HUGH Grant has accused Theresa May of "extraordinary treachery" for abandoning a Conservative commitment on press regulation.
The actor, known for films such as Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, has been a long-time supporter of the anti-media intrusion campaign group Hacked Off.
Mr Grant told ITV's Peston on Sunday show that he felt "unbelievable anger" on behalf of families who said they had been wronged by sections of the British media after the second part of the Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press would no longer take place should the Tories return to government.
The 56-year-old, himself the subject of lurid headlines about his private life, told host Robert Peston: "I feel unbelievable anger on behalf of these people I've worked with over the last six years and who relived the suffering they went through.
"They were given personal promises by the last Tory prime minister - both in parliament and to their faces, that Leveson would be seen through, that they would be protected whatever the outcome of it, that they are the ones that are important.
"Now this prime minister - for short term political gain ... to get herself good headlines, to get herself elected - throws it all away.
"It's an act of extraordinary treachery."
Allegations of phone hacking at the News of the World led to the Leveson Inquiry, with then-prime minister David Cameron initially announcing in 2011 that it would be conducted in two parts.
The second part was expected to investigate law-breaking and improper conduct within media organisations, the original police investigation into phone hacking and whether police were complicit in misconduct.
Ministers delayed taking a decision on Leveson in the last Parliament, which led to Labour's Chris Bryant, a victim of phone hacking, to claim the Government was effectively saying "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, not going to proceed with part two".
Mr Grant said: "It really doesn't do any good for me to take the press on, full-frontal, for six years. It really is the reverse of that, I can assure you.
"With the exception of (fellow actor and writer) Steve Coogan, who comes and goes with Hacked Off, I think I'm the only so-called celebrity - a word I abhor - who is involved in the whole thing."
He said the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso), the watchdog set up in the wake of 2014's Leveson Inquiry, had "not actually done any regulating at all".
An independent review last year found Ipso to be an effective regulator that is taken "very seriously" by editors.
Former civil servant Sir Joseph Pilling's review of Ipso acknowledged it faced an "uphill task" in proving that it "deserves to be trusted as an independent regulator".
But his six-month probe, ordered by the regulator, found "no evidence" of Ipso's decisions being improperly influenced by the press and said its upholding of complaints is taken seriously by the industry.
In September, MPs questioned why Ipso had not fined any newspaper found to be in breach of standards rules, or demanded equal prominence for corrections of inaccurate headlines.
But on fines, Sir Joseph said there was a "degree of disconnection" between the regulator's powers and public expectation.
