Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Lord Mann Excerpts

Wednesday 20th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Foster]

I will in a minute.

We join both major political parties in saying that it is vital to acknowledge that there are some very good police officers and journalists, sadly including many who have lost their jobs because of what happened at News International.

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[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Sadly, the phrase “Don’t believe everything you read in the press” now seems to be true. In addition to dealing with criminality, I hope that this process will ensure that we can believe everything that we read in the press, just as we can believe the phrase “You can always trust a policeman”.

A great cross-party approach has led to the inquiry, so I commend the Leader of the Opposition for working with our Prime Minister and the other party leaders. However, I wish that Labour Members had acted when they were in government, as I am sure they agree.

I associate myself with the apology that my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) made to Mr Rupert Murdoch yesterday, and I give Mr Murdoch some credit for staying on to answer Committee members’ questions. My hon. Friend also referred to outstanding points for the inquiry. As the Committee has not yet concluded its report, I do not intend to make specific comments about what was said yesterday, but I encourage hon. Members to read the transcript and to note that we will set out written follow-up questions.

The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) suggested that at least two people had lied to Parliament in the past 24 hours. I assume he was referring to Sir Paul Stephenson’s comments about his resignation, and perhaps to Mrs Brooks and the Murdochs.

[John Mann]

That is four people.

[Dr Coffey]

I do not know to whom the hon. Member for Rhondda was referring.

We have to be careful when we say that people have lied to Parliament. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that we have not got to the bottom of the matter—as the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Cathy Jamieson) said, some of the testimony was frustrating—and to do so we need to call further witnesses to our inquiry. However, I now know that the Committee’s intention is that the police and the judicial inquiry see further witnesses rather than us.

I welcome a lot of the suggestions that have been made about equal prominence for apologies and about fining and compensation powers. I asked Mr Murdoch yesterday whether, given his experience in the media spotlight, he would think again about his newspapers’ headlines and some of the targets of their investigative journalism. I appreciate that a headline such as “Up Yours Delors” is quite entertaining and unlikely to cause damage, but The Sun once published the headline “Bonkers Bruno Locked Up”. At that time, Mrs Brooks learned a lesson straight away because the following day she published a front-page editorial from the charity SANE, as well as making appropriate restoration. I see that the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) is not in the Chamber, but I should point out that The Sun has made no such restoration of reputation for the Hillsborough 96, which I think would be welcomed by the people of Liverpool.

Newspapers and the Press Complaints Commission itself do not need to wait for the creation of a new regulator because they could change the code of conduct by bringing in several ideas that have been suggested. Although, the PCC’s credibility has sadly, been somewhat destroyed, that does not mean that it should be sulking, as I perceive that some of its comments suggest is the case, although I am sure that that is not its intention. People should look in the mirror before they write those headlines and decide what they are going to put out there. As I said, some of the treatment that editors, both past and present, have recently received will, I hope, make them think again.

Both in the testimony that we heard yesterday and in the Home Office report, there was extremely heavy reliance on lawyers’ advice, for example, on the sum for which people should settle. The Home Office report considered the question of whether former Deputy Assistant Commissioner Clarke relied on lawyers’ advice about undertaking more investigation if News International was not co-operating, and whether he was told that the police could not really exercise certain powers because it would be seen as fishing. From my own experience of corporate life, lawyers always take the lowest-risk approach, and one has to decide whether one wants to take that advice. Indeed, the House decided earlier this year that it was not happy with advice about prisoners’ votes. People should not necessarily hide behind lawyers’ advice. They should listen to it, but they should be prepared to make different decisions.

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[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

Yesterday Rebekah Brooks described The Sun as a “very clean ship”, and the Murdoch family appears to be suggesting that now that the News of the World is defunct we can move on. The Sun has had some remarkable scoops for which people do not appear to have gone to court and been convicted. These are scoops by one reporter; there are others, of course, under The Sun. The following footballers have been the subject of scoops, usually front page scoops, in The Sun by the same reporter, all of which can only have come from the Metropolitan police. There is no other possible source for any of these stories.

This is my squad for the World cup: Frank Lampard, Jay Bothroyd, Carlton Cole, Manuel de Costa, Paul Gascoigne, Armand Traoré, Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Merson, Tony Cascarino, Stan Bowles, Bobby Zamora, Quincy Owusu, Jack Wilshere, Kieron Dyer, Nicklas Bendtner, David James, Didier Drogba, Juan Verón. Manager: José Mourinho—that was in 2007. Captain: Wayne Rooney—on 1 August 2008. Wayne Rooney was not arrested near Oxford street in London, but he was, according to The Sun exclusive, read his rights. All those stories involved footballers, all of them in London. However, when Mr Rooney and Mr Gerrard had run-ins with the police in the north-west, every newspaper had the story, with no scoops for The Sun. When Mr Robin van Persie, a London footballer, had an altercation with the police in Holland, The Sun was a day later than the rest of the media. Do not be a footballer in London and be in any situation with the police without being charged, if The Sun is around.

But this does not just involve footballers. Do not be a police officer, either. On 6 July 2011 a front-page headline read, “Threat to kill dead dogs in car cop”. Sackloads of hate mail targeted a sergeant who was a dog handler, in whose car two dogs had, sadly, died. The article said:

“One source said: ‘Thousands of letters were arriving’.”

The only possible source for that story was the police—the Metropolitan police. There were dozens of such examples while Brooks was in charge of The Sun, all involving the Met—no other police force—doing in their own.

