Blogs and Briefings
Tip-offs, tapes, wrangles and whistleblowing
Connect’s Ben Wright headed to the LSE last night to hear from the Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
25 November
Connect’s Ben Wright headed to the LSE last night to hear from the Chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee.
Appearing at the LSE as part of the excellent British Government seminar programme previously attended by Home Affairs Committee Chair Keith Vaz, John Whittingdale provided a blow-by-blow run through of his Committee’s work around News International and phone hacking, linking it into the implications for select committees as a whole.
In the tradition of someone who has spent a long time studying the media and entertainment industry, Whittingdale kept his audience waiting before getting to the razzmatazz of the Murdoch hearings, first running through the details of how the Committee works and the positive impact that the election of committee chairs has had on their reputation and standing in Parliament.
Concentrating on the work of the Committee this year, though, inevitably led to Murdoch. Whittingdale provided a fascinating run through of the timeline that has led to this point, see-sawing between tales of media tip-offs, private investigators, whistleblowers and legal wranglings.
What was interesting was the sense that, in terms of the Committee’s dealings with News International, they were in unchartered waters and were, to a large extent, ‘winging it’. Lots of stories ended with the honest admission that the Committee, and their legal officers, had no idea what the next steps would be if witness refused to play ball or provide requested materials. The revelation that members are seriously considering whether they should formally report that the Committee has been misled during the inquiry was also met with a shrug of the shoulders in terms of what such a censure would mean in practice.
This sense of freewheeling was also evident in his retelling of the Committee’s work around football governance and the legally choppy waters it entered in allowing Lord Triesman a platform to ‘name names’ with regards to his accusations of bribery in association with the world cup bid.
He acknowledged that there may well be difficulties with the number of inquiries now “fishing from the same pond” in terms of media regulation, phone hacking et al. There were also occasional signs of frustration at the widened remit of some of the ‘competing’ inquiries and, tellingly, Tom Watson’s failure to declare his meeting with Neville Thurlbeck ahead of the second James Murdoch session.
Whittingdale’s laid-back, cheerful admissions that he was unable to guess what would happen next were entertaining, but there was also a sense that he understood how much importance his Commitee’s work continues to have in shining a light on the effective scrutiny functions of Parliament.
