15 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Alastair Brett, former legal manager at the Times, faced an intense grilling at the Leveson Inquiry today over the circumstances in which a reporter at the paper used email hacking to reveal the identity of anonymous police blogger, NightJack, in a 2009 story.
Former Times reporter Patrick Foster had identified the blogger as DC Richard Horton by gaining access to an anonymous email account run by Horton, the Inquiry heard last month.
Brett told the Inquiry he was “furious” with Foster when he approached him about the story and asked him if he had broken the law or if there was a public interest defence he could rely on. “I told him he had been incredibly stupid. He apologised, promised not to do it again,” Brett wrote in his witness statement.
“I was told it was a one-off occasion,” he said, “and I thought ‘I’ve got to tell him you cannot behave like this at a proper newspaper’.”
Email hacking is a breach of the Computer Misuse Act and does not have a public interest defence. Brett conceded he was unaware of the Act at the time.
He said Foster told him he could identify NightJack using publicly available sources of information. Brett told Foster that if this were possible then the Times would be able to publish the story, provided the reporter put it to Horton beforehand.
A stern and incredulous Lord Justice Leveson argued that the Times had misled the High Court over the unmasking of NightJack in their fight to overturn an injunction brought by Horton. He said Foster “used what he knew and found a way out to achieve the same result.”
Brett maintained Horton had been identified legitimately. “No he hadn’t, with great respect,” Leveson responded. “He couldn’t put out of his mind that which he already knew.”
Leveson also accused the Times of exposing wrongdoing “on the basis than an individual would not seek redress.”
“What the Times have done,” the judge said, “doesn’t that mean you’re justifying any route you wish to take to get a story provided it is true?”
Brett concluded the heated session by stressing he did not condone Foster’s methods. “In 33 years I was at the Times this was the one and only case I had,” he said. “God I wish I could have done without it.”
“If you could have been in the room with me and Patrick, I mean, the air was blue,” he said.
Earlier today the Inquiry heard from Daily Mail associate news editor and former crime editor Stephen Wright, who warned against examining contact between the police and the media “to the nth degree”, suggesting that rules banning informal contact between the two might be “abused by senior officers who seek to control the information flow.”
“It could lead to a corruption of a different kind,” he added.
The Inquiry continues on Monday.
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01 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Three former police officers from the Metropolitan Police Service, who were involved in the original phone hacking investigation appeared before Leveson to discuss the relationship between the police and the press today.
In a gruelling three hour testimony, John Yates, former assistant commissioner to the Met Police, was questioned rigorously by both Robert Jay, QC, and Lord Justice Leveson.
Jay explored a catalogue of diary events in which Yates met with a number of journalists, including Neil Wallis, an executive at News International, Colin Myler, former News of the World editor, and Lucy Panton, crime editor of the News of the World.
Jay repeatedly asked Yates if he believed these appointments, at venues such as the Ivy Club, were appropriate. Yates explained “In terms of what we know now, in terms of what has happened, I suppose it is [inappropriate], but it wasn’t at the time.”
He added: “I think it’s hugely important that senior officers of the police have a relationship with the press.”
Yates was asked about an email to Lucy Panton about an Al-Qaeda plot, and story. The email mentioned Yates as “crucial” and added that it was “time to call in all those bottles of champagne. Yates dismissed this as a “turn of phrase” and denied ever being plied with champagne by Panton.
The former Met officer was also asked about an occasion when he had drinks with James Hanning of the Independent. Yates described him as an “interesting interrogator” and added “he challenged some of my preconceptions on phone hacking. It was interesting to talk to him because he was giving a completely different view on what happened. He saw a “grander conspiracy”.
When asked if Hanning had shared with him his belief that knowledge of phone hacking went right to the top of News International, Yates denied this.
Yates accepted making a “fundamental misjudgement” in his definition of phone hacking victims, but also explained that at the time it was not considered a particularly serious matter.
In relation to revelations earlier in the week that Lord Prescott was not made aware of the extent of the information which had been gathered about him, Lord Justice Leveson voiced his concern that “persistent requirements” made by Yates, did not reveal the answer.
Yates replied: “It is deeply regrettable, and I can’t account for it, I’m afraid.”
Peter Clarke, former Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations appeared before the court first, and described the “complicated relationship between the police and the press. Clarke explained that at different levels within the police, there were different levels of relationships with the media.
He said: “I felt that that it was useful to have more informal meetings with groups of journalists from across media outlets at lunches to discuss broad issues of strategy”
When asked by Jay if there was favouritism towards a particular news agency, Clarke said; “I was totally disinterested between them. If my memory serves me, it tended to be on one occasion we would have broadsheets, another red-tops, another broadcasters. We had representation from across the media groups.
During his time as the head of the anti terrorist branch SO13 9between 2002 and 2008), Clarke said that any relationship with the press was to promote the public interest.
Clarke explained that “public interest is paramount” with regards to relations between the press and the police. He added: “any engagement with the media was to try and help protect the public, and to keep them safe.”
He said: “I was not interested in trying to make the police look good, that was not my agenda, it was to try and support the counter terrorist operation at that time.
In relation to the expansion of the inquiry which Clarke admitted he never wanted to happen, he described the pressure put on the SO13 unit, during the time of the original phone hacking investigation, telling the court that at the same time, there were 70 separate terrorism inquiries underway.
He explained that he could not have justified releasing officers to work on the phone-hacking investigation, because of the terrorist threat.
