Baroness Peta Buscombe, the newish boss of the Press Complaints Commission, made an unfortunate choice over the timing of her first set-piece gig. Last April, after much searching, she was appointed to the PCC Chair after a string of rumpuses had been mismanaged by her predecessor, renowned downhill banana-skin skier, Sir Christopher Meyer, since when she has pragmatically maintained an almost undetectable profile. She must have told her colleagues and members of the commission that she’d like to take a little time to bed into the job and learn what it was about before delivering her mission statement.  
The occasion chosen for this formal spout was the annual conference of the Society of Editors last weekend, and it was bad luck for her that it happened so soon after the body she heads had loudly hammered in one of the last few nails needed to seal its own coffin.
Only a week before, she’d put her name to one of the most pusillanimous, cringe-making, Murdoch-arse-licking reports that the PCC has delivered to date, unequivocally supporting the cabal of evil, mendacious men who run – or, in the case of Stuart Kuttner, used to run – the News of the World, while at the same time trying desperately to rubbish the irrefutable and damning evidence of an investigative reporter on a paper that still has an interest in delivering the truth – evidence which, when offered to members of the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee, left them in no doubt that they were being lied to. 
(I’ve previously referred more than once to the spectacle of former Screws editor, Andy Coulson leafing through a copy of the paper, telling his questioners that he has no recollection whatever of a story, flagged on the front page of an issue of the paper that he’d edited, occupying the whole of Page 7, depicting a verbatim transcript of a message left by one prince on another prince’s voicemail, knowing that not a single person in the Wilson Room in Portcullis House, or viewing the session on Parliament TV, or in the evening news broadcasts would believe him, a which point you had to conclude that here is a youngish man who sees his whole future in jeopardy if he breaks and admits to a scintilla of knowledge of the phone-hacking that was involved in acquiring the story.)
   So, at this inauspicious moment in the PCC’s shameful career, the week after it had blatantly rallied round to uphold the obvious untruths of all the senior staff at the News of the World and ex-News International Chairman, Les Hinton, Baroness Buscombe chose to deliver a dog’s dinner. Her speech, empty of wit or erudtion was carefully – and irrelevantly – implanted with a “fuck”, ( “Peta Buscombe? Who the fuck is he?”), just to let the hard men know what a ballsy gal she is. She devoted a lot of it to party politics, MPs’ expenses, Lords’ reform and what it’s like being a woman in a man’s world. Her views on the function of her new body were expressed in a torrent of weasel words and Dacre-speak about the State ‘spying’ on citizens and ‘terrorising’ parking offenders, and the sanctity of press ‘freedom’, dutifully regurgitating the tabloid mantra that if papers weren’t able to tell stories about the private lives of famous people, the public would be deprived of a basic human right. She offered a little moan about PC gone mad, asking, ‘Whatever happened to common sense and a sense of proportion?’, and suggested that people were blind to put faith in laws and regulation – for, ‘as Gibbon pointed out, “Laws rarely prevent what they forbid”,’ an argument sometimes out forward for the dismantling of the whole penal code (though not usually by Conservatives).
   She told editors that Simon Cowell had successfully used the PCC to give him freedom from intrusive paparazzi, although he could have afforded to go to the courts if he’d wanted. She may have forgotten that only last month, Max Clifford was seen on clips from the documentary film, ‘Starsuckers’, saying that Cowell had been paying him a large retainer for several years, just to keep his name out of the papers. Or perhaps, as the film shows how easy it is to sell totally fictitious stories to most of the tabloids, her paymasters forbade her to see it.
   It was a feeble performance by a person who seems to have no clear concept of her function, which will only hasten the demise of this doomed organisation. MPs and even some serious-minded journalists are realistic enough and, in the case of MPs, brave enough to face down Murdoch and Dacre and accept at last that the concept of self-regulation by an industry that includes publications like the News of the World, the Sun, the Daily Star, the Express and the Daily Mail is not a feasible option. Next year should at last see moves towards establishing an independent, statutory body with quasi-legal powers to curb the excesses of the Shag Rags and their tawdry hacks, while making Britian a cleaner place to live.

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