Times editor on panel to select board of new press regulator

Mr Witherow will be the one serving editor on the panel (Getty Images)

John Witherow, editor of The Times, will be among members of an appointments panel that will select the board of the new press regulator, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO).

Mr Witherow will be the one serving editor on the panel, which is chaired by Sir Hayden Phillips, a former senior civil servant.

Sir Hayden announced that other members of the panel would be the lawyer Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, a former justice of the Supreme Court, Dame Denise Platt, who chaired the Commission for Social Care Inspection, and Paul Horrocks, a former editor of the Manchester Evening News.

IPSO, which is being set up by the newspaper and magazine publishing industry, is independent of the Government’s Royal Charter on press regulation. Sir Hayden said the appointment panel’s first task would be to select the chair of the IPSO board. He said he hoped the board would be ready to act by 1 May.