Putting it bluntly, Clarke told the court that phone hackers “don’t kill you, terrorists do.”
Clarke told the court that the 11,000 pages of Mulcaire’s notebooks which were seized were not analysed at the time because the investigation would have been an “enormous undertaking” and would have involved “dozens of officers over weeks if not years.”
He added: “The fear was what that resource commitment would lead us…it was disproportionate to other competing demands at the time.”
Clarke also discussed the obstruction from News International following the arrest of Glenn Mulcaire on the 8 August 2006. He said: “In terms of the investigation, it became immediately apparent that we weren’t going to get any co-operation from News International. Usually, companies bend over backwards to try and preserve their reputation and assist in inquiries. This was a closing of the ranks from very early on.”
Throughout his testimony, Clarke remained firm that all those involved in the case were not affected by News International, “those officers conducted an honest inquiry, they were uninfluenced, as was I by News International.”
Andy Hayman, former Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner also appeared at the hearing.
He told the court that he entered his role with a “reserved” approach to the media. He said “I didn’t feel I needed to engage because I felt that sometimes that kind of relationship was difficult.”
But Jay’s questioning led to the discussion of several meetings between Hayman and Lucy Panton and Neil Wallis. Discussing a “working lunch” in March 2007, Hayman said; “I can’t remember the purpose, I can remember the lunch, but it would not be anything different to anything other than what I’ve already explained, the support that newspaper was trying to give the ongoing terrorist inquiry.” Jay revealed that this lunch was paid for with a Metropolitan Police Service American Express card.
Hayman supported earlier comments from Clarke, that resources were struggling to balance between the phone hacking investigation and on-going terrorist inquiries.
Hayman said: “Without wishing to sound alarmist, the pot was actually running dry, so we had nowhere really to go. Within the Met that was exactly the same … that would have a massive attack on the counter-terrorism.”
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30 Jan 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The Press Complaints Commission was today criticised at the Leveson Inquiry for having taken a “somewhat restrictive and timorous” approach to investigate phone hacking.
Robert Jay QC told former PCC director Tim Toulmin that the self-regulation body had failed to “test the boundaries of its powers” by choosing not to question former News of the World editor Andy Coulson after he resigned from the tabloid following the 2007 convictions of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire over phone hacking. Toulmin rejected this suggestion.
Toulmin, who headed the PCC from 2004 to 2009, said the prospect had been discussed but it was decided that the body’s powers “wouldn’t have had traction” with Coulson.
He added that he later thought this was a mistake. “The PCC should have been seen to ask him,” he said. Lord Justice Leveson interjected, saying that doing so would have been “incredibly powerful”.
Quizzed about the PCC’s response to the Goodman and Mulcaire jailings, Toulmin said that although the PCC did not investigate the matter, it conducted an “exercise that was designed to produce a forward-looking report” and establish principles of internal governance to avoid future wrongdoing.
“We were looking at how it arose, and the culture,” he said.
The PCC produced two reports, one in May 2007 that found no further evidence of wrongdoing, and one in September 2009 that has since been withdrawn, which concluded the body was not misled by the News of the World.
Regarding the 2009 report, Toulmin conceded that dismissing evidence from the Guardian was a “major mistake”. He said he was not a member of the board that decided on the report’s conclusions.
Testifying at the Inquiry earlier this month, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger had said the 2009 report was “worse than a whitewash”.
Elsewhere in his testimony, which ran for over three hours, Toulmin discussed the PCC’s response to the Information Commissioner’s findings on Operation Motorman, which examined the use of a private investigators by the media to obtain personal information. He said that the then commissioner, Richard Thomas, went to the wrong body when he approached the PCC with his report. “He either should have gone directly to the industry — trade bodies — or the code committee, which is more representative of the industry,” he said, noting that data protection breaches were outside of the PCC’s remit.
Last month, Thomas told the Inquiry the PCC “should have done more” in response to the Motorman findings, and that he sought their “loud, strident condemnation.”
Toulmin also asserted that the PCC was not subject to influence from current editors serving on its board, namely Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre and former News International CEO Les Hinton. “They never a single time would phone me up and suggest we should behave in a certain way,” Toulmin said.
Toulmin argued that PCC members were not “cowed” by editors’ presence, and that their presence gave”bite” to complaints rulings.
In his witness statement, Toulmin argued that it was “inappropriate” to call the PCC a regulator.
Leveson also put it to Toulmin that the PCC was believed by the public to be a regulator ” when it wasn’t actually a regulator at all,” Leveson said. Toulmin agreed, claiming that it was “a complaints handler (…) a sort of ombudsman.”
The PCC’s current director, Stephen Abell, who gave evidence this afternoon, said he too was “happy” that the term regulator not be used to describe the PCC. He said that at the heart of the newspaper industry is “people exercising their right to be polemic”, and that regard needed to given to the nature of the industry when coming up with an over-arching structure.
During his testimony he ran through cases of complaints made to the PCC, citing Jan Moir’s column in the Daily Mail about the death of singer Stephen Gately, which was originally headlined “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death”. Abell said there were over 22,000 complaints about the piece — which was later amended to the print edition headline “A strange, lonely and troubling death” — but it was “just short” of a breach of the PCC code, despite being a “difficult” episode to judge.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with evidence from current PCC chairman Lord Hunt, former chair Sir Christopher Meyer and PCC member Lord Grade.
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