Mr Clarke’s speech – or, rather, lecture – was given as part of POLIS, a new joint-programme of events, teaching and research mounted by the London School of Economics and the London College of Communication. Among other things, POLIS intends to make “specific policy interventions” on “the changing role of news media and the challenges that they face”. At the LSE on the April 24 one of Mr Clarke’s key passages was: “I believe that a pernicious and even dangerous poison is now slipping into at least some parts of this media view of the world. In the absence of many of the genuinely dangerous and evil totalitarian dictatorships to fight – since they’ve gone – the media have steadily, rhetorically transferred to some of the existing democracies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, some of the characteristics of those dictatorships.”

In his column in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins – no leftist, as he pointed out himself – was quick to pick up the gauntlet. He countered with quotations of hyperbolic speeches by Tony Blair and declared: “No, this is not a totalitarian Government but it is a ‘creeping authoritarian’ one. Nor is the press peddling ‘a pernicious and dangerous poison’ in protesting. It is doing its job.”

Press Gazette detected a desire for State regulation of the press, and surmised that other members of the Cabinet would concur with Mr Clarke’s personal view as expressed in the lecture. Although Mr Clarke’s targets were in the liberal press – specifically, articles in The Guardian, Observer and The Independent – The Daily Telegraph joined in the attacks on him in an editorial declaring that he “was once a fanatical student radical who enjoyed his visits to the Soviet Union and, clearly, learnt a lot from them. Equally clearly, he pines after a policy where the executive does what it likes and the media does what it is told”.

Mr Clarke’s speech was based, naturally enough, on his duties as Home Secretary. He headed – only for another 11 days, as it turned out – a department of State the very name of which epitomises old-fashioned, 18thcentury Whitehall spin. Home Office: the words conjure up a cozy image of twinkly-eyed Dickensian uncles handing out bicycles to village bobbies. Disappointing to realise, then, that its functions are the same or similar to those of that stern foreign institution, the Ministry of the Interior, a name full of Orwellian foreboding. But whatever its name, it was the Home Office that created the trap into which Mr Clarke fell and blundered about, arguing about the meaning of the word “responsibility”, until he impaled himself on the stake of required resignation.

He could hardly blame the media for his loss of office. Only the most dedicated political anoraks among the nation’s readers, viewers and listeners can have been aware of the scale of the mess over prisoners and deportations before (the day after the lecture) Mr Clarke admitted in a written statement to the Public Accounts Committee that 1,023 foreign prisoners – murderers, rapists and child sex-attackers among them – had been let out but not deported. He was certainly pursued by the media after that date: before then his nemesis was the Conservative MP for South Norfolk, Richard Bacon. (Perhaps our trade or profession deserve a very small pat on the back on the grounds that Mr Bacon used to be one of us. His biography, as posted on his website, says he once worked in financial journalism.)

The echoes of Mr Clarke’s strictures come from Lord Kinnock, Chair of the British Council. They are not couched in Mr Clarke’s excitable language and they are not circumscribed by a departmental responsibility but range over a broad field, as you can read in detail in this issue of the BJR. Lord Kinnock, who, before he became Leader of the Opposition, brought Mr Clarke into Westminster – first as a researcher and then as his chief-of-staff – perceives a lack of distinction between news and comment in present-day reporting. It could be argued that politicians never complain about that sort of distortion when it favours their own case, but Lord Kinnock’s concerns have a bearing on the loss of trust in the media among the public, and how that can be repaired without recourse to statutory control.

In practical terms, Lord Kinnock has concrete proposals for rescuing and reviving the Press Complaints Commission, which is in danger of becoming moribund because of the predominance of serving editors and editors’ representatives wedged under the chairmanship of Sir Christopher Meyer, whose authority and suitability for the role were questioned by many after the publication of his DC Confidential volume of up-market tittle-tattle. (The PCC’s rapid rejection of a request to reopen its inquiry into the Daily Mirror’s City Slickers insider share-dealing affair has also raised eyebrows. Expressing “regret” that it had been misled by Trinity Mirror over the amount of shares bought by then editor Piers Morgan displayed all the bite of a toothless poodle.)

Lord Kinnock urges a new constitution for the PCC and the chairmanship of a respected figure from the judiciary, rather than what can be perceived as the out-to-grass appointment of a retired civil servant or government minister. His ideas deserve careful consideration and debate by the media community. The unwelcome alternative could be a strict legal framework to put the press under control – the kind of control that would suit a Ministry of the Interior.