Phone-hacking scandal: live coverage

With the row about News International phone-hacking and ‘blagging’ intensifying, follow all the latest developments as they happen 11.41am: Keith Vaz starts with a warning that giving false evidence could be a contempt of parliament. Yates asks if he can start with an opening statement. He says that concerns have been voiced about his interview to the Sunday Telegraph. In his interview he said that if he knew now what he knew in 2009, he would have taken different decisions. He is sorry if giving that interview is seen as a sign of disrespect to the committee. He has never lied to the committee, he says. At his last committee appearance he said that the police inquiry should have been handled differently. But News International have only recently provided evidence that would have had a “significant” impact on the decisions he made in 2009, he says. 11.40am: John Yates (left) is about to give evidence. 11.38am: James Clappison, a Conservative, asks Lord Blair if he feels any responsibility for police officers taking money from journalists while he was in charge. Blair says he was accountable. But that’s not the same as him being responsible, he says. He did not know about the wrong doing, he says. 11.36am: As the Guardian’s Nick Davies has revealed, Lord Blair himself is thought to have been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World’s investigator. Blair has just said that he did not know if any police officers were taking money from journalists when he was in charge of the Met. 11.32am: Lord Blair, the former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, is one of the witnesses giving evidence to the home affairs committee before Yates starts. The MPs have just started asking him about phone hacking now. Blair was in charge of the Met at the time of the original investigation into phone hacking, but he has just said that he was not directly involved. It was not seen as an important inquiry at the time, he said. 11.25am: Just before John Yates starts, here are some quotes about him from politicians this morning. I’ve taken them from PoliticsHome. Lord Prescott said Yates should stand down. In less than a day, in three hours he said [Yates] had reviewed it and there was no evidence whatsoever. There is no evidence whatsoever that was just a big lie. They made judgements about not pursuing criminal actions that had been conducted, that is in fact is enough to have seen them moved out of their jobs. Yates is still there, when all this evidence is coming out by Commissioner Akers, it is totally unacceptable that he stays in that job. Can’t he find gardening leave which they usually find in these situations until we have cleared all this up with a public inquiry. Conservative MP George Eustice said Yates had some serious questions to answer. Why with all these 11,000 pages of evidence, knowing as they did that it was quite widespread why they didn’t do a more thorough investigation at the time … [Yates] investigated the cash for peerages allegations thoroughly and without fear or favour. I think it does look like there has been a different approach on this particular instance. Ken Livingstone said he had been impressed by Yates when he worked with him. Certainly, in all my dealings with him, he seemed a robust and independent officer. 11.21am: David Cameron (left) has just given a response to Gordon Brown’s interview this morning about News International intrusion into his family. My heart goes out to Gordon and Sarah Brown. To have your children’s privacy invaded in that way – I know this myself, when your child is not well – is particularly unacceptable. Cameron said there was now a well-resourced police investigation into the affair and that it would not rest until it had got to the bottom of what happened. 11.19am: The internet domain name SunonSunday.co.uk has been transferred to News International, my colleagues at Media Guardian tell me. They will be posting a story shortly. 11.07am: The home affairs committee has started taking evidence, but for the first half an hour they are taking evidence relating to policing reform. The phone hacking evidence won’t start until 11.30am. Then we will have four witnesses, in the following order. 11.30am: John Yates, acting deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan police. 12pm: Peter Clarke, former deputy assistant commissioner of the Met. 12.20pm: Andy Hayman, former assistant commissioner of the Met. 12.40pm: Sue Akers, deputy assistant commissioner of the Met. Clarke and Hayman were in charge of the original phone hacking investigation. They will be asked to explain why it was so limited, and why the evidence about the full extent of Glenn Mulcaire’s phone hacking activities was not properly investigated. Yates was asked to review the case in 2009 after the Guardian published new revelations about the extent of the News International cover-up. He will be asked why he did not re-open the inquiry then. He set out his case in a letter to the select committee released yesterday. At the weekend he also gave an interview to the Sunday Telegraph saying his 2009 decision was “pretty crap”. And Akers will be asked about the current investigation. 