It has examined press ethics and media links to politicians. But what reforms can we expect to see?

It began last November with the grief of the Dowler family – and the cameras snapping Hugh Grant. In between came billionaires and editors, chief constables and tabloid reporters – and finally a succession of prime ministers. Over 86 days of evidence, all human life swept its way through the dock of court 73, the home of the Leveson Inquiry – a string of witnesses, all having their say on "culture, practices and ethics of the press" – and leaving behind a welter of contradictory evidence for the high court judge to wade through. 

Lord Black, representing the newspapers who help fund the Press Complaints Commission, on Thursday tried to present his proposals for reform – presenting a detailed plan to revamp the body without introducing statutory legislation. The Black plan, canvassed in front of all newspaper owners, promises to set up an investigations arm with the power to levy fines of up to £1m if it uncovers phone hacking style abuse, will introduce a majority of lay members on its governing bodies, and hopes to use sanctions such as denying papers the use of Press Association wires to ensure compliance. But Black's plan faces a long battle and a sceptical judge if the PCC-plus model is to be adopted.

In contrast, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband told Lord Justice Leveson this month they would support legislation to help regulate the press, but Michael Gove and George Osborne said just the reverse – while David Cameron dodged the question. PCC chairman Lord Hunt said he could toughen up the so-called regulator with the support of all newspapers, while Express owner and PCC-refusenik Richard Desmond derided it as a "useless organisation" staffed with people who liked "tea and biscuits".

But as Black admitted on Thursday, it was unlikely that any fines levied by the PCC would go to compensate individuals wronged by the press – because the issues examined were likely to be systemic rather than stemming from a single case.

That creates the central problem at the heart of the Leveson inquiry. For supporters, the inquiry is a long overdue reckoning for Britain's newspapers, and its tabloids in particular. The excesses of the past years, even decades, were aired – the traducing of Kate and Gerry McCann, or the accusation of Christopher Jefferies, wrongly implied to be a murderer – while some new misdeeds were uncovered, with Times editor James Harding having to explain away an isolated example of email hacking at his title.

For critics Leveson became sprawling – its mini-inquiry into Jeremy Hunt and the Sky bid may have been mandated by David Cameron, but was in the eyes of some far removed from its remit.

For his part, Lord Justice Leveson is desperate to be relevant, rather than produce a document that will end up "on the second shelf of a journalism professor's study". He asked every major politician in front of him to help him build "consensus"; he knows he has the problem of producing recommendations that will win support from across the main parties, while providing a template for a press that does not want to be regulated by law.

He has seen ample evidence demonstrating the closeness of newspaper owners, editors and politicians too – the "country supper" and "Yes we Cam!" intimacy as demonstrated by Rebekah Brooks's text message to David Cameron – and is clearly twitchy. Michael Gove said in February it was creating a "chilling atmosphere" for the press in which to operate – a remark that prompted the judge to ring No 10 for reassurance that his work was not going to be ignored.

It is a handful of victims of press intrusion – the ordinary members of the public – that sit at the centre of Leveson's work. Kate and Gerry McCann, whose daughter Madeleine went missing in Portugal in 2007, changed the tone of the inquiry at the end of its first week of evidence. An emotional Kate talked about "journalists [who] said we stored her body in a freezer," and photographers who would wait outside their Leicestershire home to bang on the car window as she got the children ready for school to get the startled look for the words "fragile, furious or whatever they wanted to put in the headline".

They also told the story of how her personal diary had been acquired by the News of the World and published without permission – but while there were apologies and libel payouts by the Sunday tabloid and the Express and Star titles, Gerry McCann was amazed that nobody had lost their job.

They were not alone. Some made simple, effective pleas for reform. Christopher Jefferies, who said he was "shamelessly vilified" by tabloids who implied, wrongly, that he had murdered Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010, said that once he was cleared there was no point going to the PCC for redress, because the body had "no powers to fine newspapers". He had to resort to the courts, taking on the risk and potential expense of a legal action to win a six-figure libel payout.

Proposals for reform

Other hard cases prompted more debatable proposals. The inquiry also heard from Margaret Watson, who said articles in the Glasgow Herald and Marie Claire, written after their daughter's 1991 murder by a classmate, contributed to their 15-year-old son's suicide. She argued that the law should be changed so it was no longer legally impossible for the dead to be defamed. Gerry McCann, speaking the language of his profession, medicine, argued "You should not be able to publish photographs of private individuals going about their private business without their explicit consent".

By having the so-called ordinary victims on early, in effect, Lord Justice Leveson built up a case for the prosecution. The judge made repeated interventions indicating that he regarded these cases as touchstones, in March noting that any proposals for reform would have to "work for me" by which he meant "the public at large".

It was a point not lost on David Cameron. In his evidence this month, he came close to handing the victims a group veto. "If families like the Dowlers feel this has really changed the way they would have been treated, we would have done our job properly," he said.

However, even the victims' stories presented complications. Lord Justice Leveson attempted to get to the bottom of what happened to Milly Dowler's phone in 2002; the hacking revelation by the Guardian that triggered his inquiry. Further inquiries by the Met and Surrey police tentatively concluded in December that it may not be the case, as the Guardian had originally reported, that the News of the World deleted messages left for the then missing schoolgirl on her mobile phone shortly after she disappeared in March 2002. The new doubt triggered a hostile reaction from some parts of News International, the publishers of the News of the World, with Richard Caseby, the Sun managing editor, arguing it was the "twist of the knife," the poignant detail that led to the tabloid's closure.

