George Clooney’s dispute with Mail Online needs little comment from Hacked Off.

That Mail journalists make up stories which hurt and harm people is hardly a surprise, and if they have picked on someone able to fight back that is good to hear but it is not going to help the overwhelming majority of Mail victims who don’t have that power. And make no mistake, those victims are legion.

The Press Complaints Commission (PCC) may be a discredited rump of an organisation and its data may be disgracefully opaque, but those data still give us our only measurements of the scale of wrongdoing in British journalism. So far this year the Mail and its sister organisations, the Mail on Sunday, Mail Online and Metro, have committed almost half – 48.6 per cent – of all actual or ‘probable’ breaches of the PCC Editors‘ Code of Practice. This is worse than its performance of 42.4 per cent last year.

The Mail tries to excuse these high scores on the grounds that Mail Online has a huge readership, but this is both untrue and disgraceful.

It is untrue because the Mail was topping these tables before Mail Online existed – as Nick Davies demonstrated in his book Flat Earth News. And it is disgraceful because a big readership is no excuse for abusive journalism – the more readers you have, surely, the greater your obligation to make the effort to get things right.

That the Mail should also have defended itself with lies in the Clooney case is no surprise either. This is what it does routinely. And it also deploys its powerful legal department against ordinary people who raise a complaint either directly or through the PCC.

The responsibility for this conduct rests with two people. The Mail’s owner is Lord Rothermere, who must take ultimate responsibility for the serial thuggishness of his employees. The editor-in-chief is Paul Dacre, who, incredibly, has been chair of the Editors’ Code Committee since 2008 – overseeing the rules his paper consistently breaks – and he has been a member of PressBoF, the shadowy group that runs the PCC, since 2004.

These men are frightened of Clooney – though Dacre hides while a flunkey deals with the dispute. But they are not frightened of ordinary people.

Have a look at this case involving a professional counsellor who ran a charity helping people addicted to prescription drugs. As in the case of George Clooney, the Mail casually published harmful lies about her and refused to print a correction even when she proved they were lies.

Lord Justice Leveson, after a painstaking public inquiry, showed how behaviour of this kind could be tackled without inhibiting freedom of expression in any way. Every party in Parliament endorsed his recommendations in the form of a Royal Charter. Hundreds of leading people in the world of free expression have endorsed it too. And so does the public.

It’s time the Mail, Lord Rothermere and Paul Dacre stopped the bullying and did what the rest of the country wants them to do – ditch IPSO and join a self-regulator that meets the standards set out in the Charter.