Leveson report suggests only minor changes for future mergers such as Murdoch empire’s BSkyB takeover bid

Lord Justice Leveson is highly cautious, even timorous, on what will be the key question for many of his readers, of how overweening power exercised by some media proprietors might be curbed.

He says politicians should be the ones to carry on deciding whether to intervene when they consider media plurality is threatened, rather than autonomous regulators: “It is in the nature of large media organisations that every one of us is exposed to their output on a regular basis and we all have views (and, in some cases, perhaps prejudices) that might affect such a decision if allowed to do so …

“It seems to me that those who argue that a public interest decision is rightly for a democratically-elected decision-maker are right. It is that person who is accountable to parliament and the electorate: that is the nature of our constitutional arrangements.”

All he recommends, for future media mergers, such as the Murdoch empire’s attempt to take total control of BSKyB, is a set of relatively minor improvements to transparency during the process: “The secretary of state should consult relevant parties as to the arguments for and against a referral, and should be required to make public his reasons for reaching a decision one way or the other.”

Leveson concedes that this might not appear to make much change, but he says this would make it easier to challenge poor decisions in court by judicial review: “It will ensure both the highest standards of probity and that a very rigorous test is applied to the reasoning behind the eventual position.”

He says it is “unarguable” that there needs to be more scope for the media regulator Ofcom to look regularly at plurality problems, and not merely when a merger or a takeover is occurring, but adds ” the precise mechanism for doing so is essentially a technical issue on which the inquiry is not best placed to reach a definitive conclusion”.

Anyone who thought Leveson would take a hatchet to the former culture secretary Jeremy Hunt for his behaviour over the Sky bid has had their hopes dashed.

Although he describes the Sky bid events as “an illuminating case study” that would cause a perception of bias, Leveson analyses the manoeuvrings over the ultimately withdrawn bid to take over 100% control of BSKyB in a way that broadly supports the already-presented government version of events.

He does not back the claim that there was a secret deal in which Murdoch’s papers would support the Conservatives in return for explicit commercial concession.

He largely exonerates Hunt from actually biased behaviour, and merely accuses him of a lack of supervision of his special adviser, and an “unwise” failure to spell out how closely he had been communicating with James Murdoch before being given the job of deciding on the Sky bid.

Leveson accepts the official line that Hunt’s junior special adviser, Adam Smith, who subsequently resigned, merely went too far out of inexperience and allowed himself to be ensnared into “inappropriate” email and text correspondence with the lobbyist, Frederic Michel, who was carrying out a “charm offensive” on behalf of News Corp.

This left Smith exchanging messages that appeared to accept “Mr Michel’s use of the language of common cause and conspiracy”.

“When faced with the intimacy, charm, volume and persistence of Mr Michel’s approaches, Mr Smith was put in an extremely difficult position.”

He got “way to close” to the lobbyist, “ultimately, as I have concluded, probably passing on confidential information about Government thinking which should never have been imparted to News Corp.”

But Leveson accepted: “There is much to say by way of mitigation for Mr Smith. He was inexperienced, had been involved in government for a matter of months and had never before been involved in (even if he had ever heard about) a quasi-judicial process. He did not receive what was to be, for him, sufficiently clear or detailed guidance”.

Leveson contents himself with a dry hint that the official version of events may not, in all eyes, be wholly credible: “I must admit to finding it surprising that Mr Smith, who had worked for Mr Hunt so closely and for so long should have kept him unsighted on the way in which he was performing what he saw to be his duty; that, as I understood it, was the role of a special adviser – to be the ‘eyes and ears’ of his principal. Both men, however, make it clear that Mr Hunt was unaware of the nature, and extent of his contact with Mr Michel.”