Phone Hacking

David Lammy Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The relationship did get unhealthy. It was too close and, as I have put it, too much time was spent courting the media and not enough time was spent confronting the problems, but let us be honest, we are not suddenly all going to become monks and live in a monastery. We have to have relationships so that politicians can try to persuade media organisations that they are trying to do the right thing. We have a duty to explain our policies and what we are doing for the country. Democracy is government by explanation, so we have to explain ourselves to the media, but I hope that this whole process will end up delivering a healthier relationship where we can do that explaining, but confront the problems at the same time.

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Given what the Prime Minister has said about the police’s performance yesterday, was it wise of the Home Secretary to describe John Yates as doing a good job, and of Boris Johnson, when chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority, to describe this as a song and dance and a load of codswallop?

[The Prime Minister]

Let me deal specifically with the issue of John Yates, because this is important. He does an extremely important job for the country in terms of counter-terrorism policing. I have watched him and the job that he does at close hand. We have to have a situation where the police are operationally independent, and if we put our trust in Paul Stephenson to run his team, we must allow him to do that. I ask the right hon. Gentleman to think about this: it would be quite dangerous, would it not, if politicians were able to point at individual police officers, particularly those who were leading investigations into other politicians? So there are some dangers here. I think that John Yates is doing a good job on counter-terrorism. Clearly, as he said himself, he has some questions to answer about what went wrong with the initial investigation, and I hope that he will welcome this inquiry, which will get to the bottom of what went wrong.