ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now it‘s time to go through the Sunday papers. Joining me today is the man who runs the largest advertising and media company in the world, he is Sir Martin Sorrell, playwright and author Bonnie Greer as well and former Home Secretary and host of other jobs of course as well, Lord Reid. A very good morning to all. Bonnie, I want you to kick us off because I know you watched Whitney Houston’s funeral from start to finish with Sky News.

BONNIE GREER: Yes, and I have to pay tribute first of all to Sky News because I think the BBC fell away and everyone else and I got so many responses from people about staying the course. It was an immense cultural event, particularly for the black community but I think also to be able to see this really basically family occasion broadcast, it was a great tribute to her mother to allow this to happen. To see these people who were not performing, this was actually a personal expression of this great artist’s loss and I think to be there, to be in a studio with it, was extremely moving and very, very important.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: A real celebration of life and an insight for a lot of people who don’t know what a gospel funeral looks like.

BONNIE GREER: Well it comes a teaching moment, as the President would say, for a lot of people about the whole of black culture.

MARTIN SORRELL: Except for Bobby Brown.

BONNIE GREER: Well Bobby Brown, I don’t want to go there with him but he had to leave or he felt he had to leave because he was disrespected but we didn’t know about that, that happened way in the back and we found that out later.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s interesting, the first couple of paragraphs in the story you’ve picked out in the Sunday Mirror, Bonnie, that Kevin Costner of course, her co-star in The Bodyguard revealing, I mean he was the great power in Hollywood at the time and she was a singer and not an actress, so for her to be in the film …

BONNIE GREER: Even on a deeper level, and this is what was so wonderful about this funeral, Kevin Costner came out as a Baptist. He actually had the same background as Whitney, he knew exactly the kind of upbringing she had, he was very comfortable in the church and I’m telling you, in front of this kind of formidable pack, and this was the crème de la crème of gospel, if Kevin Costner wasn’t kicking it they would have actually told him, could you please leave. He was magnificent, absolutely magnificent.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: You summed it up well, thank you Bonnie. Now Lord Reid, your first paper, obviously as a former chairman of Celtic Football Club, of great interest to you, what’s happening in the Scottish Premier League with Rangers going into administration?

LORD REID: Yes, there are a couple of articles on this, quite a good one by Roddy Forsyth who tries to make sense of all of the allegations, I mean there are more allegations here than The Sopranos. There are missing millions, alleged tax evasion, criminal connections and so on. I think actually what he touches upon is a much wider issue, it’s about sporting integrity. Put simply, the question is if one club and I say if, is purchasing championships or trophies, and the use of money they don’t have or other people’s money, when other clubs are actually cutting back and paying their taxes and so on, that goes to the heart of fairness in the game. To be fair, the SFA, the Scottish Football Association, has announced an inquiry into this, supported incidentally – and I’m glad about this – by the Rangers manager, Ally McCoist. This is a litmus test for them because people want to see this as truly independent, i.e. it has got an independent legal chairman, it covers the whole period of the alleged illicit payments and so on and is made public.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: And what goes for Scottish football goes for world football in terms of that fairness issue you raised.

LORD REID: Absolutely, it’s something that the European UEFA have been deeply concerned about even at the level of no illicit payments or alleged misuse of funds, is it right that one club should be endlessly supported by an individual with …?

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Do you think there are too many football clubs?

LORD REID: In Scotland or in the UK?

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Generally.

LORD REID: I think … no, I don't think that’s the problem, I think the problem is that football has now become world entertainment, there are enormous gains to be made from it and therefore there are people who will either put endless amounts of money into particular clubs and …

MARTIN SORRELL: Players like bankers are paid too much!

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: I judge your question, as a pre-eminent businessman, I mean they are run as businesses, they are businesses but they should not be immune from the laws of economics.

MARTIN SORRELL: I think there is an argument that there are too many and that there should be a market culling and that to some extent is what is going on. We’ve been talking about, before Bonnie was saying that players are paid too much and should we have salary caps, rather like in other areas of the economy it is being debated but I think over time there will be a diminution.

BONNIE GREER: But I think we shouldn’t take off the table, in relation to what Martin is saying, that clubs like Rangers, or maybe even Rangers alone, they support entire economic ecologies. It’s not just about this club.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s not just about economy is it, it’s about culture.

BONNIE GREER: Yes, it’s about culture but it’s also about businesses around that area. Pubs go up when Rangers are playing, this is all very important and these owners don’t seem to take on board that this is also about the community, it is also about the economic ecology, the social cohesion and all of that.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, well we’re having a football debate later on so we’ll move on and Sir Martin, you’ve been looking at … reviewing newspapers, newspapers talking about newspapers. What’s going on with News International and News Group?

MARTIN SORRELL: Maybe we are about to see a little bit of a turn. We are all eagerly anticipating the launch of the Sun on Sunday, a seventh day Sun, which we from our point of view, our selfish point of view, would like to see because certainly there has been a decline in readership of the Sundays, a decline in advertising revenues. The readership was lost I think about two and a half million of News of the World, about half of that has gone to other titles but half has gone so I think we are a little bit worried about the Sunday readership market and we’d like to see a new launch in the market from an advertising point of view and from a client point of view and from a readership point of view. The other issue picked up in the papers, and not just in the article that you referred to but in other articles, is about investigative reporting which you know a lot about and whether this will put unconscionable limits on investigative reporting or whether this will carry on. After all, a number of the most sensational stories have broken because of the practices of investigative journalism, some good, some bad, some not so good. So this fine line between a free press, a controlled press and a feeling that’s starting to come that people are being a little bit too vindictive about the Sun. I see even Ed Miliband is saying a Sun on Sunday is ‘fine’, quote unquote.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But some are saying it’s too early, is it going to be the News of the World in just another guise?

