I am grateful to the noble Lord, who obviously knows a great deal about the matter—more than I do. I still think that we should question the ability for this to happen in the future. Surely the whole point of the Leveson inquiry was to tighten things up so that this would not happen so much. When I listen to people talking about what happened to them and how they felt that they had very
little recourse—although they took civil action and some of them won—I accept that newspapers shut down, but my goodness, perhaps they should have done. These things are right.
In listening to the debate, I was very impressed by the speech of the noble Lord, Lord McNally. It is not that I do not believe in the press—believe me, I think that the press does a wonderful job, by and large—but even those of us who are involved in doing wonderful jobs do so because we can look at ourselves and say, “We got this wrong”. That is what I have not heard enough of. My noble friend Lady Hollins is having a rather tricky time; she is up against some big guns.
What do the future victims have if they do not have recourse to law—if they believe that Leveson was the answer and we gradually remove most of his recommendations, which is what we seem to be doing? Perhaps noble Lords are right; perhaps in law we should be getting rid of them, but I am worried that the public will begin to think, “What are these inquiries? Why does the status quo always remain exactly the same?”. That is why I wanted to speak up for my noble friend Lady Hollins. We must think a bit more about people whose lives are sometimes ruined just by innuendo. As we have heard, they might get a tiny apology at the bottom of the page, but the damage is done—and it can terrible.