As Lord Justice Leveson said in his report, the press has ‘no real appetite for an effective and adequate system of regulation’. Not only did he show in detail how the Press Complaints Commission had been ‘run for the benefit of the press not of the public’, but he demonstrated that even in 2012 things had not changed.

While the inquiry was sitting, PCC bosses put forward a reform plan. Lord Hunt, the last chair of the PCC, and Lord Black, the head of its powerful funding body, proposed a new ‘self-regulator‘ they said would be dramatically different.

Lord Justice Leveson declared that it ‘did not come close’ to a proper regulator. It was, he said, ‘structured entirely around the interests and rights of the press, with no explicit recognition of the rights of the individual’. In other words, like the PCC it would operate ‘for the benefit of the press and not of the public’.

David Cameron also said Hunt-Black was ‘not good enough’, adding: ‘We need more changes.’

In a remarkable turnaround, however, the Conservatives are now proposing a post-Leveson fix that would enable the press to operate the Hunt-Black proposals. An analysis by the Media Standards Trust shows that, barring two technical elements, the scheme that Leveson said ‘did not come close’ would pass muster under the Royal Charter plan advocated by ministers.

Though the policy minister, Oliver Letwin, and the culture secretary, Maria Miller, insist publicly that they intend to implement the Leveson recommendations, they have watered them down so much at the behest of their friends in the press that Lords Hunt and Black could get their way.

This is exactly the kind of fix that occurred in 1990 and 1994, and that gave us all the press outrages of the years that followed, from the hounding of Princess Diana by way of Motorman, phone hacking and the McCann affair, to the hounding of Christopher Jefferies. If the press and the Conservatives get away with this there will be nothing to prevent more such abuses – and of course they won’t be the ones who suffer.

Read more about the Royal Charter proposals here.