As trailed on Coffee House over the past few days, Nick Clegg used his own separate Commons statement to declare his support for the statutory underpinning of the new independent press regulator. He said that nothing in the debate that he had heard so far suggested to him that there was a better system of regulation than the one before MPs today.
‘The long grass is the last place that this problem should end up in,’ he said, adding: ‘I am convinced that he has made a case for legislation.’
The Deputy Prime Minister said he acknowledged that ‘we now need to show how that can be done in a workable way’. But he argued that it was a ‘straw man’ to suggest that law is always a threat to the freedom of the press.
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