The editor of Private Eye has rejected calls for the statutory regulation of the press.
Ian Hislop told the Leveson Inquiry that the laws were not rigorously enforced because of the close relationship police and politicians had with senior media executives.
Mr Hislop defended the use of "blagging" by journalists carrying out investigations into wrongdoing and warned against introducing strict privacy laws like those found in France.
Mr Hislop said: "I do think that statutory regulation is not required. Most of the heinous crimes that came up and have made such a splash in front of this inquiry have already been illegal.
"Contempt of court is illegal, phone tapping is illegal, policemen taking money is illegal. All of these things don't need a code, we already have laws for them.
"The fact that these laws were not rigorously enforced is again due to the failure of the police, the interaction of the police and News International - and let's be honest about this, the fact that our politicians have been very, very involved in ways that I think are not sensible with senior News International people."
He said he hoped that inquiry chairman Lord Justice Leveson would call Prime Minister David Cameron and his predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to give evidence.
He also alleged that Mohamed al Fayed commissioned Benjamin Pell, better known as "Benji the Binman", to rifle through Private Eye's rubbish.
"We put a camera up and found out Benji was going through our bins. Mr Fayed was looking for things to print about Private Eye at the time."
Asked if he had evidence of Mr al Fayed's involvement, he said: "I think the fact that it appeared in Punch, which he owned, was a giveaway."
He said Private Eye would sometimes use a single source as the basis for a story, for example in whistleblowing cases, but his journalists would check the facts as thoroughly as they could.
Mr Hislop, who has edited Private Eye since 1986, said 40 libel actions had been brought against his magazine since 2000, of which 26 were withdrawn, 11 settled, one resulted in a hung jury and two were won.
British Prime Minister David Cameron set up the Leveson Inquiry in July in response to revelations that the News of the World commissioned a private detective to hack murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler's phone after she disappeared in 2002.
