Hacked Off members and supporters have received calls from the Sunday Times over the last few days.We set out below the questions we were asked and our reply. The Sunday Times may or may not accept our refutation, may or may not include our replies, and may or may not include other allegations (or allegations presented as facts) which were not put to us. We will see.The Sunday Times and its proprietor have a keen interest (which conflicts with any commitment to fair journalism) in maintaining the fiction that IPSO is an effective regulator, in seeing the Leveson Report sidelined, and in cancellation of the promised Inquiry into the hacking cover-up (Leveson Part 2).From Sunday Times:Dear Mr Harris,Sorry to put questions to you late on a Friday afternoon. I would be most grateful if you could respond to the following question for a news feature we are running this weekend.

1. What did Hacked Off hope to achieve by endorsing the publication of details of the private life of John Whittingdale, the Culture secretary in the online publication Byline?
2. Do you believe that this has helped advance your goal, to reform the conduct and regulation of the press?
3. Brian Cathcart, a founder of Hacked Off, found himself in the position of arguing in favour of breaching Mr Whittingdale's privacy. Do you now consider that this was a mistake?
4. Have you obtained guidance from either IMPRESS or Ipso on whether the disclosures were or were not in the public interest? If so, could you please tell me what their assessment was and when they shared this with you?
5. Do you believe that there was an agreement between the national newspapers which investigated the allegations concerning Mr Whittingdale not to publish- and that this was in order to give them leverage over him in his decisions concerning press regulation?
6. If you do believe this, do you have evidence for it please?
7. I see there has been a dispute today about the nature of any relationship between Hacked Off and Byline. To help us avoid any factual errors, could you please clarify the nature of any financial or operational links between the two organisations and between their staff, directors or high profile supporters?

Yours sincerely,Nicholas HellenAssistant Editor (Social Affairs) The Sunday Times@NicholasHellenFrom Hacked Off:Dear Mr HellenHere is our responseQuestion 7I see there has been a dispute today about the nature of any relationship between Hacked Off and Byline. To help us avoid any factual errors, could you please clarify the nature of any financial or operational links between the two organisations and between their staff, directors or high profile supporters? As this is the only plain factual question so I will start with it.I am not sure what dispute you are referring to. But I understand that Byline have secured a commitment form the Daily Mail that they will print a correction to the Mail's absurd assertion, made on Thursday, that Byline is funded by Hacked Off.Byline is a company with 4 investors. Hacked Off is not one of them. The Sunday Times can find them on the “internet” on the Byline website http://www.byline.com/about. These are Nicolas Berggruen, Jaewoong Lee, Eric X. Li, and Ian Osborne. Hacked Off is not financially or operationally involved with any of these investors or any byline staff.Disclosure: One of the advisory panel, Sir Harold Evans, a distinguished former editor of the Times and Sunday Times has publicly declared his support for Hacked Off.Freelance journalists writing on Byline use the site to crowd-source funding. Hacked Off has – as far as I am aware – not made any donations to journalists through the site.It is possible that Hacked off supporters have done so since we have 80,000 supporters and Byline writes stories that much of the newspaper industry suppress. Byline publishes transparently any user names provided by those who donate to journalists. These may or may not be the actual people concerned – I see Rupert Murdoch appears on the site – but it is quite possible that people who fund public interest freelance journalists on Byline also support Hacked Off since we support public interest journalism too.Disclosure: Although Hacked Off does not fund Byline, we do admit to funding The Times and The Sun via subscriptions to the online platforms.++++++Question 1 .What did Hacked Off hope to achieve by endorsing the publication of details of the private life of John Whittingdale, the Culture secretary in the online publication Byline?Your use of the term “endorse” is peculiar and the question is based on a false premise.That makes some of your other questions – founded as they are on that false assumption – redundant.We have no more editorial control over Byline than we do over The Sunday Times. When the story first came out on 1st April we were unaware of it, and neither re–posted it, nor tweeted it.The second story came out, by Jim Cusick, on Sunday 10th April on Open Democracy and Byline websites, we did not re-post that either nor tweet it. In fact I do not think we have directly published the reported details of Mr Whittingdale’s private life – unlike almost all national news media. I believe we tweeted an opinion piece on the Open Democracy website on that day. We published a