We have a Royal Charter that has been approved by every single party in Parliament. It is backed by the mass of public opinion. And it is based on the recommendations of a year-long, judge-led public inquiry of remarkable thoroughness. And now the people who run some of our big newspaper corporations - an industry condemned by that inquiry for 'wreaking havoc in the lives of innocent people' - say they have made a concession towards it.

This is not a story that can be understood from headlines alone, partly because in Britain the headlines have so often wildly distorted the truth. Despite what you may have read, there is no threat by British politicians to interfere with press freedom. There is, however, a powerful consensus for change.

The Sun newspaper is outraged this morning that not every single Labour MP turned up for yesterday's Commons debate designed to honour Margaret Thatch...

The problem now for Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and the Barclay brothers, who between them control most of the British press, is that the British public have got their number. Most people now know what's been going on and they don't like it. Until recently, Murdoch controlled the government and, disgracefully, sections of the police. At the same time, he and his UK employees repeatedly told us that phone hacking had involved only one rogue reporter. Newscorp, he said, had "zero tolerance" of wrongdoing. We now know that was untrue.

It could hardly be worse. The system of press regulation cobbled together by the Coalition and opposition in the wee small hours on Monday is, to borrow the Leveson jargon, neither voluntary, nor independent, nor self-regulation... to the eternal shame of parliament, we have ended up with a political concoction based on a single judge's recommendations, which may lead to the courts telling editors what to put in their publications. That noise you hear is the applause of dictators around the world.

Conservative MPs have expressed their frustration at David Cameron's decision to reach a compromise deal on the Leveson Report that Labour argues incl...

Nick's line was a rather desperate piece of nonsense which relied on an understandable lack of knowledge of how local government finance works on the part of the public and a lack of will or ability to investigate on the part of the press to make the council's cuts seem mean and unnecessary.

On some level, you have to feel sorry for Chris Huhne.