Cleaning up Britain proceeds apace. First the bankers (though Alistair Darling’s feeble White Paper scarcely merits the title of a clean up – more a brush-down – see next blog on this site), then the MPs, and now the media, or rather the more seamy tabloid side of it. Today’s Guardian story is devastating, not only because it is so well documented and impeccably sourced, but because the political implications for the Murdoch press (the News of the World and the Sun) and for Cameron, who hired Andy Coulson the previous News of the World editor as his director of communications, are so serious. The evidence already indicates (1) Murdoch journalists hiring private investigators to illegally hack into the mobile phone messages of the Royal Family, Ministers and politicians, and sports and fashion celebrities, (2) the Metropolitan police failing to warn these public figures that their phones were being targeted, (3) the CPS failing to press charges against senior News Group executives, and (4) the Press Complaints Commission failing to find evidence of illegality though it is now exposed on a massive scale. A senior Met source revealed that private investigators used by News Group staff had hacked into ‘thousands’ of mobile phones. So what should now be done to clean up this Augean stable?

First, a high-level police inquiry directed by the Head of Constabulary should immediately be set in train at the request of the Home Secretary. Subject to the evidence uncovered, this could be the precursor to criminal prosecutions for breaches of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and the Data Protection Act. Already a News of the World reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator who had worked for News Group, Glenn Mulcaire, were jailed in 2007. But the scale of this illegal activity is now revealed as going vastly wider, and Andrew Neil, a former editor News Group’s Sunday Times, has described the News of the World as a newsroom out of control.
Secondly, the veracity and integrity of News Group need to be rigorously challenged. Initially News Group executives claimed not to be involved in any way in Mulcaire’s hacking into the phone of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and insisted they had kept no record or notes of intercepted messages. But when, in the High Court case brought by Taylor, the court ordered the production of Scotland Yard’s detailed evidence from the Goodman case, plus further evidence collected by the Information Commissioner into journalists collecting confidential material dishonestly, it was found that Mulcaire had indeed provided a recording of Taylor’s phone messages to a News of the World journalist who had transcribed them for a senior reporter, and in addition Mulcaire had been given a substantial bonus. Having been caught lying, News International reversed its earlier position and offered Taylor a hugh cash payment of £700,000 on condition he signed a gagging clause, together with another £300,000 to two other targeted football figures on the same condition. All this evidence needs to be reopened and the full extent of the cover-up in these and all the other cases brought to light.
Third, the complicity of the full range of journalists, private investigators, editors and senior executives throughout News International in this illegal activity needs to be thoroughly scrutinised. It appears that the widespread dishonest procuring of confidential personal records began when Coulson was deputy editor and Rebekah Wade was editor of the News of the World. Under Coulson’s editorship the evidence hitherto suppressed now shows that his journalists were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts. Is there evidence which shows that Coulson (or Wade) knew more than he has admitted? And if so, did Cameron have any knowledge of this, and did he question Coulson closely enough to find out?

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