'Sun' editor says Calcutt was told to get the press

KELVIN MACKENZIE, editor of the Sun, yesterday declared himself 'cowed' in a 'curious sort of way' over the future of the press. MPs on the Heritage Committee inquiring into privacy and media intrusion must have wondered, after a 90-minute bruising, what an uncowed Mr MacKenzie would be like.

In the committee's most combative session yet, he told the MPs they would be 'nuts' to bring in American-style privacy laws.

He defended publication of the 'Camillagate' tape - even though the Sun had chosen not to publish 'because we are in a curious sort of way cowed in relation to the future of the press'. He said the public had the right to decide 'whether the next Defender of the Faith' was going to be someone who cuckolded someone else's husband.

He told MPs: 'You are hostile to ordinary people knowing what is going on in public life.' And he said that if the committee wanted to bar publication of the tape it was saying 'the whole world can know what's going on, but not you poor little people in the UK. Not you people who actually pay their taxes, who support their castles.'

It was, he said, 'outrageous' that the committee would be taking evidence in private next week from Charles Anson, the Queen's press secretary. MPs defended that by saying the full transcript would be published, the private hearing was intended to avoid 'misquotation'.

Mr McKenzie said that Calcutt was 'totally an Establishment set- up', with Sir David having decided 'if it was the last thing he was going to do, he was going to leave the press emasculated. I don't accept one single word of what Calcutt says. He had been given the nod by the Government to 'get the press'.'

As MPs on the committee tried to pin him down over individual invasions of privacy, Mr MacKenzie had answers for almost all of them. It had been 'a mistake' to print the picture of a rape victim with only her eyes blacked out - and he 'regretted' the Sun's coverage of Hillsborough. 'It was a fundamental mistake' - but the mistake, he said, had been to believe a Tory MP.

He wrong-footed Joe Ashton, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, over his complaints about the tale of a man who mistook super-glue for pile cream, by telling him the victim himself had called the Sun.

And he said that times had changed. Complaints were fewer since the Press Complaints Commission had been set up, and 'the spotlight is on us in a way which would make us foolhardy to do anything which would attract more organised opprobrium than already exists. Yes, we do try harder now.'

Mr McKenzie went on: 'When we publish something you can be absolutely 101 per cent certain that it is 101 per cent true.' But being cowed 'doesn't mean we will stop publishing stories about Norman Lamont's credit card'.

Sun reporters now had the Press Complaints Commission's code of conduct written into their contracts and would be 'fired straight out' if they breached it.

He warned MPs against US- style privacy laws. Referring to the so-called 'dirt-list' that Lindi St Clair, the prostitution campaigner, had sent to the Sun, he said there were 'some extraordinary names in there. We could say it's in the public interest to put all of these things in the paper. Then all you gentlemen would troop down the Strand and pick up a huge amount of tax-free wonga (cash)'. But under US laws, 'we could publish the name of every single MP and their alleged sexual peccadilloes, and you couldn't claim one single penny'.

(Photograph omitted)