They have shoved their slavering snouts into the parlours of weeping widows, and by their outrageous lies they have driven the relatives of their victims to suicide. When you read Leveson in full, you are left to ponder the mystery of how people can behave like this. Are these journalists that much nastier and more cynical than the rest of the human race? Why do they seem to have got out of control? The answer is simple. The press are no nastier than anyone else; quite the reverse. On the whole, journalists are highly intelligent, amusing and frequently idealistic.

But these days they are afraid. They are like the crew of a plane whose port engine has failed. They can see the ridge of the mountain ahead, and they have been driven to start chucking their principles overboard in the hope of avoiding a crash. That is why they have been so hungrily hacking phones, bribing officials, and claiming that asylum seekers have eaten the donkeys of Greenwich Park. They can see the altimeter of their circulation figures spiralling downwards, and they need stories ever more exotic and titillating to keep the readers buying.

Newspapers have always chased exclusives – and quite right, too. But the pressure on circulation is now so great that some papers have abandoned their grip on ethics and on reality. In the past 10 years, virtually every paper has experienced a drop in hard-copy circulation of between 30 and 40 per cent, and in some cases more. People are getting their news from different sources – principally the profusion of electronic media – and there seems to be no stopping the erosion in support for traditional papers.

That is in itself a sad and bad thing, since it is the Fleet Street papers that have the skills and experience – and public trust – to expose wrongdoing. But for some papers the costs are becoming prohibitive. Every year, every month, they are losing ground to blogs and Twitter and Google News; every year the internet eats more destructively into the business case for old-fashioned journalism. That is at least one of the reasons why some journalists have been driven to behave so disgracefully, squawking ever louder, no matter how erroneously, in the hope of being noticed.

The tragedy is that the cure may now be worse than the disease.

Leveson is proposing to throw shackles around that part of the media that is already struggling – while doing nothing to tackle the riot of bile and slander on the web. It was Twitter that turned the BBC’s awful Newsnight into a monstrous libel of Lord McAlpine; and yet Leveson proposes no code of conduct for the Tweeters. Instead, he endorses just about every politically correct criticism of the mainstream press, to the point where he seems to want to sterilise it of fun and flavour.

He complains, for instance, that the Mail was wrong to say that an asylum seeker was given leave to remain because of the attachment he had formed to his cat. I read the judgment, and the cat was certainly mentioned. It struck me as an entirely legitimate headline.

He seems to want to make the British press as earnest as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, whose front-page splash was once about “100 years of Electric Light in Switzerland”. He wants above all to create a system whereby newspapers would be compulsorily regulated by law – licensed – for the first time since the 17th century. He must be resisted; and the only way is for the media to recognise humbly and sincerely the extent of their recent errors, and accede to the setting up of a powerful and independent monitoring body, capable of wielding hefty fines, whose code they would undertake contractually to obey.

David Cameron’s analysis last week was entirely correct. He has thrown the papers a lifeline, and they need to grab it tight. We want a vital and exuberant media that reports the foibles of the rulers, without fear or favour but also without lying and cheating and cruelty.

If the papers get it right, and act fast, they can rebuild trust, and they may also be able to rebuild some of that lost circulation.

28 November 2012: Boris Johnson was left to sit it out in economy class as he played second fiddle to Bollywood megastar Kajol Devgn on the flight from Hyderabad to Mumbai. The London mayor’s bandwagon headed to India’s trade capital for the final leg of his six-day tour of the country, but with all business class seats taken up by the 38-year-old and her entourage, the mayor was left in economy for the hour-long flight to Mumbai.Picture: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The government was right to tighten rules for those who might become a drain on the state, he said, but warned “It’s crazy that we should be losing India’s top talent and the global leaders of the future to Australia and the United States.”

“The most important thing is academic freedom — if people are genuine students and genuinely desire to learn and contribute to the economy there should be a system which allows them to travel from one major centre of learning to another, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve,” he told students and academics at Delhi’s Amity University which announced it was establishing a new 15,000 student campus in London.

