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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, in December 2010 Christopher Jefferies was arrested on suspicion of murdering Joanna Yates. He was eventually released without charge and Vincent Tabac was found guilty of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment but not before Mr Jefferies had found himself the subject of intense speculation in many parts of the press. The phrase trial by media has rarely seemed more fitting so it is no surprise that Mr Jefferies is now campaigning for press reform and he joins me now from Brighton. A very good morning to you Mr Jefferies and of course that brings us to the Leveson recommendations of self-regulation of the press. Do you feel that after Lord Justice Leveson reported back at the end of last year that his recommendations are now getting bogged down in political wrangling?

CHRISTOPHER JEFFERIES: Well there is certainly no reason why they should have got bogged down in political wrangling and we are where we are entirely because of the rather belated scruples that the Prime Minister discovered that he had about any kind of legislative underpinning of those proposals, a legislative underpinning which as far as I’m concerned are entirely necessary, first of all because this is the democratic way forward but also to give the appropriate authority to the proposed new oversight body.

DM: I don’t want to get into too much technical detail but the Prime Minister is proposing a Royal Charter to provide that underpinning, why is it so important that it be legislative?

CJ: Well there is no reason why the Royal Charter couldn’t be something that is an acceptable way forward provided – and this is the very important thing – that it does fully implement all the recommendations of Lord Justice Leveson. The objection to going down that route as I implied a moment ago is that Royal Charters are undemocratic and they can very easily be interfered with by the Privy Council, in other words, by Government Ministers, whereas if we went down the route proposed by Lord Justice Leveson then it would need Parliamentary approval for any amendments to the statute.

DM: Well we know the existing Press Complaints Commission is trying to put forward its own programme of change, given the horrendous experience that you went through, why do you feel that the Press Complaints Commission can’t rescue itself? Was it any good at all to you?

CJ: It was absolutely no good to me whatsoever. First of all, the Press Complaints Commission never was a regulatory body, it was simply a complaints handling procedure. I didn’t consider going down the press complaints route, I felt it absolutely necessary that I had to take action against the papers who defamed me and indeed when I did eventually write to the Press Complaints Commission, I didn’t have a reply and it took publicity of that at the Leveson Inquiry before I did get any response whatsoever.

DM: It was cases like yours and of course many others that led to this head of steam behind the issue. I mentioned the political wrangling going on, we are also hearing that amongst the newspapers themselves there’s a sense that they’re no longer unified.

CJ: Well that could well be the case, I’m certainly not privy to those particular discussions but it seems to me to be entirely disgraceful that the newspapers should be in any way allowed to water down or compromise the very clear, the very fair and entirely proportionate recommendations which Lord Justice Leveson’s report came forward with.

DM: Do you think it is still going to happen then in the form envisaged by Lord Justice Leveson?

CJ: Certainly everybody that I am talking to in the Lib Dem party and I think in the Labour party are absolutely determined that the Conservatives should not be allowed to get away with implementing something which suits the press and which suits nobody else and the one other thing that I ought to stress is that no responsible journalist, no responsible investigative journalist, has anything whatsoever to fear from the proposals which Lord Justice Leveson has put forward.

DM: Okay, Mr Jefferies, thank you very much indeed for your time, Christopher Jefferies there.