"Stop the arse kissing and start the arse kicking"

Paul Dacre, it transpires, may only be the warm-up act today for Kelvin MacKenzie. The Daily Mail columnist and former Sun editor launched a full-frontal assault on both the Leveson inquiry and David Cameron.

According to a final draft of his speech released this afternoon to the Evening Standard, he will begin by asking: "Where is our great prime minister who ordered this ludicrous inquiry?"
He says: "The only reason we are all here is due to one man's action – Cameron's obsessive arse-kissing over the years of Rupert Murdoch. Tony Blair was pretty good, as was [Gordon] Brown. But Cameron was the daddy."
After sarcastically accusing Cameron and his colleagues, "especially Michael Gove", of genuflecting before Murdoch, he turns on Rebekah Brooks.
He makes it clear he had little time for the recently departed News International chief executive, and his former colleague, who he describes as Murdoch's handmaiden.
He says: "Cameron had clearly gone quite potty. And the final proof that he was certifiable was his hiring of my friend Andy Coulson."

That is followed by an amazing anecdote:

"I remember telling anybody who would listen that if I were Brown, every time Cameron stood up in the Commons he should arrange for mobile phones to ring on his side of the House.
It would have killed Cameron. Nobody took me seriously. And then the phone-hacking scandal erupted. Not a scandal of Rupert's making but the order went out from Cameron: stop the arse kissing and start the arse kicking."

MacKenzie, warming to his theme, claims that Cameron had since distanced himself from Murdoch, "a bloke he had so assiduously wooed for almost a decade".
Now, he said, we have "this bloody inquiry chaired by Lord Leveson". And then it is Leveson's turn to feel what it's like to be on the end of a MacKenzie diatribe. He says:

"God help me that free speech comes down to the thought process of a judge who couldn't win when prosecuting counsel against Ken Dodd for tax evasion and more recently robbing the Christmas Island veterans of a substantial pay-off for being told to simply turn away from nuclear test blasts in the 50s. It's that bad."

He claims: "I have been forced by what sounds like the threat of a jail term to give a witness statement to this inquiry.
"The questions not only made me laugh through their ignorance but also that a subject as serious as free speech should be dealt with in this manner."
He says one question wanted to know if an editor knew the sources of the stories he published and relayed an anecdote about the occasion when he ran a scoop – which turned out to be false – about Elton John. He says:

"With this particular story I got in the news editor, the legal director, the two reporters covering it and the source himself on a Friday afternoon.
We spent two hours going through the story and I decided that it was true and we should publish it on Monday. It caused a worldwide sensation.
And four months later the Sun was forced to pay out record £1m libel damages to Elton John for wholly untrue rent-boy allegations.
So much for checking a story. I never did it again. Basically my view was that if it sounded right it was probably right and therefore we should lob it in."

He concedes that "there was criminal cancer at the News of The World" along with editorial and management errors, but says he does not think the Leveson inquiry is necessary.
"There are plenty of laws to cover what went on," he says. "After all, 16 people have already been arrested."
He says he views the inquiry as a way for Cameron to escape his own personal lack of judgment in hiring Coulson.
"It was clearly a gesture of political friendship aimed over Andy's head to Rupert Murdoch," MacKenzie says. "If it wasn't that then Cameron is a bloody idiot. A couple of phone calls from Central Office people would have told him that there was a bad smell hanging around the News of the World."
Then comes yet another astonishing anecdote:

"Rupert told me an incredible story. He was in his New York office on the day that The Sun decided to endorse Cameron for the next election.
That day was important to Brown as his speech to the party faithful at the Labour party conference would have been heavily reported in the papers.
Of course the endorsement blew Brown's speech off the front page. That night a furious Brown called Murdoch and in Rupert's words, 'roared at me for 20 minutes'.
At the end Brown said, 'You are trying to destroy me and my party. I will destroy you and your company.' That endorsement on that day was a terrible error."

He says: "The point of my anecdotes is to show that this inquiry should decide there is nothing wrong with the press, that we should enshrine free speech in Cameron's planned bill of rights and accept that the scandal was simply a moment in time when low-grade criminality took over a newspaper."
And he concludes:

"If anything, the only recommendation that should be put forward by Leveson is one banning by law over-ambitious and under-talented politicians from giving house room to proprietors who are seeking commercial gain from their contacts.
In tabloid terms, arse-kissing will be illegal. Should have an interesting passage through parliament.
Do that and you will have my blessing – and I suspect the blessing from Rupert Murdoch, too."

via guardian.co.uk