He added: “I’m not sure it was your best look. As ordinary citizens, taxpayers and floating voters, we looked away with embarrassment.”
He conceded – to laughs, applause and more cheers – that when “you were the first of the big two parties to slip the umbilical cord to Voldemort, I went from floating voter to Labour curious” but worried whether Labour MPs will still be concerned in a couple of years’ time.
Grant, the “actor turned political activist”, as Guardian columnist Jackie Ashley introduced him, called for an end to “privacy theft for profit as a business model for the press”.
Ivan Lewis, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, admitted: “We are a party that got far too close to News International. Make no mistake about that. Remember what they did to Neil Kinnock? The judgement we got wrong was that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’. The Sun backs those who hold – or it thinks will hold – power for its own commercial and ideological interests. But while David Cameron and Nick Clegg dithered Ed Miliband denounced what they were doing.”
Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust, which launched its Hacked Off campaign “for a good public inquiry” after the phone hacking scandal erupted at the News of the World, said the Murdoch empire was “keeping its powder dry but still trying to influence things”. He said the campaign was not about celebrities
but ordinary people whose lives have been destroyed by “a very damaged newspaper culture” and cited the infamous remark by the News of the World’s Greg Miskiw: “That’s what we do. We go out and destroy people’s lives.”
He told the audience – which included Tom Watson and Chris Bryant, the influential Labour MPs who have been campaigning against phone hacking for years – that News International was not the only newspaper group engaged in phone hacking; and said revelations about email hacking would also emerge soon.
Jonathan Heawood, director of English PEN, called for “better laws, not tougher laws” and condemned the way the Metropolitan Police tried to use the Official Secrets Act to get the Guardian to disclose its sources for stories which embarrassed the force. “We need to reform laws which treat companies as if they have feelings. They don’t.
