IN any democracy, the relationship between politicians and the media is going to be a chippy one.

That can be aggravating if you happen to be the politician in the firing line; but too bad.

The press play a critical role in holding those with power to account, and exposing its misuse.

When politicians complain about their treatment by the press, they don’t get much public sympathy.

Winston Churchill once said that it was as useless for a minister to rail against the newspapers as it was a sea captain to shout from the bridge of his ship about bad weather.

Or, as US President Harry Truman once put it ‘if you don’t like the heat, get out of the kitchen’.

There’s not much concern for so-called ‘celebrities’, who, after all, only come to public attention because of the coverage they receive in the media.

But when some sections of the press break common standards of decency, and possibly the law too, that’s different.

Tuesday’s revelations that the voice mail of the murdered Milly Dowler may have been hacked into, after she went missing, by private investigators working for the News of the World, takes the debate about press conduct from the fevered world of Westminster and Fleet Street into every home in the land.

The possibility that the voice mails of the victims of the ‘7/7’ bombings, (whose sixth anniversary is today) may have been hacked into as well is beyond belief.

There is now a mammoth police investigation into all these allegations.

Prosecutions may follow.

A wide ranging judicial inquiry is inevitable.

I prejudge none of these, but we do know enough already to appreciate that the existing system of regulating the conduct of the press, through the self-regulation of the Press Complaints Commission, will have to change.

Working out how this system should be reformed is tricky.

But, in my view, there will almost certainly have to be some statutory regulation, working with a re-vamped Commission.

We can’t go on as we are.