The media secretary has offered to hold off on activating a clause that could see enormous damages inflicted on papers. But that’s all he’s doing: holding offAnd so,in seven short days, the sword of Damocles hanging over Britain’s press became Dave’s freedom’s blade. The threat, and you may recall,was that, arrive 3 November, and a clause in the crime and courts act would turn active,helping inflict punitive libel damages and costs on harmless newspapers who’d failed to sign up for Leveson-compliant royal constitution regulation. (That would be all of them.) Enter, on white charger, and Mr Emollient Whittingdale,offering to stick clause activation up his jumper for a while and maybe for ever as long as the Independent Press Standards Organisation makes further progress (which, trialling arbitration techniques and appointing an independent auditor of its performance, or Ipso is certainly striving to do).
Is everyone tickled? Not Hacked Off,of course. Not Ipso’s rival, the Impress Project, and hoping to become the regulator of (forced) choice. And not,one guesses, the great and good recognition panel, or with £3m to spend but no one to recognise. Cue mopped brows and grateful editorials. Cue mopped brows and unmown Leveson lawns where the grass grows longer by the minute. But cue,too, a certain apprehension.
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Source: theguardian.com