MARTIN SORRELL: Yes but the best form of defence is offence so I think that’s what you are seeing here. It’s a Murdoch rally going on.

BONNIE GREER: But Murdoch also has to be careful about his American holdings because there is a law called The Corrupt Practices Act, so he’s got to come here and make sure everything is squeaky clean because his competitors and enemies in America are looking at this situation and it is very important for him to make sure that these papers are tidy. But I think we are also at an existential crisis as well because people gain their news from other places, a lot of websites and blogs and tweets are actually beating newspapers. The British, we have a big addiction to ink and paper, we love … we’re doing it now, and no one does this is the world so it is a big cross over moment.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Lord Reid, just on that point, do you think it is too soon to see a Sun on Sunday comeback?

LORD REID: Well that’s a commercial judgement for Rupert Murdoch.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: But given what has gone on at the News of the World and the reasons for its closure?

LORD REID: I don't think it’s just the News of the World. People concentrate on that so you can’t be in a position where you say that no newspaper proprietor is able to open a new newspaper. I do agree with Bonnie, I do think that the whole strategic purpose of what has been done at News International is to try and isolate and create a firewall between the press, and in particular the British press sections of News International and News Corp and the United States. If this fire spreads to the United States I think there are huge commercial implications for News Corp.

MARTIN SORRELL: So far that hasn’t happened and in fact in the early days there were talks about whether there had been any tapping or hacking done in the US and to date that has proven not to be the case but there are two things I think they are trying to do at News Corp. One is to isolate obviously bad, corrupt practices historically, that’s one thing, so clean up your act and then number two, try and reformulate and relaunch brands that clearly have been damaged in some way.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Okay, we need to move on now because I want to get a selection, a real flavour of what’s in the papers today and Bonnie, you have a health story that seems to go on forever and ever, questions about the Health Secretary Andrew Lansley.

BONNIE GREER: Poor Andrew Lansley, what did he spend, like ten years studying the NHS? He is probably the world’s biggest anorak on it and suddenly he gets politics and his Prime Minister, his leader, is not standing up to him. He goes back and forth, which is kind of the Cameron way, one minute he gets a briefed against, he should be taken out and shot and then the next Cameron stands up and says I’m with him all the way to the wall. I am sure Lansley must be sitting there thinking, you know, he’s Janus, which way is this going. Cameron has also a tendency to be rather petulant when you don’t want to play ball with him so he has kicked out actually the main players in the whole NHS because they don’t like him so he is going to have this summit tomorrow but what Cameron does, and I think a lot of Tories are very angry with him in general, he turns his head and he changes his mind at the end of the day.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: I just wanted to ask you on that very narrow point, Lord Reid, not on the reforms themselves, that Bonnie’s raising there absolutely out what goes on in government, the briefing for, the briefing against. As a man who has held such high office himself, do you have any feeling for Andrew Lansley in the sense that he has spent an awful lot of his career concentrating on this. He knows his brief but he doesn’t know, as Bonnie says, which way to turn now.

LORD REID: Yes, what he seems to lack here is politics and a strategic objective to what he’s doing, I think that’s the key problem. I have no doubt that Andrew Lansley thinks he is carrying on the reforms of Blair and Milburn and Reid and so on but he isn’t because the whole strategic objective of our reforms was to pass power to the patient, to give the patient choice, remember the great debates about choice, to allow the patient to drive the system. What he is doing is decentralising to local providers not to the consumer and setting up local soviets of providers and it is just a bureaucratic mess. The real question for David Cameron is that given this is getting deeper and deeper into political quagmire, does he abandon it or does he plough on? My advice to him would be the old military slogan, never reinforce failure. Just because you have invested a lot of capital at it, don’t throw more capital at it, just get rid of this thing, do your U-turn, get out of it and the health service will be better for it.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: So advice for the Conservatives. Just while we are on advice, and I know you it is going to be one of your stories because we are running out of time, the advice that Lord Prescott – a great friend of yours in government of course – Lord Prescott is giving the current leader, Ed Miliband, about put his jacket on?

LORD REID: Yes, well, with great respect to John who is, as you say, a long-time colleague, I would have thought there are perhaps several pieces of advice you can give but to say I’m deeply worried because Ed Miliband takes his jacket off doesn’t seem to me to get to the strategic …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s about authority though, looking the part of the leader.

LORD REID: Yes, I think Douglas Alexander said earlier, a lot of people get worried when John Prescott takes his jacket off so …

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Especially during an election campaign and rolls the sleeves up! We are nearly out of time, just a last reflection from Martin Sorrell, Sir Martin you have been looking at the Telegraph very briefly on the upcoming budget and the growth plan.

MARTIN SORRELL: Yes, which is part of the plan. I think the one disappointment that we’ve had, certainly the government or the coalition have tried to address the cost issue but they haven’t actually reduced costs, they have actually reduced the rate of increase of costs so that’s one side of it. Maintain credibility, our credit, there is this question about whether the Triple A rating will come under pressure as it came under pressure in France so the other part of the plan is to get the growth plan and tax policy, regulation policy, 50p in the pound whether that’s right or wrong, are all issues that business are concerned about, loans to small manufacturing enterprises which is the engine of growth and employment. So the second part of the plan, they really missed the opportunity on November 29^th to bring out the plan – it is not just about tax, it is about immigration policy, it is about technology, education, infrastructure, all apple pie and motherhood but they have to get their plans coherent because people are looking at their boots. They have to look at the horizon, they have to look at the future and we have to have some hope that by the next election we will have got some growth in the economy and some jobs.

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Fascinating paper review, thank you all. Sir Martin Sorrell, Bonnie Greer and Lord Reid joining me for that.