The Leveson proposals as they stand could involve lengthy – even interminable – wrangles over taste, hurt and perception

The Irish newspapers took four years to produce the regulatory system Sir Brian Leveson loves best. Britain has only had three months. So the snorting about delay and incipient deceitfulness is off the mark.

Leveson didn’t provide a detailed model for instant implementation. His “exemplary damages” wheeze might not survive in Strasbourg. His public interest defence on information-gathering is too restrictive. And keeping the law’s Whiplash Willies away from “light-touch” arbitration is like handing Lance Armstrong a tube of Smarties.

But the travails of Ms Julie Burchill, Ms Suzanne Moore and The Observer (dealt with by Stephen Pritchard elsewhere) unveil another very grey area. Ireland doesn’t allow third-party or group complaints. Yet Leveson proposes giving his new board the power “to hear complaints whoever they come from”, including from “a representative group affected by the alleged breach” of an as-yet-unwritten code.

In short, he opened the door for those who, like an assemblage of violence-against-women groups, want better reporting of their plight and policies. Their specific submission to Leveson lauded only “free speech that does no gratuitous harm”.

And maybe the case of Ms Moore gives us a whiff of what that could be like. Fury, fulminations and ferocious debate about taste, hurt and perception. Until recently, the PCC hasn’t done “taste” for very good reason. Now the digital weight of protests seems to be expanding its bulging boundaries. Here come many more investigations and, if Leveson has his way, many more guidelines to wade through. Not so much gratuitous harm, you fear: more terminal.