post ourselves commenting on it but this did not mention the personal matters which were the subject of the articles.I do not believe that we have tweeted the Cusick piece since then, though we have commented on the issues it raised – but only after it was published to hundreds of thousands of people by Private Eye and Newsnight.Our position on whether there was at any stage sufficient public interest to justify publishing matters to do with the personal life of a public figure are set out in these multiple places and now should be very clear.https://hackinginquiry.org/mediareleases/hacked-off-respond-to-revelations-that-newspapers-held-back-on-whittingdale-story-as-he-blocked-promised-reforms/https://hackinginquiry.org/mediareleases/whittingdale-should-never-have-interfered-with-press-regulation/http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/hacked-why-we-are-not-hypocrites-over-stance-john-whittingdales-privacyhttp://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/15/john-whittingdale-leveson-press-reformIn short, two experienced broadsheet journalists, Jim Cusick and Cahal Milmo, were told by multiple sources that the Independent spiked a story (about 3 newspapers refusing to publish a story on John Whittingdale which they would normally have no qualms about doing) because their landlords, the Daily Mail, considered him an “asset”. There was – in our view - a public interest publishing the allegation of a cover up, in the light of the policy changes that Mr Whittingdale has made since 2013 – which can be found here, and his decision to give himself executive power over press regulation by suspending commencement of section 40 at his discretion, and suspending the automaticity of Leveson Part 2, leaving it to mistrial discretion.These reversals and new accretions of executive power over the press by Mr Whittingdale are matters we have been pointing out for several months.In relation to questions 5 and 6 ("Do you believe that there was an agreement between the national newspapers which investigated the allegations concerning Mr Whittingdale not to publish- and that this was in order to give them leverage over him in his decisions concerning press regulation?" and "If you do believe this, do you have evidence for it please?”, we are surprised that you need to ask. This is the point (although we would include the reasonable perception of leverage) we have been making in the four articles set out above. As Cusick, Private Eye and Newsnight have all also suggested, these matters set out in the paragraph above (what the Indy were told about the Mail regarding him as an asset, his policy reversals and his accretion of executive discretion over press regulation) constitute some evidence that Mr Whittingdale’s position may have been compromised by his being told by the press that they had a salacious story about him which they were not publishing, or gives rise to rise to a reasonable perception of such a conflict of interest. The Ministerial Code covers just this eventualityGeneral principle 7.1 Ministers must ensure that no conflict arises, or could reasonably be perceived to arise, between their public duties and their private interests, financial or otherwise. Responsibility for avoiding a conflict 7.2 It is the personal responsibility of each Minister to decide whether and what action is needed to avoid a conflict or the perception of a conflict, taking account of advice received from their Permanent Secretary and the independent adviser on Ministers’ interests. Procedure 7.3 On appointment to each new office, Ministers must provide their Permanent Secretary with a full list in writing of all interests which might be thought to give rise to a conflict. The list should also cover interests of the Minister’s spouse or partner and close family which might be thought to give rise to a conflict. 7.4 Where appropriate, the Minister will meet the Permanent Secretary and the independent adviser on Ministers’ interests to agree action on the handling of interests. Ministers must record in writing what action has been taken, and provide the Permanent Secretary and the independent adviser on Ministers’ interests with a copy of that record.Question 4 "Have you obtained guidance from either IMPRESS or Ipso on whether the disclosures were or were not in the public interest? If so, could you please tell me what their assessment was and when they shared this with you?” is gibberish in that Hacked Off is not a news publisher and has not published the disclosures.IMPRESS is not yet at the point where it can offer advice to those (which obviously does not include Hacked Off as we are not a news publisher) who have a applied for membership. I suggest you go to IMPRESS to confirm this if you have not already. IPSO can provide pre-publication guidance to its members only, and only on request. The Independent was not a member of IPSO so could not have obtained any such advice. The three newspapers which did not publish were members of the PCC at the time and may have asked that organisation (deemed by all to be an abject failure) for advice. I suggest you direct your questions to Messrs Scott, Dinsmore and Greig who were the editors at the time I believe, none of whom have yet commented.