Oh What A Muddle!

Raymond Snoddy on the confusion of conflicting and overlapping investigations. The select committee may have now had its (divided) say, but we still have Ofcom, Leveson, the police… and the forgotten Communications Green Paper to come.

Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to run an international company such as News Corporation.

This must be true because Tom Watson MP says so and persuaded four other Labour members and the single Lib Dem on the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee to back his amendment containing the damning words.

While the phone hacking scandal was raging and the committees and the inquiries were cranking up their activities, members of the public were however taking a different – though inevitably unfocussed stance. As BSkyB announced yesterday, in the nine months to September a net 78,000 new households signed up for the company’s services taking the total to 10.55 million. At the same time operating profit rose by 25 per cent to £752 million.

Profit does not excuse immorality or illegality. But we can say at the very least that consumers are insufficiently exercised by the events at the News of the World to want to punish BSkyB, even though most must know it is a company controlled by Rupert Murdoch.

In the US, where Rupert Murdoch’s reputation is rather different than in the UK, the work of Tom Watson had its inevitable consequence – News Corp’s share went up. A market has spoken and the company was worth $1 billion more than it was before the works of Tom Watson were announced.

It is already a commonplace acceptance that the otherwise diligent work of the Select Committee has been undermined by Watson and his chums deciding to go beyond fairness, balance or what can be proved. As a result we have division and an element of derision.

Rupert Murdoch may indeed have been guilty of “wilful blindness” and both he and his son certainly stand condemned of appalling standards of governance and woeful incompetence. Yet if competence alone was the test of fitness to run a company you could rule out half the chief executives in the FTSE 100. Here we have the subjective ruling of unfitness to run an international company that goes beyond the evidence and even the remit of the Select Committee.

Surely one of the main issues that would undermine such fitness would be if the main individuals at the top had been charged and found guilty of a serious criminal offence. Neither is true – at least for the moment – in the case of Rupert or James Murdoch. But the activities of Tom Watson and the single vote majority for the harsh line are more serious for another underlying reason.

They have added to the growing sense of muddle and overlapping jurisdictions and regulations that now beset the entire phone-hacking affair ever since Prime Minister David Cameron set the ball rolling by setting up the Leveson inquiry with very wide terms of reference.

No-one asked the Media Select Committee to come up with an over-arching and ultimately meaningless nostrum about a company not based in the UK. The finding could though cut across and confuse the more precise work of Ofcom, the communications regulator, already looking at whether News Corp is fit and proper to hold a broadcasting licence. That is a meaningful question to ask, which can be determined by previously agreed rules and precedents rather than through a spirit of antipathy and revenge.

At first glance it is difficult to see anything in either of the Murdochs’ behaviour as a broadcaster that would justify the extreme sanction of removing a broadcasting licence. Such a decision if taken would find its way very quickly to the High Court. We now have also have a splendid muddle over who should determine the culpability or otherwise of Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt in the case of the now withdrawn News Corp bid for the shares in BSkyB it did not already own. The Prime Minister’s decision to use the Leveson inquiry as a forum to, in effect, decide Hunt’s guilt or innocence at least in terms of evidence-taking, has placed Lord Leveson in a difficult position. As he has made clear, his inquiry is looking into the standards and ethics of the media not ruling on the future of Cabinet ministers.

Despite the muddle the Culture secretary could be in for a torrid time in claiming that Adam Smith was a rogue special advisor and that he had no idea what Smith was up to. You can just hear Robert Jay QC the Leveson inquiry’s chief counsel asking where exactly was Mr Smith’s office and how many policy-making meetings did he attend. The answer of course is lots and his office was the next one to Jeremy Hunt’s at DCMS.

If, after Hunt’s evidence to Leveson, Cameron decides to refer the matter to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, will the evidence-taking and the questioning have to start all over again, or will Lord Leveson be the default judge of Hunt’s future whether he likes it or not?

Leveson looks increasingly as if he is the underlying cause of the non-appearance of the rapidly disappearing Green Paper on Communications. It was promised by the end of last year. Then Easter. Now it’s “soon” or at least it was before Hunt’s latest difficulties. Presumably we must now wait to see whether Hunt is cleared or not before publication with at least the possibility that it might not be Jeremy Hunt’s Green Paper after all should it ever appear. If matters continue to slip then it would be worth waiting to see what Lord Leveson recommends so that necessary legislative proposals are included for discussion.

A Green Paper when? Next year? More muddle.

Then to add to the gaiety of nations we have yet to see the effect of criminal prosecutions on both Leveson and the Government’s legislative timetable. Lord Leveson now believes the second phase of his inquiry – into phone hacking – may no longer be necessary or justified because of the time that will elapse through police investigations.

Overall it adds up to a fine muddle with an impact that could last for years, and David Cameron was the original creator of chaos.