11.01am: As you would expect, there is wall-to-wall phone hacking coverage in the papers today. You can read all the Guardian’s coverage here. As for the rest of the papers, here are some of articles that caught my eye. • Mary Riddell in the Daily Telegraph says that Ed Miliband has “the schmoozing impulse of a tortoise” and that he has no links with the Murdochs. Ed M, an unlikely giant-killer, has the schmoozing impulse of a tortoise. While adept at emerging from his shell when duty calls, he would far prefer a Fabian debate to partying with Chipping Nortonites, including Cameron and Rebekah Brooks, the embattled News International (NI) chief executive. Miliband is said to have “zero links” with the Murdochs, beyond once, as energy secretary, meeting James Murdoch for breakfast, at the latter’s request. “That’s as chummy as it gets,” says a friend. Apart from declining to berate Rupert Murdoch over the quails’ eggs at a recent NI summer party, Miliband, unlike Cameron, is a cleanskin. Hence his stand against a century of complicity that began when press barons and editors helped Lloyd George into No 10. • Greg Dyke in the Financial Times (subscription) says he thinks News Corportation’s bid for BSkyB is “dead in the water”. Whatever happens with BSkyB – and it is difficult to see the referral to the Competition Commission as anything other than the forerunner to the bid failing – the events of the past week mean that never again should we all be lectured by a Murdoch on how the media should be run. Anyone who listened to James Murdoch’s self-interested lecture in Edinburgh in 2009 will be relieved to know the family’s power is waning. Those of us who believe in the values of the BBC can sleep easier knowing that the Murdochs will never be as powerful again. • But the splash in the Financial Times (subscription) says it is still not clear what will happen to the bid. By ensuring that the bid now goes to the Competition Commission, Mr Murdoch’s team hopes to remove the issue from the political arena until next year to keep the BSkyB bid alive. “We are still going to be talking about this in 2012, but by then maybe people’s attitudes will have changed,” said one person close to Mr Murdoch, who is in London overseeing the company’s reponse to the crisis. One government insider admitted ruefully: “It’s too early to say it’s dead.” But some believe Mr Murdoch’s attempt buy the 60.9 per cent of BSkyB it does not already own can never recover from the tide of revelations about journalistic malpractice at his newspapers, the latest concerning Gordon Brown and the royal family. • Michael Seamark in the Daily Mail asks whether the BBC’s Robert Peston is too close to News International. Media commentators have highlighted the close personal and formerly professional relationship between Mr Peston and Will Lewis, the very senior News International troubleshooter, amid suggestions that the BBC man is being used by the Murdoch machine … Certainly, all the leaks have pointedly focused on the Murdoch regime of the past, particularly on former News of the World editor Andy Coulson who left the company some time ago. Equally usefully, the leaks have also sought to try to distance Mrs Brooks and James Murdoch – Mr Lewis’s bosses – from the relentless tide of damning revelations. 10.37am: Earlier this morning Christopher Graham, the information commissioner, said that the punishment for “blagging” should be tougher than it is at the moment. (See 8.41am.) This is the practice that was used by investigators finding private information about Gordon Brown. Graham said that the last Labour government passed a law creating a maximum two-year jail sentence for this offence, but the relevant section of the Act has not been implemented. That was because of a stand-off between the press and the politicians, he said. In 2008 Paul Dacre (left), the editor of the Daily Mail, gave a speech to the Society of Editors that covered this. And who did he praise for helping to ensure that journalists don’t go to jail for blagging? It was Gordon Brown. Here’s the key section. The fourth issue we raised with Gordon Brown was a truly frightening amendment to the Data Protection Act, winding its way through Parliament, under which journalists faced being jailed for two years for illicitly obtaining personal information such as ex-directory telephone numbers or an individual’s gas bills or medical records. This legislation would have made Britain the only country in the free world to jail journalists and could have had a considerable chilling effect on good journalism. The Prime Minister – I don’t think it is breaking confidences to reveal – was hugely sympathetic to the industry’s case and promised to do what he could to help. Over the coming months and battles ahead, Mr Brown was totally true to his word. Whatever our individual newspapers’ views are of the Prime Minister – and the Mail is pretty tough on him – we should, as an industry, acknowledge that, to date, he has been a great friend of press freedom. 