Is it me, or has Lord Leveson proved his critics dead right

I suppose we shall have to take Lord Leveson’s word for it that he didn’t threaten to resign from his exciting inquiry. He says he didn’t, and that will have to be good enough for the likes of me. If I was an old school journalist worth his salt, I’d have hacked his lordship’s phone to find out exactly what he said to the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. It was reported at the weekend, by the Mail on Sunday, that back in February Leveson threatened to shut up shop and take his big briefcase home with him, so annoyed was he at comments made about his inquiry by the Education Secretary, Michael Gove. This was later denied.

Nonetheless, I’ve been told by one source who claims to be in the know that Leveson was ‘glued to the ceiling by an incandescent rage’ about the story and had been ‘biting off bits of furniture and spitting them out at people who came near, while growling in the manner of a lycanthrope’. I think this was not meant to be taken in an entirely literal manner, but was an overstatement for dramatic effect. More relevantly, I have heard it suggested that Leveson wished to haul the perpetrators before his little court and give them a roughing up, until he was persuaded that this might be counter-productive. Implausible nonsense, I thought, but phoned to check anyway. A spokesperson for his lordship told me that there had been a ‘brief discussion’ about the possibility of reconvening the inquiry to consider the offending article, but that this idea had been shelved because of the cost to the public exchequer of having to pay loads of lawyers to turn up again. So instead, I was told, Leveson will address the issue the next time the inquiry is in session.