in damning press mal- practice. I believe words have become an underrated weapon of public policy. No punishment meted out to 'Tiny' Rowland was more damaging than Edward Heath's dismissal of him as 'the unacceptable face of capitalism'; nothing did Robert Maxwell more harm in his life than the inspector's phrase 'unfit to run a public company'. Such words express public abhorrence and relieve public anger, even if they are with- out further sanction. In days gone by, a condemnation from Lord Franks made his victims shake in their shoes, be they bankers, spies or heads of Oxford colleges.

Public life today offers few dignitaries of such authority, which is why we have such frequent recourse to legal sanctions when we think self-regulation is failing. There is no Franks, Shawcross, Devlin or Denning to whom professions or institutions can turn as monitors of their behaviour. There are no lofty heads girt with unimpeachable integrity whose good opinion would be wel- comed and bad opinion feared.

I cannot believe, in all seriousness, that the mooted name of Lord Wakeham, how- ever much it might appeal to Tory back- benchers, fits this bill, as chairman of the PCC. The only name I can offer the PCC is the outgoing Archbishop of York. He, at least, would put some moral firepower into its public statements.

Simon Jenkins writes for the Times. His col- lection of essays, Against the Grain, is pub- lished this week by John Murray.