Murder cases are involved too. I have written to Sue Akers about them, and I shall not go into them now, as this is a time to tread delicately around them. Suffice it to say that I am asking her to look into texts to or from murder victims that have mysteriously appeared in the media. Who gave the media those texts? There is a range of cases that the House will be familiar with, but they have not been mentioned in relation to phone hacking. Texts need to be part of the inquiry, not least those that appear in The Sun.

London’s celebrities are not just footballers: Hugh Grant, Ms Dynamite, Lily Allen, Peaches Geldof, Adam Ant, Jude Law, Liz Hurley, Rod Liddle, Keira Knightley, Leslie Ash, Elliott Tittensor, Mohammed al-Fayed, Woody Harrelson, Joe McGann, Christian Bale, Sean Bean and Mike Tindall; it could even be someone marrying the Queen’s granddaughter. They are all in London. If you want to have a car crash, have it outside London. If you want to have a drink and an issue with a photographer, have it outside London. If it happens in London, someone in the Met will be handing over or selling your information to The Sun.

Relatives of the famous are affected too: John Terry’s father, Cristiano Ronaldo’s cousin, Ashley Cole’s brother, Jermain Defoe’s brother, Sadie Frost’s sister, Tony Blair’s son, Patricia Hewitt’s son and Nelson Mandela’s grandson. On 4 November 2005 The Sun exclusive was Steve McFadden and Angela Bostock: police officers were there at the time. On the same day, Detective Constable David Dougall, a Scotland Yard officer, was convicted of selling information to The Sun. Why has that case, including the comments of John Ross, who bought the information, not been made public? The police dropped their investigations against The Sun because, Ross believes:

“It would have revealed a lot of conversations between Mike”—

Sullivan, The Sun’s crime reporter—

“and senior officers and they didn’t want to open that can of worms.”

Giving evidence on behalf of Ross were Sky News crime correspondent Martin Brunt and others. In the Press Gazette, Sullivan kindly put his diary—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order.

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[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

I believe that I am the first London Member from the Opposition Benches to speak in the debate. That is unfortunate, given the prominence of the Metropolitan police in our discussions, but I hope that my colleagues from London will catch your eye later, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I would like to say a lot, but we are constrained by time at the tail end of our discussion. Suffice it to say that I believe that the power of News International and many other media organisations, as many hon. Members have said, has distorted the way in which politicians and others in public life go about their daily business, but what is wrong is the fact that the ownership of our media is out of kilter. It should not just be an issue about BSkyB and whether News International increases its influence in it; it should be about whether News International is a fit and proper company and should be allowed to continue to hold sway over such a large part of our national media.

In what is left of my time allocation, I wish to speak about the influence of the Mayor of London on the Metropolitan police. I think it was wrong for him to say that the phone hacking issue was “codswallop”—that it was a plot

“cooked up by the Labour party”,

that it was

“a song and dance about nothing”,

and that he was not going to become involved in the issue, only as far back as September 2010. The Metropolitan police were under pressure from people outside the House and some hon. Members, as we all know, to reopen the investigation and look into the phone hacking scandal. It was bound to influence the views of those police that the Mayor of London, who is supposedly given influence over issues relating to policing matters on behalf of people in London, had already made public statements to say that he did not think such an inquiry worth while—that he thought it was a load of rubbish. It was bound to influence their thinking about whether to reopen that inquiry.

I sincerely hope that the Leveson inquiry will look into that fact, because it will be an important factor in whether we decide to go forward with elected police commissioners throughout the country, because when the Government advocate elected police commissioners, they always use the Mayor of London as an example. Well, actually, the Mayor of London is accountable to the Metropolitan Police Authority for what he does with the police. The members of the MPA have a great deal of influence in London, and it is a democratically based body, with other co-opted members to make it broadly representative of London. We are diluting the influence of the MPA and converting it into a panel. We are not giving it any teeth whatever to enable it to have oversight, and we are placing all the influence and power in the hands of a directly elected Mayor or his appointed deputy Mayor.

The problem that we have faced is the over-burgeoning power of the media and their ability to twist and manipulate individuals, particularly politicians at times. I would stand here and criticise the former leader of my party for going halfway around the world to pay court to Rupert Murdoch—I made that criticism openly at the time and I do so now—but that is because those individuals’ power has been too great. We have seen the tentacles go deep into the Metropolitan police and into our political life. We have officers who are now probably facing prison because they were corrupted by journalists throwing money around; we have politicians who have been too close and embarrassed themselves by their relationships with the media. It is extremely corrupting.

The Mayor of London said that this matter was “codswallop” only days after the article appeared in The New York Times which resulted in the reopening of the Metropolitan police inquiry. So we have to look at how the Mayor has been influenced by the media and the way he has used the media.

[John Mann]

Would my hon. Friend be astonished to learn that one of his constituents, as a police officer in 2005, received a suspended jail sentence for selling information to The Sun for a mere £200? Does that show how endemic the problem has become?

[Clive Efford]

I think it does, and it shows why Parliament was recalled so that we could have this debate. I am sure that that police officer, for that small sum of money, seriously regrets his judgment, but what underlies such transactions is the power of the media to suggest that their influence stretches so far that they are not accountable, and will never be accountable, because they are under the umbrella and shield of our protection because they think themselves so great and so mighty. The fact that Rebekah Brooks thought she could walk into Parliament and say, “Yes, we pay the police,” and walk out again without being held to account for it was an absolute disgrace. The Met must never return to that again.

The Mayor of London, however, used his influence to try to stall the inquiry. His reasons for that will have to come out as these matters are investigated, but without question his attitude to the investigation into phone hacking could only have had influence on the thoughts and decisions of the police, and that must be investigated.