10.32am: Theresa May, the home secretary, has confidence in John Yates, according to Alan Travis, who has just sent me this from a Home Office briefing. The home secretary, Theresa May, said today she had confidence in John Yates and that he was doing a “very good job” as the Metropolitan police’s assistant commissioner in charge of counter-terrorism. As he prepares to gives evidence to the home affairs select committee on phone-hacking, May said: “John Yates is in charge of counter-terrorism. He is doing a very good job in that role. I have confidence in John Yates.” She also told a Home Office press briefing that she took “very seriously” any suggestion of corruption in the police. She had spoken to Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met Commissioner, as soon as the allegations emerged last week to satisfy herself that they were being dealt with properly, she said. “Any officer who is invoved in corruption or illegal activity of any sort in any way should be identified and dealt with according to the law,” May said. 10.28am: My colleague Marina Hyde has more information about what happened when the Sun rang Gordon Brown to say that it was running a story about his son having cystic fibrosis. Are you insufficiently repulsed by the Sun’s mysteriously-obtained exclusive on Brown’s son’s cystic fibrosis? Don’t worry – like everything about the hacking scandal, there are always more details to emerge to compound the horror. I’ve been speaking to a source close to Gordon Brown at the time of the story, who recalls that it was served up with a chaser of threat. “Gordon insisted – despite a heavy brow-beating from Rebekah – that he was not willing to let his son’s medical condition be the stuff of a Sun exclusive,” recalls this source. “So he put out a statement on PA to spike their scoop and make clear that despite his condition, Fraser was fit and healthy. The Sun were utterly furious, and Brown’s communications team were told that if Gordon wanted to get into No10, he needed to learn that was not how things were done.” Yes, how DARE the then-chancellor refuse to accept that his child’s health was not technically a commercial Murdoch property? I’d like to tell you there’s a sick bag located in the rear pocket of the seat in front of you. But I’m afraid you’re on your own. 10.15am: You can tell when a British story gets really huge because it makes it onto Jon Stewart’s Daily Show in the US. Stewart covers it wonderfully with his usual blend of comic indignation. Do watch the whole clip here. Interesting, the programme’s account of the News of the World’s antics (particularly in relation to the families of the 9/11 victims) provokes booing from the audience. 10.10am: Originally Labour were going to table a motion for debate tomorrow calling for News International’s bid for BSkyB to be put on hold. News International effectively scuppered that plan yesterday by withdrawing their offer to hive off Sky News as a separate company as part of their bid which – as they knew – meant Jeremy Hunt had to refer the whole bid to the Competition Commission, thereby delaying any decision for at least six months. So what will MPs vote on tomorrow? On his blog Gary Gibbon at Channel 4 News thinks he has the answer. Labour is cooking up a new motion for the debate tomorrow and thinks it has found a corker. Having originally planned to do something along the lines of delaying a BSkyB bid until after the police investigation, I get the impression they are now proposing something a little more cultural, addressing the relationship between politicians and the press perhaps? Anyway, it’s designed to lure Lib Dems into the same lobby as Labour MPs. 10.06am: News International is also saying that is satisfied with the methods used by the Sun to obtain the information about Gordon Brown’s son Fraser having cystic fibrosis, according to the BBC. 9.50am: Alan Johnson (left), the former Labour home secretary, told Sky News earlier that Labour did not set up an inquiry into phone hacking – as Gordon Brown said he would have liked to have done (see 9.34am) – because ministers would have been accused of exploiting the issue for party political gain. I’ve taken the quotes from PoliticsHome. If I’d have ordered a public inquiry at the time, I’d have probably been castigated because in the run-up to a general election people would have said it was an attempt to get at Andy Coulson who’d been appointed by Cameron. So you can’t take today’s knowledge and just apply it retrospectively, you have to look at the information that was available at the time. 9.45am: News International have put out this statement in response to Gordon Brown’s interview. We note the allegations made today concerning the reporting of matters relating to Gordon Brown. So that we can investigate these matters further, we ask that all information concerning these allegations is provided to us. 9.34am: Nick Davies’s news story about the Gordon Brown interview has just gone up on our website. Here are some more quotes. • Brown said that in two cases there was “absolute proof” that News International obtained private information about him. I had my bank account broken into. I had my legal files effectively broken into. My tax returns went missing at one point. Medical records were broken into. I don’t know how this happened. I do know that in two