The Leveson inquiry will finish its principal evidence-gathering phase this week and begin looking for consensus on how 90 days of evidence can be moulded into a system of press regulation which satisfies the victims of libel or intrusion, MPs and newspaper owners.

The tribunal, set up almost exactly a year ago, has heard from hundreds of witnesses, ranging from prime ministers, films stars and media moguls to junior civil servants, rank-and-file reporters and people who would have remained anonymous but for Fleet Street’s excesses.

The formal end of “Module 3”, which looked at the relationship between the press and politicians, is due on Wednesday. After that, Module 4 will feature witnesses who have been thinking, and writing, about regulatory solutions to the issues of press misconduct, abnegations of privacy and lawbreaking that the previous three modules have highlighted.

There have been 18 submissions on the future of regulation that the inquiry has thought worthy of publication on its website. None of them offers solutions, or even opinions, on some of the most damning testimony Lord Justice Leveson has heard, which showed the embarrassing extent to which politicians and police officers became intimates of newspaper owners and editors.

Instead, the submissions centre on how best to police the press without impinging on its own policing role as protector of ordinary individuals against organs of state or local administration. To use Lord Leveson’s phrase from his inaugural speech as inquiry chairman, they seek to answer the question: “Who guards the guardians?”

Much of the most powerful evidence of the past 86 days of hearings has come from ordinary people whose misfortunes brought them under the interrogatory lamp of press attention. The parents of missing Madeleine McCann or Milly Dowler, the murdered teenager, are the most quoted examples: in both cases they have, after enduring gross suffering at the hands of reckless journalism, received huge sums of money in recompense.

Lord Leveson found an ally 10 days ago in David Cameron, the prime minister, for his view that any new system of regulation for the press would have to satisfy the McCanns and the Dowlers.

But perhaps more difficult for the inquiry, or Mr Cameron, to satisfy was the case of Margaret Watson.

In one of the earliest sessions of the inquiry, she described how articles about the murder of her teenage daughter by one of her classmates in a Glasgow school were so distorted by the agendas of their authors, and so misrepresented the facts of the case, that they contributed to the later suicide of her 15-year-old son, found dead with a magazine piece about his sister’s case clutched in his hand.

Lord Leveson has said a plea by Tony Blair, the former prime minister, for regulation to separate fact from comment, to prevent agenda-driven journalism from playing fast and loose with accuracy, was a far more difficult task than just punishing phone hackers, intrusive paparazzi or purveyors of cynical defamation.

The judge has steered clear of favouring or opposing any particular form of regulation. But he has made it clear that he is opposed to constraining the freedom of the press and also that “tinkering at the edges” of the current system of the Press Complaints Commission will not be good enough.

Over the final three weeks of evidence, he will try to thrash out the issues presented by the newspaper industry, which wants to retain control of a self-regulatory body through funding, and by strong opponents of the press, who would be happy to see parliament set the rules of behaviour for newspapers. Neither is likely to find favour in the Leveson report expected some time in October.

But that report will have to resolve problems such as how to force owners like Richard Desmond,proprietor of the Express and Daily Star papers, from opting out of regulation altogether, or how to regulate the press if the internet remains a jungle of privacy invasion, distortion and defamation.

To the relief of many, and the trepidation of some, the inquiry is now in its last days, where actions will take the place of millions of words.