Cameron seeks to head off Leveson split David Cameron will on Thursday embark on a last-minute round of political diplomacy to try to secure cross-party support for a new system of press regulation and head off a split in his coalition. The prime minister received a copy of Lord Justice Leveson's report into press standards and regulation on Wednesday lunchtime, setting in train 24 hours of activity in Downing Street to determine how to respond. Mr Cameron and Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, met for 40 minutes on Wednesday night to discuss the report - which runs to hundreds of pages - and its implications for press regulation and freedom in Britain. The two will meet again on Thursday morning but Downing Street officials confirmed on Wednesday that the Leveson report may split the coalition and that Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg may have to make separate statements in response. Lord Leveson's report was circulated in advance to only a handful of government ministers amid speculation that it would propose a new independent form of press regulation, rooted in law. Mr Clegg and Ed Miliband, Labour leader, have committed to implementing the Leveson proposals provided they are reasonable, but the newspaper industry is fiercely opposed to any form of statutory regulation. A compromise proposal has been backed by the industry where a tough new press regulator would be set up with the power to investigate wrongdoing and levy fines, but it would be set up on the basis of civil contract, not under statute. Were Mr Cameron to reject the Leveson proposals, he would be seen as a hero in Fleet Street but would face a fierce backlash at Westminster and from the victims of phone hacking, whose plight prompted the Leveson inquiry in the first place. Liberal Democrat officials said they hoped common ground could be found between Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron, but one said: "We are looking at contingency plans in the event they don't agree." Speaking ahead of receiving the Leveson report on Wednesday, Mr Cameron pledged to seek cross-party consensus on regulation but said that the status quo was "unacceptable and needed to change." On Wednesday many prominent magazine and newspaper publishers voiced their opposition to press regulation by statute. Tom Mockridge, chief executive of News International, Rupert Murdoch's UK newspaper business, ended his group's silence on the issue when he told the BBC: "The people who argue for state regulation are saying they are going to trust the politicians in this country for another 300 years not to exploit that," he said. That is a trust too far. Mr Mockridge threw his weight behind a proposal for beefed up self-regulation of the press that has been put forward by Lord Hunt, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, and Lord Black, a senior executive at the Telegraph Group. He conceded that victims of press abuse have "a unique moral voice" but said it would be wrong to let individual victims of press abuse determine the future of regulation. In a leading article to be published in Thursday's edition, the Spectator magazine pledged not to "sign up to anything enforced by government." "If such a group is constituted we will not attend its meetings, pay its fines nor heed its menaces," its editorial said. But the actor Hugh Grant, who has been campaigning for tougher press regulation, told BBC Breakfast that independent regulation underpinned by statute, which is being supported by many victims of press abuse, was "a very, very different beast" to statutory regulation. "What people are campaigning for is an end to newspapers being able to regulate themselves, marking their own homework, because that is what has resulted in the kind of abuses of people like the Dowlers, the McCanns," he said.