John Whittingdale has sat in the Commons since 1992 and is one of its longer serving members, a Thatcherite of the old school who was the late prime minister's political secretary in her final years in Downing Street. More than three decades on, his record is that of a creature of the media world he was twice asked to regulate.

His best work was done in scrutiny. For a decade from 2005 he chaired the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, and during the phone hacking scandal his committee produced the 2012 report that declared Rupert Murdoch not a fit person to run a major company. It is the line he is best remembered for, though the detail is less flattering than the headline: the toughest wording passed only on a party split, with the Labour and Liberal Democrat members for it and the Conservatives against, and Whittingdale himself did not vote on it. Even at his most independent, the instinct to spare Murdoch was there.

That instinct defined his time in government. As Culture Secretary from 2015 he held the brief for press regulation, the BBC and Channel 4, and he was the press industry's preferred kind of minister, sceptical of the post Leveson settlement, in no hurry to commence the statutory backstop, and openly cool towards the BBC. He was not a neutral referee.

Then came the conflict that should have ended the pretence of neutrality. In 2016 it emerged that Whittingdale had been in a relationship with a woman who was a sex worker, and that several newspapers had known and chosen not to publish. He said he had been unaware of her occupation and ended things when he learned of it, which may well be true. The problem was structural. The man responsible for whether and how the press would be regulated had been, for months, a story the press was sitting on, and no one regulating with that hanging over him could be trusted to regulate hard. Downing Street called it a private matter and moved on.

In 2024 he held Maldon, the seat he has represented in one form or another since 1992, though his majority fell to 6,906 with Reform in second. He was knighted in 2022.

Whittingdale is a conviction Eurosceptic who served long and chaired well, and the phone hacking inquiry was a real piece of work in an era when few held the press to anything. He is also the embodiment of regulatory capture in a single career, a politician so close to the industries he oversaw that he could never quite bring himself to bind them, and who was compromised, at the crucial moment, by the very press he was meant to hold to account. The longevity is real. The distance a regulator needs from the regulated was the thing he never had.