Prime Minister David Cameron yesterday insisted the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking and media standards was not a ‘hideous threat’to press freedom.
Cameron also vowed the press should be free to investigate the ‘dark recesses’of society, according to a report in The Daily Telegraph.
Speaking at a Newspaper Society lunch he said:
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I am passionate about not just a free press but a press that feels free to inquire. I don’t want anything to stop that.
I don’t want MPs to use [the inquiry] as an avenue for revenge for the expenses saga.
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He added:
There is no intention on behalf of this government to neuter the press. There is a very good reason for Leveson and that’s the phone-hacking scandal.
Meanwhile, The Independent reports that the news of Colonel Gaddafi’s death was broken to Cameron by ‘an excited’Joe Murphy, the political editor of the London Evening Standard.
A report in The Independent said:
He burst into a Newspaper Society lunch at the Commons Press Gallery, where Mr Cameron had just spoken. The Prime Minister left abruptly for Downing Street to get confirmation before commenting, missing his chicken supreme main course.
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