Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Debate between Geoffrey Cox and James Clappison

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Cox]

The matter needs to be closely examined, and the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee has taken it on board. With the greatest respect to the Attorney-General at the time, if he was informed of the matter, he should have interested himself in exactly how the investigation would be conducted. On the face of it, an enormous amount of wrongdoing was simply ignored. The police appear to have proposed a strategy, which would, as the briefing paper put it to the Attorney-General, “ring-fence” Mulcaire and Goodman and exclude a whole raft of serious criminal wrongdoing from investigation. That may well have affected Members.

I do not know to whom the Committee refers when it says that neither Ministers nor the police escalated the matter. As the Committee put it, if Ministers at the time had taken those issues sufficiently seriously, the matter would have been investigated. The truth would have been discovered then and we could have avoided a whole series of events that we now know unfolded.

My second point is about the review suggested by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner Yates. The Home Affairs Committee has rightly judged, in tone and substance, its criticisms of Mr Yates and Mr Hayman. There are serious questions to be asked about why an investigation or a review—I appreciate that it was not a formal review—that was carried out in eight hours apparently failed to read material that, as the former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions was able to determine in a few minutes, gave rise to the gravest illegalities. On the face of it, that is either wilful blindness or rank incompetence. Whatever the reason, Mr Yates’s resignation was right and done for proper reasons. It is inconceivable that, if the exercise had been carried out properly, the material would not have come to light in 2009. Questions arise about the closeness of officers of the Metropolitan police to News International and whether that deflected and deterred them from a rigorous analysis of the evidence that had been in their possession since 2006. It was not only in their possession, but, as the memorandum of 30 May 2006 to the Attorney-General shows, they had discovered that it included

“a vast array of offending behaviour.”

[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

I do not know many of the details that my hon. and learned Friend has given to the House, but the Select Committee heard that a great deal of the evidence was never examined, either in the original investigation or in the course of the review, so it could not be known what possible criminal behaviour had occurred, in addition to the hundreds and thousands of names involved. The e-mails that my hon. and learned Friend mentioned are slightly different. News International supplied them internally and they had not been held by the police. They were supplied to the solicitors who gave them in May to the former DPP, who quickly saw wrongdoing in them.

[Mr Cox]

My hon. Friend is right that new material was supplied by Harbottle & Lewis, but I am referring to material that was in the possession of the police in 2006—mobile phone records, about which they told the then Attorney-General, “Look we’ve got a vast array of offending behaviour here. What are we going to do?” The instruction—or at least the approval—that came from on high appears to have been, “Confine it. Keep out the penumbra of offending behaviour you could examine and confine it to Mulcaire and Goodman.” That was wrong. With hindsight, we now see that that judgment was fundamentally flawed. The matter should have been investigated. Why was it not?

One cannot resist the conclusion that, until it became apparent that ordinary members of the public—Milly Dowler, soldiers who fought for this country—had also been subject to hacking, the Labour Government’s approach was that politicians and celebrities were fair game, so it was not a serious matter. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee reported that Mr Clarke gave as his justification the fact that he did not have many resources and that he was also dealing with terrorism at the time. Frankly, the clear impression is given that the matter was not very serious. One suspects that that is why no action was taken.

It has been suggested that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was wrong to decline an invitation to be briefed in 2010. The surprise is that the offer was ever made, not that it was declined. The chief of staff did exactly the right thing. In 2010, when The New York Times published the report, the Prime Minister was right: he needed evidence. He could not act on anything else.

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[Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con)]

I served on the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into this matter. I came to the inquiry straightforwardly; I had no previous involvement or personal interest in it. I heard the evidence given to the Committee and shared the conclusions that it came to and which I felt were justified by the evidence. I say with sadness that I am not satisfied with all the evidence that we heard from the police. I say that with sadness as somebody who has the greatest respect for the police. I do not believe that any taint has been put on the integrity of Sir Paul Stephenson or on the thousands of Metropolitan police officers who serve on the force, many of whom live in my constituency. However, questions remain unanswered about the conduct of the investigation, including the original investigation, which, as we now know, seems to have had catastrophic effects on the reputation of the police and, as we now know, on many individuals.