instances, there is absolute proof that News International hired people to do this and the people who are doing this are criminals, known criminals in some cases with records of violence and fraud. • He accused John Witherow, the editor of the Sunday Times, of failing to deal with “indiscipline” amongst his reporters. There was no support going to come from the editor of the Sunday Times in dealing with the indiscipline among his reporters. This was a culture in the Sunday Times and other newspapers in News International, where they really exploited people. • He said that he wanted to set up a judicial inquiry into phone hacking when he was prime minister. I came to the conclusion that the evidence was becoming so overwhelming about the underhand tactics of News International using these private investigators to trawl through people’s lives, particularly the lives of people who were completely defenceless, I thought we had to have a judicial inquiry. However, as Patrick Wintour explains in the Guardian today, this idea was opposed by officials. • Brown said News International were “distorting the news” for their own reasons. News International pursued an incredibly aggressive agenda in the last year. News International were distorting the news in a way that was designed to pursue a particular political cause. This was an abuse of their power for political gain. The record will show that some people at News International abused their power. There is absolutely no doubt that News International were trying to influence policy. This is an issue about the abuse of political power as well as the abuse of civil liberties. 9.30am: BBC News have just finished broadcasting their interview with Gordon Brown. Here are the key points. • Brown accused News International of using known criminals to invade people’s privacy. News International were using people who were known criminals, people who had in some cases criminal records and News International as a result were working through links that they had with the criminal underworld. When people find out that the invasion of their liberties, their privates lives and their private griefs and their private thoughts and their innermost feelings become public property as a result, not of a rogue reporter or a chance investigator or someone saying something out of turn when they meet a friend at the street corner, but because criminals were hired to do this particular work, and these were known criminals … These were criminals ,in some cases with records, in some cases with records of violence, and these links have now got to be explored. I find it quite incredible that a supposed reputable organisation made its money, produced its commercial results, at the expense of ordinary people. And here are some of other points he has been making. • Brown claimed he never had a good relationship with News International. I do not think you can say I had a good relationship with News International. • He claimed that News International attacked Labour because it refused to support its commercial interests. The papers from Labour’s time in office would show this, he said. Asked to give three examples, Brown said that News International had an agenda in relation to the BBC, to Ofcom and to its own commericial agenda, and that Labour refused to support them in all three area. • He claimed that he had only now become aware of the full extent of News International’s invasion of privacy . This came out when it was put to him that he had a good relationship with senior News International executives when he was in office. “I did not know the level of criminality involved until now,” he said. • He insisted that he had always tried to protect the privacy of his children. • He accused News International executives of abusing their power. The record will show that some people at News International abused their power. • He accused the Sunday Times and the Sun of invading his privacy. He said that he had complained to the Sunday Times in person and that his words had been misreported. But he conceded that he did not complain to the police at the time. I’ll post further quotes from the interview shortly. 9.05am: BBC News is broadcasting the Gordon Brown interview in full now. He is certainly attacking News International with gusto. I’ll post the quotes shortly. 8.47am: Gordon Brown (left) has given an interview to the BBC about the revelation that News International journalists obtained private information about himself and his family. The BBC has just broadcast an excerpt, covering the moment when Brown learnt that the Sun had found out that his son Fraser had cystic fibrosis. Brown said: “They told me they had this story about Fraser’s medical condition and that they were going to run this story.” Asked how he responded to the news, Brown replied: In tears. Your son is now going to be broadcast across the media. Sarah and I were incredibly upset about it. We were thinking about his longterm future. We were thinking about our family. But there’s nothing that you can do about it. You’re in public life. And this story appears. You don’t know how it’s appeared. I’ve not questioned how it’s appeared. I’ve not made any allegations about how it’s appeared. I’ve not made any claims about [how it appeared]. But the fact is it did appear. And it did appear in the Sun newspaper. 