Let's get this right (or should that be Wright?) Peter Hill has not left the Press Complaints Commission. It has left him. He has, after weeks of difficult behind-the-scenes negotiations been forced to step down because he refused to do the honourable thing and resign straight away.
Well, I say he refused to go, but his obstinacy had a great deal to do with his owner Richard Desmond. No owner or manager will go on the record, of course, but they regard him as a maverick, a liability who will not play the game. His newspapers - the Daily Express edited by Hill, the Sunday Express, Daily Star and Star on Sunday - were responsible for wholesale libel against the family of the missing girl, Madeleine McCann, and were therefore required to pay £550,000 in damages.
You might have thought this would have given Desmond pause for thought, prompting him to ask himself if the public would accept that one of his editors should continue his membership of the commission that administers the editors' code of practice. Instead, Desmond dug in his heels.
So it has taken eight weeks of to-ing and fro-ing by the great and the good on PressBof and the NPA, not to mention the PCC itself, to engineer Hill's removal. What we have yet to discover is the nature of the deal that eventually did the trick.
So, while we inquire into that matter, let's say farewell to Hill (who, despite all that has happened, is a good journalist and a decent chap), and welcome to Peter Wright, editor of the Mail on Sunday.