It was a moment where some hoped the inquiry might collapse, but Leveson concluded that if there was "any doubt" about the purpose of his inquiry by then, he anticipated that "the last month" – meaning the evidence of victims of press intrusion – had dispelled that.

Further investigations followed, the Guardian corrected its original report, by which time the temperature came out of the issue. In March Rupert Murdoch launched the Sun on Sunday, which now sells 2.2m copies – 400,000 less than the old News of the World – and a further analysis by the Met and Surrey police in April was unable to explain what it was that caused the phone messages on Milly's phone to clear at the end of March 2002, which had given her parents "false hope" she was alive.

The police examination revealed clear evidence her phone was hacked in April 2002 – but the fact that it was so difficult to pin down what had happened 10 years ago may explain why it has taken so long for hacking charges to emerge. At the time of writing the Crown Prosecution Service is deciding whether to charge 11 journalists with hacking offences, in an investigation that began in January of 2011.

On alleged evidence supplied by News Corporation's in-house management and standards committee, a string of Sun journalists were arrested on suspicion of making corrupt payments to public officials. At first there were howls of complaint from the Sun, which in turn prompted Detective Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers to come to the inquiry and make the incendiary statement in February that there was a "culture of illegal payments" to police and other public sector officials. But with the Akers led-inquiry into alleged bribes – Operation Elveden – still ongoing, Leveson was unable to hear more about the subject. His inquiry into press standards had to move on, unable to touch on the subject of ongoing investigations.

Instead the inquiry moved on to the nexus of relationships between the press and politicians, and in particular the tight links between News International, New Labour and latterly David Cameron and his Conservatives.

In some respects, politicians were treated like victims, although Tony Blair's plea for Leveson to find a way of ensuring a greater separation between fact and comment – he complained of having fallen out with the "controlling element" of the Daily Mail – did not find much take-up anywhere else.

Mostly, Leveson helped lay bare the details of the intimacy between Britain's press and political class – forcing newspaper owners and politicians to disclose their contacts with party leaders, leading to the revelation, for example, that it was James Murdoch who told Cameron that the Sun would back the Conservatives on 10 September 2009 at a breakfast at The George club – three weeks before the newspaper actually did so with its "Labour's Lost It!" front page, on the day after Gordon Brown's speech to Labour conference. The prime minister was forced to disclose on five separate occasions how often he had met News International executives – with the amount reaching 59 after Leveson obliged him to release a full list – of meetings that included the country suppers of the kind Rebekah Brooks referred to.

It was a valuable exercise in disclosure, which is likely to set a standard for transparency in the future.

Looking for a smoking gun

The harder task, though, was proving the existence or otherwise of "deals" between politicians and media owners, for which read Rupert Murdoch. On the first of the media mogul's two days of evidence, Murdoch said "I've never asked a prime minister for anything in my life" – a claim echoed, curiously, by both Blair and Cameron.

The inquiry looked hard at the circumstances of News Corp's bid for BSkyB, which was launched a month after the 2010 general election, but Cameron said it was "nonsense" that there was an "overt deal" in which support for the Tories was translated into support for the bid. Nor, despite intense inquiry, was there any explicit evidence of a deal, though there was plenty of evidence of close contact between Jeremy Hunt and James Murdoch before a clearly pro-News Corp Hunt got to decide on the bid – and plenty of close contact between Hunt's special adviser, the hapless and loyal Adam Smith, and Murdoch's special adviser Fred Michel during the process.

That left the inquiry to posit a different theory, with Robert Jay, the counsel to the inquiry, asking Rupert Murdoch if he had an "aura or charisma" that meant he never had to ask explicitly for what he wanted from editors or politicians.

It is a subtle argument, but its difficulty (apart from the lack of paperwork to prove the point) is that it does not obviously lead to any solutions. Equally significantly, Leveson has so far showed little apparent desire to get into the question of the ownership structures of newspapers: when invited by Ed Miliband to set a cross-media ownership limit that would force a Murdoch sale of the Sun or the Times, Leveson fought shy, "because that involves all sorts of competition issues which would require quite detailed analysis".

Instead, Leveson went elsewhere to debate some practical solutions. The judge has been surprisingly consistent in the views he has espoused, taking the approach of testing out ideas periodically with witnesses he likes. Leveson is clearly sceptical of the PCC, telling Financial Times editor Lionel Barber in January that the body was not "really a regulator" but a "complaints mechanism" – and that it needed to be supplemented by another body, a new kind of court, "some sort of arbitral system" to cover libel and privacy claims - an imagined body that the judge said would be designed to be low cost - or to use a phrase he repeated many times "not make extra work for lawyers". Its nearest analogue would be the industrial tribunals, or the arbitration system used in the construction industry.

This, though, is an area that would require legislation, though the libel and privacy tribunal could sit alongside a revamped PCC. But all the evidence in front of Leveson suggests that the battle to come is whether there should be a "Leveson Bill" – and what it should contain, given the broad nature of the evidence submitted so far. Leveson has suggested it could include constitutional safeguards for the freedom of the press along the lines of those offered for the judiciary – but so deep is the fear of legislation that Lord Hunt, giving evidence in February, said he feared that a bill with such intentions would end up being subverted by parliament.

But given that Leveson is so focused on the difficulties faced by the likes of the Dowlers and the McCanns, and how they can get affordable redress and compensation – the real battle over reform is only just beginning.

• This article was amended on 22 June 2012. The original said that the Sun on Sunday sells 400,000 more copies than the old News of the World. This has been corrected.