JOURNALISTS are a bit like Millwall Football Club – everyone seems to hate us... and, like the Lions, we don’t care. It’s not because we’re horrible and unfeeling – we’re not – but because the day that everyone loves journalists is the day we’re not doing our job properly.

In the main our job is to find out things that people don’t want other people to know and then publish them.

You know, stuff like if your MP has spent their parliamentary ‘allowance’ on moatcleaning and glittery loo seats.

Or if that TV or sports personality who trades on his family-man image is secretly knocking off another man’s wife.

Or if the government is planning to axe benefits to injured ex-servicemen.

Of course we get it wrong. And yes, the words ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Savile’ do spring to mind. Along with a few others.

But with the journos who failed to investigate this, who messed up on Lord McAlpine, who hacked the phones of innocent crime victims we also have in our number heroines like Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times reporter who was assassinated in Syria, simply for exposing the Assad regime’s systematic murder of children.

We have folk like the late John Diamond and Ruth Picardie, who chronicled their own deaths from cancer simply, I think, because they couldn’t let a good story go to waste.

Many who don’t even know it have cause to be grateful to journalists, not just for heroic reporting but also for the ceaseless ferreting of people like my colleague, Mel Vass, who spends her days finding out stuff that the local council would rather she didn’t.

And then we have operators like the great John Humphreys, who dissected his boss, George Entwistle, live on air, effectively costing him his job as Director General of the BBC.

More than anything this incident demonstrated just why the freedom of the press, and journalists, is so vital. It’s to our nation’s eternal credit that Humphreys was able to do this without any comeback whatsoever and that for the most part the press has been free from state regulation, even when it has exposed that state, poked fun at the ruling party and campaigned against government policy.

Thanks to Lord Leveson, however, by the time you read this we may already be living in a world where an unelected body of people you’ve never heard of will decide what the press – from Marie through to Mel and me – should and shouldn’t publish.

For all I know these arbiters may very well be the sort of people who behaved disgracefully in the 1970s and now occupy a respectable position in society.

They may be members of the unelected House of Lords.They may be politicos who have a grudge against journalists because they revealed their fake expenses claims. They may be big businessmen or bankers who don’t want anyone beaking into their murky financial affairs. Or they may simply be the kind of liberalist who believes that any newspaper which has red on its masthead, or which asks if we’re letting too many immigrants into the country, should be wiped from the face of the planet.

Whoever they are, they should be careful what they wish for because no sane or decent person should want to muzzle a free press.

Those calling for regulation should be scrutinised very heavily indeed because they will assuredly be the ones with the most to hide and the most to benefit.

Leveson was set up to look into what appeared to be, and in some cases was, grievous wrongdoing.

But here’s the thing. Given that it’s already illegal to hack phones, pay off cops and to purport that someone is guilty of a crime before they’ve been tried, why the hell weren’t those laws invoked at the time? And how would more regulation help? It’s against the law to commit murder but that doesn’t prevent the deaths of the 700 or so souls who are unlawfully killed each year, does it?

Does anyone really believe that the people chosen to join any press regulatory body would be Doris from up the road, Ray the electrician, or the nice lady from Beales?

We are quangoed, committeed and regulated to death in our ordinary lives but I bet that not one of you knows anyone who sits on the Arts Council, the BBC Board of Trust or even the police authority.

It may not feel like it now but it is actually an abomination.

The press should be free to publish the news, publish tittle-tattle about celebrities, discuss the merits of the government’s economic policies, criticise judges, sneer at the apparent hypocrisy of folk like Hugh Grant, investigate the finances of our former Prime Minister, and, like me, to more or less write what it damn well pleases, every week it chooses to.

Because only when – or if –we lose it will we realise that the freedom of the press, in all its infuriating imperfection, is so important to defend because it actually represents and helps safeguard the freedom of us all.