Privilege

Debate between John Whittingdale and Simon Hughes

Tuesday 22nd May 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes the conclusions set out in chapter 8 of the Eleventh Report from the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Session 2010-12, on News International and Phone-hacking, HC 903-I and orders that the matter be referred to the Committee on Standards and Privileges.

Let me begin, Mr Speaker, by thanking you for granting precedence to this motion, which I move on behalf of all the members of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. I am aware that the motion is unusual, if not almost unprecedented in modern times, but as the Committee set out in the conclusions to our report, we believe that the integrity and effectiveness of Select Committees relies on the evidence that we are given being given truthfully and completely. We therefore regard the finding of the Committee that we were misled by specific individuals as an extremely serious matter, and we think it only right that it should be brought to the attention of the whole House of Commons and referred to the Committee on Standards and Privileges. I apologise for throwing this hot potato into the lap of the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron), but I think that it is important that his Committee consider this matter, first, to establish whether my Committee was indeed misled in the evidence that it was given; and secondly, to deal with the perhaps rather more difficult question of what Parliament should do in response.

It might help the House if I briefly describe the events that have led to this afternoon’s debate. At the beginning of 2007, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee decided to hold an inquiry into the self-regulation of the press. Three events triggered that decision. The first was the harassment of Kate Middleton —then a commoner, now the Duchess of Cambridge—that was taking place, which was felt to go well beyond what was acceptable.

The second issue was the publication by the Information Commissioner of his report “What price privacy now?”, at the end of 2006. In that report, he published details of the very large number of journalists working for a wide variety of publications who had employed the services of Steve Whittamore, a private investigator who was subsequently convicted for illegally breaching the police national computer and the driver vehicle licensing database in order to obtain information. Although no prosecutions of the journalists were brought, there was certainly a widespread suspicion that many members of the press had been involved in what appeared to have been illegal activity.

The third matter that the Committee decided we needed to consider was the conviction, just a few months previously, of Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News of the World, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator, who were found to have conspired to intercept communications without lawful authority. On that third specific issue, the Committee took evidence from the then chairman of News International, Mr Les Hinton. During our evidence, I put this question to him:

“You carried out a full, rigorous internal inquiry, and you are absolutely convinced that Clive Goodman was the only person who knew what was going on?”

Mr Hinton replied:

“Yes, we have and I believe he was the only person, but that investigation, under the new editor, continues.”

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the Committee had to accept the assurance that we were given, but we did make some fairly strong comments about the culture that had allowed payments to be made by Clive Goodman without any apparent authority from the management of News International. However, although we concluded that we had not seen evidence that proved otherwise, I think we all heard alarm bells ringing, since we were very much aware that Glenn Mulcaire had been convicted of hacking into the telephone voice messages of Mr Max Clifford, Mr Sky Andrew, Mr Gordon Taylor, Ms Elle Macpherson, and the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), none of whom had any obvious connection with the royal family. Yet we were told that the only person at the News of the World who had any knowledge or involvement was the royal editor. There was therefore certainly a suspicion in our minds that the phone hacking may have gone much wider than we were led to believe.

During 2009, two years later, the Committee conducted an inquiry into press standards, privacy and libel. During that inquiry, in July 2009, The Guardian reported that News Group Newspapers had paid more than £1 million to settle privacy cases that had been brought by Gordon Taylor, one of those on the charge sheet for Glenn Mulcaire, and by Jo Armstrong and a lawyer, all of whom were involved in football matters. We decided that the size of that settlement was so large that it cast doubt on the previous testimony that we had received. On that basis, we decided to reopen our inquiry.

That decision, and certainly the report that appeared in The Guardian, was vigorously attacked by News International to such an extent that when we summoned the editor of The Guardian and the journalist who had written the story, Mr Nick Davies, to appear before us, they responded by providing the Committee with certain documents. In particular, there was a contract between Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator, and Greg Miskiw, a senior executive on the News of the World, and also what has become known as the “For Neville” e-mail. That was a heavily redacted transcript of an exchange that took place between Gordon Taylor and Jo Armstrong on their voicemails.

To us, that clearly suggested that others had been involved. We therefore took evidence during the course of our inquiry in 2009 from quite a number of senior executives of News International, including Tom Crone, the legal manager; Colin Myler, the then editor of the News of the World; Andy Coulson, the previous editor of the News of the World; Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor; and Les Hinton, the executive chairman. Mr Crone told us that he had become aware of the e-mail in April 2008, but in his evidence to us he suggested that an investigation had found little real evidence that it had gone any further. His implication was certainly that it did not amount to much. As we commented in our report:

“In summary, Mr Crone’s investigation, he said, had established that nobody remembered the ‘for Neville’ email, apart from Mr Hindley”—

the journalist who taken the transcription—

“who could not remember what he did with it.”

