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Actor says the police let her down by not telling her about evidence that tabloid hackers were targeting her The actor Leslie Ash has spoken out for the first time against the Metropolitan police for failing to investigate claims that a private investigator working for the News of the World had hacked into her mobile phone, even though the force had held evidence since 2006 that he had targeted her along with her husband and two children. Ash, a former star of Men Behaving Badly, told the Guardian: “I feel I’ve really been let down. I can’t understand their behaviour at all.” Ash and her husband, the former footballer Lee Chapman, are suing the News of the World for breach of privacy after the Met confirmed in January that in a 2006 raid on the investigator Glenn Mulcaire, it had seized notepads in which he had recorded their mobile phone numbers and those of their two sons. Despite holding that information, which Ash said includes phone numbers for her GP, bank and a teacher at her sons’ school, Scotland Yard failed to tell her that she was a target. “The police were actually withholding evidence,” she said. “I’ve been brought up to trust the police. It’s not a good time for the police at the moment.” Ash became a regular in the headlines as soon as she appeared in the hit laddish comedy Men Behaving Badly, but tabloid pressure reached its peak when cosmetic surgery left her with inflamed lips in 2003 and when she contracted a form of MRSA in hospital the following year. Her family feared she would die. Now Ash says that messages left on mobile phones belonging to her and her children at that time were used by newspapers. “That really came home to me because that is not in the public interest,” she said. “The most painful things … had been said, while I was in hospital, to my kids, to my husband [along with] things really, really personal to my agent – who wasn’t just my agent, she was my friend. “All those worries about if I was going to work again, if I was going to walk again … I just feel horrible thinking that someone’s been able to access my private messages.” Scotland Yard finally confirmed that Ash was “a person of interest” to Mulcaire three months ago. Her lawyer had written to the police last October after she sought a court order forcing the Met to make that information available. Yesterday, Ash accused the Met of deliberating seeking to suppress the truth about the scale of phone hacking at the News of the World by refusing to notify hundreds of potential victims following its original 2006 inquiry, which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Mulcaire and the former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman. “They are hand in hand with the press,” Ash said. “We’re trying to break through into something that’s basically corrupt.” Referring to evidence given to parliament in 2003 by Rebekah Brooks, the former Sun and News of the World editor who is now chief executive of the papers’ parent company, News International, Ash said: “Rebekah said that day: ‘Yes, we have paid police before.’ That shouldn’t happen. You should be able to trust the police. Who do you trust if you can’t?” A new police phone-hacking investigation, Operation Wheeting, is now under way. On Tuesday the Met made the first arrests in the case since Goodman and Mulcaire were charged nearly five years ago. The News of the World’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, and the paper’s former assistant editor (news), Ian Edmondson, were released on police bail without charge. Both men deny wrongdoing. However, Ash said she was not encouraged by the arrests. “No, not at all. They’re just scapegoats. That’s all it looks like to me. The News of the World are going to try and give sacrificial lambs here. They will be happy to draw the line under those two arrests and the police will as well.” Executives insisted after Goodman was jailed that he was the only reporter at the paper who acted illegally, paying Mulcaire additional money on top of his six-figure News of the World contract to hack into messages. It has since abandoned this “rogue reporter” defence in the face of claims made in civil actions brought by a series of public figures that others at the paper were involved. Mulcaire typically wrote the first name of the journalist who had commissioned him to target a particular public figure in the top left-hand corner of his notes. The fact that he wrote “Clive” in his notepad helped to convict Mulcaire and Goodman of illegally accessing voicemails belonging to members of the royal household. Ash said the notes Mulcaire made about her and her family, along with many of their associates, included the name of a person they believe is a News of the World journalist who has been publicly linked with the hacking affair but has not been arrested. Ash said she had feared for years that underhand tactics were being employed by newspapers, including the News of the World’s rivals. Her suspicions were aroused when intensely private stories began to appear, but initially she feared that the stories had been leaked from within her circle of friends. “There were just too many things happening. It’s just certain things that happened at strange times that no one else could have known – especially when I was in hospital. Something came out in the newspaper that no one would have known apart from this friend of mine. When it came out in the paper I obviously thought it was them who had sold it.” Ash is one of around 20 people who are pursuing the News of the World in court, along with other well-known figures including the actors Steve Coogan and Sienna Miller, the former Sky Sports presenter Andy Gray and the football agent Sky Andrew. “The way they’ve done the first investigation [in 2006], the police were obviously trying to keep something very quiet,” Ash said. The former Met police assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, who was in charge of the original inquiry, claimed there were only “a handful” of victims. The Met’s acting assistant commissioner John Yates, who reviewed new evidence unearthed by the Guardian in July 2009 before concluding there were no grounds for a new inquiry, has said on several occasions that the number of people targeted was low. Referring to the number of people suing, Ash said: “Now there are [dozens] of people involved they are not going to be able to keep it quiet because for one person to take the News of the World to court – to sue – would be almost impossible, but now thousands of people are.” Ash also criticised her mobile phone provider, Vodafone, who she says refused to hand over mobile phone records dating back to the time of Mulcaire’s alleged offence. “Vodafone weren’t really helpful to start with. I contacted them. They said I had to get the police to contact our solicitors [to confirm they could release the records]. The police weren’t giving us any information so how were we going to get them to help us?” Friends in showbusiness had warned Ash that hacking was commonplace. “Someone within the PR business just said get yourself a pay-as-you-go phone because they are listening in to things. So we just stopped having conversations on the phone, but it’s quite difficult.” She conceded that she gave interviews to the press during the course of her work as an actor and TV personality but said her treatment in the media was “almost like [being] eating alive. I can’t explain it.” She said her legal action was not motivated by money or a desire for revenge. “It’s not vengeance. Well, maybe a little bit. I can’t lie to you. It really hurt me. Some of the stuff said has really, really hurt me. And if that’s what they wanted to do then they’ve done it. Maybe it is a little bit of payback time. “I want to make sure this is sorted out once and for all. If it is brushed under the carpet and these two guys are the only ones arrested, questioned, they will have a little break – a little sabbatical – and then they will come back and start doing it again. The whole tabloid culture has got to change.” James Robinson guardian.co.uk