Much talk about national press regulation, with reports that swathes of our media won’t sign up to the new Royal Commission.

With top journalists up before the beak, hacking and phone tapping disturbing all reasonable people and a list as long as your arm of innocents whose lives have been trashed by our peculiar national newspapers, there can surely be nobody outside Fleet Street that seriously believes the do-nothing option is right or that the pervasive culture in our media is acceptable.

Let it be said loud and clear that the press needs licence to print junk because that’s the privilege of a free press.

So it is, for example, that poor Prince Harry gets torn apart on the front page of one our wonderful newspapers because, it is inferred, somebody else sat his Sandhurst exams.

Even in the highly prejudicial terms expressed last week, what this apparently amounted to was a young man texting a soldier acquaintance for advice on how he might approach an essay he had been set as part of his coursework.

Well, OK, most of us as students didn’t have recourse to a retired major on our household staff, but on the spectrum of malfeasance this must surely bump along the bottom.

But not according to our screeching national press, for whom this had all the ingredients of a good front page story, apart, of course, for substance. Still, as I say, liberty to print rubbish is the hallmark of a free press.

Through gritted teeth, perhaps, but nevertheless, we must defend it, resisting the temptation to govern the press by illiberal statute; a course of action that many have been advancing. But setting the framework for proper, effective, self-regulation to deal with the more egregious end of the spectrum of press behaviour, making it pay properly when defenceless innocents suffer from falsehoods, intrusion and shoddy reporting, is another matter.

Enter the Royal Commission.