LORD Wakeham, chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, is to embark on an exhaustive round of meetings with editors and proprietors to reinforce his warning about indefensible media intrusion.
His tough stance was welcomed yesterday by the National Heritage Secretary, Ms Virginia Bottomley, but she called for the industry's code of practice to be strengthened and written into editors' contracts of employment.
Lord Wakeham warned press self-regulation was being endangered by "a stream of injudicious stories centring on the private lives of public individuals, backed up only by the flimsiest of public interest defences".
Ms Bottomley ruled out, privacy legislation, describing it as a legal minefield. She said the code needed to be more explicit and urged the establishment of a telephone hotline to make the complaints procedure more accessible.
The commission has plans to improve its helpline, which tells members of the public how to contact a newspaper if they fear the code is about to be breached.
But it is firmly opposed to running a hotline, which it fears could act as a "prior restraint" on a newspaper's freedom to print stories.
Most editors already have the code written into their contracts, a policy favoured by the commission. The warning from Lord Wakeham was prompted by three recent royal stories.
He was concerned by the Sun's coverage of the hoax video purporting to show Princess Diana and Maj James Hewitt, lurid tabloid stories about the private life of the Duchess of York, and an inaccurate Daily Express report linking Prince William to the daughter of a Scottish aristocrat.
Lord Wakeham said just because people did not complain newspapers should not assume they had carte blanche to print what they liked.
Richard Addis editor of the Express, said on Radio 4's The World at One that the code needed to be made "absolutely clear" on privacy. He thought writing it into all journalists' contracts would be too legally complicated.