Press freedom has just acquired its most important defender: David Cameron

For precisely 99 minutes yesterday, it looked like press freedom in Britain was doomed. At 1.30pm Lord Leveson announced his plans for statutory regulation of the press – with his bizarre instruction that we were not to call it statutory regulation. Worse, respectable commentators seemed to buy it. A very clever compromise, it was being argued. Self regulation really was being given another chance, albeit with a device which puts a legislative gun to the head of the press. If they obeyed his demands, he would not apply the force of the state.

But at 3.09pm, the Prime Minister rejected all this outright. The existence of such a device, he said, would mean politicians setting the parameters under which the press operates which it hasn’t done since 1695. No ifs, no buts, no fudge, no statutory regulation. The battle is not over: the press now needs to respond properly and (as James says) most MPs are pro-regulation (and, ergo, against Cameron).