Media: Parting shots from the Last Chance Saloon?: Could papers be fined for photographs like these? Michael Leapman looks at next week's White Paper on press ethics

CHEERS may have closed, but the Last Chance Saloon looks like being good for a few more seasons yet. That was the mythical bar where David Mellor, when a junior Home Office minister three years ago, condemned the press to sip nervously while the Government decided whether to introduce laws against invasions of privacy and other media excesses.

Now the Government has finally decided, and its verdict is expected in a White Paper due before the Commons goes into recess next week. The first puffs of smoke from the Department of National Heritage suggest that the press has, in effect, won yet another reprieve, despite the powerful view that it has not earned it.

One change in the Last Chance Saloon could be the arrival of a strict new barman, going under the name of an ombudsman. He or she - probably a lawyer - would be placed above the existing Press Complaints Commission to adjudicate in serious cases of intrusion or invasion of privacy.

That was recommended in March by the Heritage Select Committee, but the White Paper is unlikely to go as far as the committee suggested. Crucially, it will not give any ombudsman power to levy fines on newspapers. Instead, it will urge the press to agree voluntarily that fines can be imposed - a request that newspapers are certain to reject. The White Paper may also include elements from Clive Soley's Private Member's Bill, which sought to ensure that victims of the press should be given a right to reply and to have any corrections printed prominently and quickly.

The Prime Minister is opposed to any statutory regulatory body. Peter Brooke, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, has held private discussions in recent weeks with several senior figures from the national press, hoping to get their agreement to a system of voluntarily applied fines that would help the Government to placate those backbenchers who feel strongly that the press should be curbed. The meetings have been outspoken and sometimes angry. The press executives told Mr Brooke unequivocally that they will not submit voluntarily to any system of fines.

'It would be like cheque-book journalism by another means,' says Sir David English, chairman of Associated Newspapers, publishers of the Daily Mail, and chairman of the PCC's Code Committee. 'People would be tempted to try to have something written about them that could get them money from the newspapers.

'I'd like to see some recognition of the progress the press has made in the last 18 months in getting its own house in order. Producing newspapers is such a complex matter that the only way of getting it right is if we get it right ourselves. I'd like to see politicians show more understanding of the press and how it works.'

Peter Preston, editor of the Guardian and also on the PCC, agrees: 'An ombudsman sounds a cuddly and sensible idea because 'ombudsman' is a cuddly and sensible word. But his appointment would undermine self-regulation and the PCC. The whole idea of the PCC is to get away from lawyers and a legislative approach.

'Ombudsmen in public services can usually assess a tangible sum for the harm caused to someone who has a complaint. How do you assess the intangibles of hurt?

'Over the last couple of years, the press has taken very long and, to many of us, quite surprising strides to get its self-regulatory act together. I wouldn't want to see anything that would blow all that away.'

The White Paper has been a long time in the writing. Mr Mellor's powerful bar-room metaphor was in response to a report on privacy and the press commissioned by the Government from Sir David Calcutt QC after a series of complaints about tabloid intrusion and a clutch of well-publicised libel actions.

That first Calcutt report suggested a probation period for the sinful tabloids, to see if they cleaned up their act. On the reports's recommendation, the Press Council, derided for ineffectuality, was replaced by the Press Complaints Commission (hard to distinguish from its predecessor), headed by Lord McGregor, late of the Advertising Standards Authority. The Calcutt report also urged legislation to control the use of long-lens cameras and bugging devices.

Then came the general election, when the issue was temporarily buried to enable the Tory press to concentrate on getting the Government re-elected. That safely accomplished, Mr Mellor, by now Secretary of State for National Heritage, asked Sir David to have another look.

While he was doing so, Mr Mellor was himself stitched up by the recording of his indiscreet telephone conversation with an actress and replaced by Peter Brooke. Then the collapse of the marriages of two of the Queen's sons was helped along by assorted telephone interceptions and long-lens photos.

In January, Sir David donned his black cap and said that, if he had his way, the Last Chance Saloon would now be converted to Death Row. The press had blown it. A statutory commission should be set up with powers to levy large fines in the event of transgressions. He repeated his call for legislation on specific breaches of privacy, and the Government is already committed to that principle, if undecided on the detail.

The redoubtable Lord McGregor opposes statutory regulation, as do all the national editors. After the second Calcutt report was published, he revealed that some members of the Royal Family had actually encouraged press coverage of their marital difficulties so as to present their side of the story. Although Sir David Calcutt appeared unmoved by this disclosure, it did serve to place the Royal Family on the margins of the argument. The feeling grew that the press could not be blamed from royal misjudgements.

More relevant were the photographs in the People last Sunday of Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley, ITV's popular daytime television presenters, in the South of France. The pictures, clearly taken with a long lens, were perfectly decent, but showed Ms Finnigan to be less glamorous in the flesh than on screen.

A law restricting the use of such cameras could mean the end of this kind of snatched photograph. Yet the pictures do not appear to conflict with the clause attached last week to the PCC's code of practice in an attempt to toughen it in advance of the White Paper. This outlaws the use of long lenses when people are in private houses or gardens or in hotel bedrooms, but beaches - private or public - are not covered.

Sir David English, who chaired the committee that drew up the new code, said he did not approve of the publication of the Finnigan pictures - even though some were republished on Monday in the Daily Mail. 'I know she's a public figure, but I don't think the fact that she spills out of her swimming costume is relevant to how she does her job.'

These are the kind of issues on which an ombudsman would have to rule and, were the press to agree to the Government's plan, to assess fines. The newspapers would be moving from the Last Chance Saloon to the No Chance Casino. Small wonder that they prefer to remain where they are.

(Photographs omitted)