Former Sun editor David Yelland’s speech on the first anniversary of the Leveson Report (sponsored by the Media Standards Trust and Article 19) was honest, forthright, refreshing and surprisingly moving to the many victims of press abuse in the audience.

Before he criticised others, he owned up to a few of his own errors of judgement. I won’t dwell on them, because, frankly, by recent standards, they pale in comparison. But it was courageous of him to do so.

He didn’t go in for personal criticism of other editors. He talked much more about what it is to be an editor, and how it can go to your head. When he was the editor of the Sun, one in four adults read the paper (the proportion is, he says, about the same now). Yelland truly believed that such a high readership meant that he – unelected, and without a clue as to what his readers really thought – was speaking on their behalf. How could anyone dare to disagree with him, he wondered?

Furthermore, in the pyramidal and distinctly old-fashioned world of the tabloid press, what the editor said, went. No-one ever questioned his authority until he’d put his foot in it. Even today, for a staffer to step out of line, or even for an editor to step out of line with the collective thinking of the editors’ rat pack, it could be professional suicide.

Most tellingly, he said that the classic role of the press, in holding the establishment to account, had become perverted. The press still did not realise, given the power that they wield, that they are the establishment, or at least part of it, now.

Yelland called for truth, humility, reconciliation, and compromise in what appears at the moment to be an impasse between the press and its readership, the majority of whom disagree with the press’s dog-in-a-manger attitude towards any proper, independent self-regulation.

I would like to hear more truth from other editors, and I would certainly like to see more compromise. However, as someone who worked for many years on human rights issues in Northern Ireland, there was one thing I took away from David Yelland’s speech on Friday: a modicum of healing, for which I thank him. That is the first step towards reconciliation, which opens all doors.- Jane Winter, victim of computer hacking