8.41am: In the Commons yesterday Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, said that he hoped the inquiry into the phone hacking affair would consider “blagging” – the practice of obtaining private information illegally, normally by impersonating someone on the phone. Hunt said blagging was “at the heart of many of the problems that we have been finding out about in the past week”. Investigators were often only able to hack phones because they had “blagged” phone numbers and passwords in the first place. On the Today programme this morning Christopher Graham , the information commissioner, made much the same point. He said that blagging was an offence under the Data Protection Act, but that it attracted a “rather puny penalty”. The last Labour government actually passed a law bringing in a much tougher penalty, he said. But this law has never been enacted because of opposition from the press, he went on. We really need to get a serious penalty in place to stop this happening … Frankly, we need to say to people ‘You will go to prison if you do this’. The serious penalty that is needed has been on the statute book since 2008 – Section 77 of the 2008 Criminal Justice Act provides for a custodial sentence of up to two years in the Crown Court, but it has been suspended for three years because of a stand-off between the Press and the politicians. 8.35am: Keith Vaz (left), the Labour chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, has been giving various interviews this morning and, as usual, PoliticsHome have been monitoring. Vaz said some of the allegations involved were as serious as any his committee has considered. The latest revelations that the details, personal details of a former prime minister, were obtained, the fact that police officers may have been involved in protecting members of the royal family and then selling that information on to journalists – these are all very serious allegations, the most serious allegations, certainly this committee has seen over the last few years. Vaz also gave some indication as to what he wants to find out. I think what the committee wants to know, and what Parliament wants to know, is a clear set of processes. What happened when and where, what were the facts, why was the original review stopped when it was, what did Mr [John] Yates do following that? I think most of these questions are in the public domain but we’ve not had an opportunity of putting them to our witnesses and I think that we need to hear from the witnesses when they appear. When they do we will ask them relevant, robust but fair questions. 8.21am: David Cameron has promised to set up a judge-led inquiry into the phone-hacking affair, and, in particular, into the relations between News International and the police. He has not even appointed the judge yet, or published the terms of reference, but today we’re going to get a dress rehearsal for the inquiry when four senior police officers give evidence to the Commons home affairs committee. The session starts at 11.30am and, as my colleagues Vikram Dodd and Paul Lewis explain in the Guardian today , this is a crucial day for the Metropolitan police. First up is assistant commissioner John Yates , who will tell MPs that he did not examine any documents before declaring in 2009 that the Met did not need to reopen its phone-hacking investigation, which had closed two years earlier after gaining two convictions. Yates appears before MPs on a crucial day for Britain’s biggest police force, who are under fire for missing numerous allegedly criminal acts of phone hacking by the News of the World, and for some of its officers allegedly selling information to the paper which facilitated the hacking of the royal family. A concerted Yard fightback saw Yates acknowledge to the Sunday Telegraph that his 2009 decision was “pretty crap” and admit mistakes, followed on Monday by the Met accusing News International of leaking to try to derail its corruption investigation. Keith Vaz , the chairman of the home affairs committee, has just told the Today programme that he wants to establish a “timeline” so that MPs know “precisely what the officers did”. I’ll post more from his interview shortly. In other phone hacking developments, Ed Milband is meeting the parents of Milly Dowler and other members of the Hacked Off campaign at 9am this morning. The Dowlers will give a mini-press conference afterwards. Those are the events that we can predict. But, as we learned yesterday, this story has an enormous capacity to produce surprises. I’ll be focusing on phone hacking all day and I will be bringing you all the breaking news, as well as the best comment from the web. I’ll post a lunchtime summary after the home affairs committee is over at 1pm, and an afternoon one at about 4pm. House of Commons David Cameron Gordon Brown Ed Miliband Phone hacking News International Privacy & the media News of the World BSkyB Jeremy Hunt Andrew Sparrow Rupert Murdoch James Murdoch guardian.co.uk

Posted by on July 12, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.