Chairmanship
The Report notes that the third Royal Commission on the Press (1974-77) - it omits any reference to the first and second Royal Commissions - was established ‘under the chairmanship of Professor Oliver (later Lord) McGregor on 7 March 1974’, an independent individual, as the Press Council’s constitution provided after 1966.
This was strictly inaccurate, as could have been discovered by referring to Shannon’s A Free Press and Responsible.2 The chairman selected by Harold Wilson’s Labour Government was in fact Mr Justice Finer, a judge of the Family Division of the Supreme Court, who sadly died nine months into the working life of the Commission; he was succeeded by his deputy and close friend, Professor McGregor, who effectively led the Commission to its final report in 1977. McGregor was, truly, an academic and head of the Social Administration Department at Bedford College of the University of London - he held the chair of Social Institutions. His1 In case anyone infers that Sir David was instinctively hostile to my appointment, I would like to point out that at the English Bar we were the greatest of friends. When Sir David became Treasurer of Middle Temple in 1998 he nominated me as the Reader for the Lent Term (a kind of deputy to the Treasurer).
2 R Shannon, A Free Press and Responsible (London, John Murray, 2001) 15. speciality was as an agrarian historian of the Victorian era, and he had no medical or legal qualification, or expertise, save that he served as chairman of Reuters. The medio-social element in the department was battened on to the Social Administration Department under the separate leadership of Professor Margot Jeffreys.
Professor McGregor was, correctly, made a peer under the title of Lord McGregor of Durris and became in 1980 the chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority, a self-regulatory body for the advertising industry. As we shall see later in this chapter, but which was unnoticed in the Leveson report, he was the preferred candidate for chairmanship of the Press Council in 1988 on the announced resignation of Sir Zelman Cowen, the former Governor-General of Australia and Provost of Oriel College, Oxford.
He was interviewed by the members of the Press Council in April 1988, in circumstances that will be described below.The Report noted (para 4.4, p 204) that the third Royal Commission (1974-77) stated that to increase public confidence in the institution it should increase the number of lay representatives ‘and the appointment of a lay chairman’. The Report omits to observe that, since 1966, the independent chairman had been exclusively a prominent lawyer - from Lord Devlin and Lord Pearce (both retired Law Lords), Lord Shawcross (the chairman of the second Royal Commission in 1964), Sir Patrick Neill QC (now Lord Neill of Bladen) and Sir Zelman Cowen[258] in 1983. This dominance was never adversely commented upon in public, but was a familiar theme within the newspaper industry. In 1990 the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association appointed Lord McGregor as the Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission; no contest for its chairmanship was envisaged. It should be noted that in the initial composition of the Press Complaints Commission there was nobody selected who was legally qualified (later appointments relented in this regard). None of this important aspect of independence, stemming from judicial or legal experience, was mentioned in the Report.