We went on to note:

“In spite of the allegations contained in the Guardian, the News of the World has continued to assert that Clive Goodman acted alone. Les Hinton, the former Executive Chairman of News International, told us: ‘There was never any evidence delivered to me that suggested that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.’”

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman not just for his work and that of his Committee but for the measured way in which he is putting the case.

May I make it quite clear—this is in the public domain, so I am not breaching any prospective prosecutions —that there was substantial evidence, at all material times soon after the arrest of the two people who were subsequently convicted, that a series of other people at higher levels in the same newspaper had been involved, because they had been told what was going on? That is now in the public domain, and some of us believe that that knowledge cannot have been limited to those who were named in the documents seized by the police. It must have been held more widely.

[Mr Whittingdale]

I hope that the full facts will continue to emerge, not just through the work of the Committee but through that of Lord Justice Leveson and the police investigation and the possible charges to follow. I have to say that the Committee reached that conclusion in our work. Initially, it was suggested that the “For Neville” e-mail might have been going to any old Neville in the News of the World. We made inquiries and discovered that in fact there was only one person called Neville in the employment of the News of the World, and he was its chief reporter. Therefore, in 2009 the Committee concluded:

“Evidence we have seen makes it inconceivable that no-one else at the News of the World, bar Clive Goodman, knew about the phone-hacking”.

In relation to the previous assurance about the rigour of the inquiry, we said:

“The newspaper’s enquiries were far from ‘full’ or ‘rigorous’, as we—and the PCC—had been assured. Throughout our inquiry, too, we have been struck by the collective amnesia afflicting witnesses from the News of the World.”

We published that report and nothing happened. It is perhaps a matter of regret that no further action was taken for another two years. However, evidence then started to emerge from the civil cases being brought by the victims of phone hacking, which led to the initiation of Operation Weeting—the police inquiry—and an Adjournment debate introduced by the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), in which he suggested that the Committee had been misled. Those events, plus the decision of James Murdoch to close the News of the World and to make a statement saying that the evidence and statements given to Parliament were wrong, caused the Committee to decide to reopen the inquiry.

We took evidence from a wide range of people, including John Yates, then of the Metropolitan police, Rupert and James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks, Jonathan Chapman, Daniel Cloke, Tom Crone, Colin Myler, Les Hinton and Julian Pike. We were assured at the time that News International was extremely keen to co-operate with the Committee and to establish the facts, but during the course of our subsequent inquiry three crucial documents emerged. It is worth noting that none were supplied to the Committee by News International, and that they actually came from various lawyers acting for the personalities involved.

The first document was the letter sent in March 2007 by Clive Goodman to Les Hinton, the then chairman, objecting to his dismissal. The reason Clive Goodman gave for his objection to his dismissal was as follows:

“This practice [phone hacking] was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the Editor. The legal manager, Tom Crone, attended virtually every meeting of my legal team and was given full access to the Crown Prosecution Service’s evidence files. He, and other senior staff of the paper, had long advanced knowledge that I would plead guilty.”

The second document we obtained was an internal e-mail sent from Tom Crone to Colin Myler before a meeting with James Murdoch to discuss the terms of the settlement with Gordon Taylor. The e-mail states that

“this evidence, particularly the e-mail”—

the “For Neville” e-mail—

“from the News of the World is fatal to our case.”

Tom Crone went on to say:

“Our position is very perilous. The damning e-mail is genuine and proves we actively made use of a large number of extremely private voicemails from Taylor’s telephone in June/July 2005 and that this was pursuant to a February 2005 contract.”

Of course, that was written almost a year before Mr Crone appeared before the Committee and suggested that the “For Neville” e-mail was of no real significance because they could not remember where it had gone or find any record of it.

The third document was the opinion obtained by Michael Silverleaf QC, who advised News Group Newspapers that it should reach a settlement because, as he said:

“there is a powerful case that there is (or was) a culture of illegal information access used at News Group Newspapers in order to produce stories for publication.”

The Committee, in its conclusions, comments on several specific issues that I will not go into in great detail, but they include such matters as the decision to authorise payments to Clive Goodman following his conviction; the importance of confidentiality in the size of the Gordon Taylor settlement; and the commissioning of surveillance of at least some members and former members of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. These are matters that we describe in detail, and I hope that the Standards and Privileges Committee will also consider them.

Our overall conclusion was that the evidence that we had obtained made it clear that the evidence given to us in our previous inquiry, when the individuals involved had once again attempted to assure us that there was no real suggestion or evidence that anyone else at the News of the World was involved in phone hacking other than Clive Goodman, was not true. They certainly did have documents that indicated very clearly that that was not the case. It was for that reason that the Committee concluded that we had been misled by Les Hinton, Tom Crone and Colin Myler—