Northern & Shell tycoon Richard Desmond says he is willing to work with the Press Complaints Commission again when it clears out its “Old Boys’ Club” of editors and replaces them with independent experts.

The Express Newspapers owner’s differences with Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – also chairman of the PCC’s Editors’ Code of Practice Committee – are well documented, and he told a parliamentary select committee that he left the self-regulating watchdog because he “found some members of the PCC to be very hypocritical”.

He said he would consider rejoining it under the new leadership of Lord Hunt, but said senior Fleet Street figures should not be involved in regulation.

“Let’s not have editors of newspapers who sit in a little cabal and, when it’s their turn, that editor withdraws and gets discussed behind his back by competitors,” Desmond said. “It would work better if the people on that committee were not the same people who were working as day-to-day editors and executives on rival newspapers.”

As owner of Channel Five, he said he preferred the set up of broadcasting watchdog Ofcom because “you haven’t got the people sitting there who want to kill you”. While Ofcom is a statutory body he did insist that the PCC should be kept as a voluntary system.

Desmond said he was sorry for his newspapers’ coverage of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, but that “every other newspaper was publishing the same and, [referring to phone hacking] certain others were doing very, very bad things”.

On this point he added “we always heard internally” about the “Mail on Sunday, the Mirror and the People… these were the very people who were sitting there hanging us out to dry.”

Attacking the Mail again, he said its lack of coverage on phone hacking was “hypocritical”.

(Source: Press Gazette)

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