Due to my Vienna visit I entirely missed a remarkable couple of paragraphs in Kelvin MacKenzie's Daily Mail column in which he apologised to Lord Justice Leveson for his controversial speech last week:
"On reflection, I owe an apology to Lord Leveson, the judge heading the inquiry set up in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.
On Wednesday I made a speech to the hearing — with Lord Leveson only yards away — in which I was somewhat disparaging of his ability when, as a young QC, he failed to win a conviction for tax evasion charges against Ken Dodd.
Before I delivered my speech, he was very courteous to me and yet I repaid him by being disobliging. I shouldn't have done it and I am sorry."
I cannot believe that anyone puts words into Kelvin's mouth, but I do wonder if his editor, Paul Dacre, played some role in that unexpected climbdown.
While we're on the subject, do I also detect some embarrassment at the Mail about one of Kelvin's past misdemeanours? Namely, his Hillsborough tragedy coverage when editing The Sun (which I wrote about yesterday).
When hiring Kelvin, the paper cannot have anticipated that the 1989 football disaster, which claimed 96 lives, would become headline news again.
It ran an editorial today saying all the right things about the need to be given "the facts about police conduct on that day of unimaginable suffering."
But how will it cope should the persistent references in the media about The Sun's disgraceful slurs four days after the deaths transform into a call for a Mail boycott on Merseyside?