In an interview with The Telegraph, he said changes in visa regulations, to limit the amount of time students can remain in Britain to work, had caused a negative impression. “Indians are being put off. It’s a bit of perception [but] too many people have had difficulty. A lot of people raise it with me, students and businessmen too. They need to stay and take up employment more speedily [and for a longer period]. But generally their applications need to be processed faster and we need to be more sympathetic and not shutting off a major source of investment in our education,” he said.

^{During Boris Johnson’s visit to Delhi he handed over the London 2012 Olympic cauldron petals to Indian Olympians (PA)}

Until last April, Indian students studying at a British educational establishment were automatically allowed to stay and work for two years after their course ended. But concerns that too many were coming to Britain for dubious courses and staying for low paid jobs led to new rules which allowed longer stays after course completion but only for those with ‘graduate level jobs’ on salaries higher than £20,000. These students can stay for three years and can extend for a further six years if they meet the salary requirements.

Mr Johnson told the Home Secretary it was necessary to “shift the debate on student visas away from numerical targets and squarely onto policy based on promoting jobs and growth in the UK. This is why I am supporting a growing, cross-party consensus on removing students from the Government’s net migration target,” he said. He is also calling for a ‘Migration Advisory committee’ to conduct a cost-benefit study of international students to the British economy and new measures to protect foreign students against being repatriated if their college loses its license to recruit overseas.

His comments were welcomed by the British Business Group in India which has raised concerns about the changes. “No one can argue that bogus institutions or students should go unchecked. But it is vital for the UK’s prosperity that we are seen as a preferred education partnert for good and genuine Indian students. Our image as an attractive education destination has clearly suffered recently in India,” said Mark Runacres, head of the British Business Group and an educational consultancy.

British officials said the number of Indian undergraduate and postgraduate students had doubled from 2007 to 2011, but it is not yet known whether the new rules have affected those wanting to study in the United Kingdom.

Foreign students: countries sending the most students to the UK (in pictures)

The government was right to tighten rules for those who might become a drain on the state, he said, but warned “It’s crazy that we should be losing India’s top talent and the global leaders of the future to Australia and the United States.”

“The most important thing is academic freedom — if people are genuine students and genuinely desire to learn and contribute to the economy there should be a system which allows them to travel from one major centre of learning to another, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve,” he told students and academics at Delhi’s Amity University which announced it was establishing a new 15,000 student campus in London.

In an interview with The Telegraph, he said changes in visa regulations, to limit the amount of time students can remain in Britain to work, had caused a negative impression. “Indians are being put off. It’s a bit of perception [but] too many people have had difficulty. A lot of people raise it with me, students and businessmen too. They need to stay and take up employment more speedily [and for a longer period]. But generally their applications need to be processed faster and we need to be more sympathetic and not shutting off a major source of investment in our education,” he said.

^{During Boris Johnson’s visit to Delhi he handed over the London 2012 Olympic cauldron petals to Indian Olympians (PA)}

Until last April, Indian students studying at a British educational establishment were automatically allowed to stay and work for two years after their course ended. But concerns that too many were coming to Britain for dubious courses and staying for low paid jobs led to new rules which allowed longer stays after course completion but only for those with ‘graduate level jobs’ on salaries higher than £20,000. These students can stay for three years and can extend for a further six years if they meet the salary requirements.

Mr Johnson told the Home Secretary it was necessary to “shift the debate on student visas away from numerical targets and squarely onto policy based on promoting jobs and growth in the UK. This is why I am supporting a growing, cross-party consensus on removing students from the Government’s net migration target,” he said. He is also calling for a ‘Migration Advisory committee’ to conduct a cost-benefit study of international students to the British economy and new measures to protect foreign students against being repatriated if their college loses its license to recruit overseas.

His comments were welcomed by the British Business Group in India which has raised concerns about the changes. “No one can argue that bogus institutions or students should go unchecked. But it is vital for the UK’s prosperity that we are seen as a preferred education partnert for good and genuine Indian students. Our image as an attractive education destination has clearly suffered recently in India,” said Mark Runacres, head of the British Business Group and an educational consultancy.

British officials said the number of Indian undergraduate and postgraduate students had doubled from 2007 to 2011, but it is not yet known whether the new rules have affected those wanting to study in the United Kingdom.

Foreign students: countries sending the most students to the UK (in pictures)