I heard the contribution from my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox) and agreed with many of the questions that came to his mind. As he said—and this was the evidence that the Committee heard—a considerable amount of material was seized from Mulcaire and Goodman, but the police did not properly pursue investigations with the material that they had. Indeed, some of the large quantities of material was not investigated or read at all, it would appear. Nor did the police look for further potentially relevant material in the normal way by searching premises, seizing documents and interviewing people. We now know that such material might have been at hand because we heard the evidence from the former Director of Public Prosecutions—as it happens, he now works for News International as its counsel—who, when asked to advise on this matter, saw some of the material that had been in the hands of News International and after brief consideration advised that it contained criminal matters that had to be referred to the police. I think that that was in May 2011—that is what the chronology suggests—not in 2005-06 when the matter first came to light.

[Mr Cox]

I am grateful for what my hon. Friend has said. I can show him the evidence if he wants. On 30 May 2006, the Attorney-General and the DPP were informed that there was a vast array of offending behaviour and that a vast number of telephone numbers in the possession of the police had been accessed without authority. However, there was a conscious decision to confine the investigation, even though they knew that hundreds of people, including Members of the House, had had their phones tapped.

[Mr Clappison]

I have to say, having heard the evidence, that the answer to my hon. and learned Friend’s point remains hanging in the wind. I am not satisfied with the explanations that we have heard, which will appear in the evidence that will be published by the Home Affairs Committee. One explanation that was given by a senior investigating officer in the case was that the police had other priorities, and this matter was not regarded as sufficiently important when set beside them. We have to accept that police resources are limited and the police have to determine their priorities, but their credibility on the matter is not assisted by what the senior investigating officer of the case wrote about it—incidentally, in a News International newspaper of which he had subsequently become an employee. I am referring to Mr Hayman, who said:

“In the original inquiry, my heart sank when I was told the accusations came from the Palace. This was not the time for a half-hearted investigation—we put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned as officials breathed down our neck.”

I believe that was inconsistent with the evidence that we heard from the police about the priorities that they set themselves at the time. That is the honest conclusion that I have come to on the basis of that evidence.

The Committee has gone as far as it can. I believe we have gone to the limits of what a Select Committee can achieve in carrying out an investigation. These questions now remain to be resolved by others in the course of the Leveson inquiry, which my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has rightly set up, and further criminal investigations must go forward under the direction of Sue Akers in Operation Weeting. In view of the evidence that we have now heard from the former DPP and others, I will not be surprised if evidence is uncovered of further phone tapping, further payments to officers and, I am afraid, possibly other offences involving the corruption of police officers. I hope that that is not the case, but the important thing for the reputation of the police, the good reputation of many honest officers and the public interest is that these matters are now fully investigated impartially and independently, and that those investigations are carried through to their conclusion.

We have heard a great deal about the press. One catastrophic effect of the original failed investigation, along with the failed review carried out by Mr Yates in 2006, was that senior police officers went to see representatives of The Guardian, which had been carrying out an investigation, effectively to try to put them off further investigations by persuading them that their investigation, which was based upon matters that were seeping out through the civil courts, was exaggerated and unjustified. It is to the credit of The Guardian, and particularly its journalist Nick Davies, that it persisted with the investigation. I say that as somebody who is no great sympathiser with The Guardian—I do not expect to receive an invitation to lunch there any time soon, and I do not know the people concerned. However, that was to their credit, and it was an illustration of the value of a free press.

That brings me to my next point. It is very important to keep the criminal side of this separate from the issues that arise in respect of the regulation and ownership of a diverse, free and robust press. The matters that we have been talking about are criminal matters, not just matters of comment or of insufficient comeback from the Press Complaints Commission. They are serious criminal matters involving a wide range of people—politicians, celebrities and, as we have heard, many ordinary members of the public often in tragic circumstances. Each case has to be properly investigated, and anybody who has committed offences has to be brought to justice.