Private Eye editor Ian Hislop: Don't create new press regulations He said he hoped that inquiry chairman Lord Justice Leveson would call Prime Minister David Cameron and his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to give evidence. Mr Hislop called for action to be taken to reduce the potentially crippling costs of libel and privacy actions brought against publishers. I think justice should be cheaper and faster. I think there should be early resolution. I think you should be able to have a judgment on meaning far quicker than you currently get in the court," he said. There are plenty of ways to speed up justice through the courts if you think the courts is the right way. Referring to proposals to introduce stricter privacy laws in Britain, he cited the French press's difficulties in exposing the fact that "the minister in charge of raising taxes was paying no taxes." He said: "The French situation is terrible. They are now catching up on about two decades of news... They are incredibly slow because of this extraordinary reluctance to look at the private lives of the people who ran them. Mr Hislop said journalists could be justified in employing "blagging," the use of subterfuge to obtain information. I don't throw my hands up at blagging. There have been some very effective blags," he said. For example, the Channel 4 programme where someone pretended to be a lobbyist and a number of greedy MPs and members of the House of Lords came and offered to offer their services. He also alleged that Mohamed al Fayed commissioned Benjamin Pell, better known as "Benji the Binman," to rifle through Private Eye's rubbish. We put a camera up and found out Benji was going through our bins. Mr Fayed was looking for things to print about Private Eye at the time. Asked if he had evidence of Mr al Fayed's involvement, he said: "I think the fact that it appeared in Punch, which he owned, was a giveaway." He said Private Eye would sometimes use a single source as the basis for a story, for example in whistleblowing cases, but his journalists would check the facts as thoroughly as they could. Ian Hislop Mr Hislop, who has edited Private Eye since 1986, said 40 libel actions had been brought against his magazine since 2000, of which 26 were withdrawn, 11 settled, one resulted in a hung jury and two were won. Mr Hislop said his magazine is not signed up to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) because he does not believe the body is "effective." He said the Street of Shame section in his magazine criticises newspapers and journalists and a number of newspaper editors sit on the body. "Private Eye has had some issues with the number of tabloid editors on there with a particular agenda," he said. He added that he does not think a state-regulated press would work, adding: "If the state regulates the press, the press no longer regulates the state." Mr Hislop added that the Murdoch family are "deeply embedded in our political top class." He went on to say that he would no longer give prior notification to the subjects of his stories after a lengthy and costly court battle to publish an article about the Law Society reprimanding its former president, Michael Napier. He said the story was "self-evidently in the public interest" but Mr Napier was granted a temporary injunction halting the publication of the story. Five months later, the story could eventually be published following a £350,000 court battle. "The lesson I learnt from that was not to give prior notification," Mr Hislop said. Tom Mockridge News International chief executive Tom Mockridge, who took over from Rebekah Brooks when she resigned over the phone-hacking scandal last July, also rejected state regulation of the press. He told inquiry chairman Lord Justice Leveson: "I share the view of many of your other witnesses, that in this society, where there is not a constitutional guarantee of free speech, for the Government to make laws which intervene in the press would contravene that basic principle and undermine the principle of a free press." Mr Mockridge, whose company publishes The Sun, The Times, and the Sunday Times, defended British newspapers while conceding that "everything might not be perfect." "I am talking about the situation today, not the circumstances clearly of five years ago," he said. But I think in general this country enjoys something precious and something which many people in other countries look up to. Susan Panuccio Susan Panuccio, finance director at News International, told the inquiry that journalists at The Sun "were very nervous" about making cash payments for stories following the closure of the News of the World. She said that in the last six months, requests for cash payments were "significantly less" than they had been in the past, amounting to £50,000. Previously she had given reporters £30-40,000 to pay reporters, and, in the case of the News of the World Pakistani cricket sting, £150,000. Journalists did not have to declare to whom the cash would be paid in order to protect their sources, she said. James Harding, editor of The Times, said the newspaper published details of Adam Werritty's bank account details because it was "clearly in the public interest." He said the relationship between Mr Werritty and former defence secretary Dr Liam Fox was "something that the public should know about." "It was clear that there was a public interest in understanding the nature of that relationship," he said. He added: "There is no absolute right to privacy and there is no absolute right to freedom of expression." He said indicated he regretted his decision not to purchase the disk containing details of MPs' expenses. We generally don't pay for stories. On that occasion we took the view we shouldn't be in the business of stolen goods. There would not necessarily be a public interest defence for that," he said. It may be the case - hindsight is a wonderful thing - there was undoubtedly a public interest defence in that story. If there's a lesson there, and it's the lesson I drew, you have to have a set of rules and a culture, but you have to be willing to break them if you are presented with a story that is overwhelming in the public interest. The editor defended The Times' coverage of the phone-hacking scandal, which was first broken by the Guardian in summer 2009, but said he wished it had pursued the story more vigorously earlier. He said his paper reported the story on the front page every day for nearly three weeks after it emerged last July that the News of the World hacked murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone. He added: "Looking back, I certainly wish that we had got on the story harder earlier. The reality, of course, is that both News International and the police poured cold water on it at the time, and we went to the sources that we had to try and chase it up, and ran off those. It was only later that we could fully get to grips with it, but of course it was and has proved a very important and significant story. He said sources would have been less likely to come to The Times with information about phone-hacking because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch - although he stressed that his paper was editorially independent. Mr Harding was asked how often he had contact with Mr Murdoch. He replied: "It varies a great deal. Sometimes you won't hear from him for weeks and then occasionally there will be things happening and you will get a couple of calls in a week - and usually that's driven by the news. The editor estimated that he had met Mr Cameron about half a dozen times since the May 2010 general election. Lord Justice Leveson asked him if newspapers overly influenced Government policy through this kind of contact. Mr Harding answered: "All I can say to that is that's not been my experience. My experience is that the subject of the conversations that we have had are always the matters of the day.