Phone Hacking

John Whittingdale Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Attorney-General]

It is a matter that I am very happy to go away and check, but I think the hon. Gentleman might be mistaken. I think that in fact Ofcom could intervene at any stage if it were to conclude that somebody was not a fit and proper person to hold a broadcasting licence. As these matters can be complex and I would not wish in any way to mislead the House, I would be happy to go away and check that point and to write to the hon. Gentleman about it.

[Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

I can confirm that I spoke to the chief executive of Ofcom yesterday, who told me that Ofcom has the power to intervene at any stage if it determines that somebody is no longer a fit and proper person to own a media organisation.

[The Attorney-General]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and that confirms what I already thought. Of course, that will not prevent me from going away and triple-checking the matter before I write to the hon. Member for Rhondda about it.

I am conscious that I ought to make progress and I want to allow time for debate. Because of my rather limited ability to comment on many of the allegations made, I was going to remind the House of some of the history of this matter. The House will be aware that these problems originated in November 2005 when the Metropolitan police were contacted by the royal household with concerns that voicemails relating to members of the royal family had been intercepted—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Whittingdale (Maldon) (Con)]

I rise to speak in the debate with considerable sadness. I am a passionate believer in the freedom of the press, but like other freedoms, that freedom must be exercised within the rule of law. Many of us here were appalled when we discovered, in the course of the expenses scandal, what a small number of Members of the House had done. They were rightly prosecuted and several have now gone to prison, but that scandal tainted all of us. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) referred to the fact that journalists throughout the country are equally appalled at the revelations that have come out about the activities of some members of their profession, and they too feel that they have been tainted by them.

The latest revelations mark a low point in the saga of phone hacking, but I fear they do not mark the end point. There are likely to be further revelations still to come. The matter was first looked at by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee in early 2007, following the conviction of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire. At that time I asked the chairman of News International, Les Hinton:

“You carried out a full, rigorous internal inquiry, and you are absolutely convinced that Clive Goodman was the only person who knew what was going on?”

Mr Hinton replied:

“Yes, we have and believe he was the only person, but that investigation, under the new editor, continues.”

The Committee produced a report which stated:

“We note the assurances of the Chairman of News International that Mr Goodman was acting wholly without authorisation and that Mr Coulson had no knowledge of what was going on.”

In July 2009 The Guardian reported that News International had paid Gordon Taylor and two others more than £1 million because their phones had been hacked, which led the Committee to believe that we might have been misled. We therefore decided to reopen our inquiry. Early in those inquiries The Guardian produced two pieces of evidence: one was the so-called “for Neville” e-mail, which contained the transcripts of 35 voicemail messages between Gordon Taylor and his legal adviser; the other was a contract between Glenn Mulcaire, under a false name, and Greg Miskiw, a senior executive at the News of the World. We felt strongly that both pieces of evidence suggested that Clive Goodman was not the rogue reporter that we had been told about.

The Committee took evidence from Tom Crone, the legal manager of News Group Newspapers, Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World, Stuart Kuttner, the newspaper’s managing editor, and Andy Coulson, its former editor. We asked whether Rebekah Brooks would appear before us, but she said she had had no involvement with the News of the World when the phone hacking was taking place, which was the case, as she was editor of The Sun at the time. We asked Neville Thurlbeck to appear but were told that doing so would reveal what he looked like, and so compromise his position as an investigative reporter. We asked that Ross Hindley, the junior reporter who had transcribed the voicemail intercepts, should appear, but were told that he could not come because he was in Peru. We were told that there had been a thorough investigation by outside solicitors and that no evidence had been unearthed to suggest that phone hacking had been any more widespread.

[Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one important issue that a public inquiry will have to navigate is the fact that no one so far has been cross-examined in either a criminal or a civil court, as settlements have been reached in all the civil cases? Indeed, in the Gordon Taylor case the court ordered the files to be sealed, and Sienna Miller is the latest victim of phone hacking to settle. As a result, we have not yet got to the bottom of this.

[Mr Whittingdale]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman—indeed, I can call him my hon. Friend, as a fellow member of the Select Committee. I think that an inquiry should be able to investigate any documents that are relevant to this matter.

During the Committee’s inquiry I again spoke with Mr Crone, the legal manager, and asked:

“As far as you know, no information regarding those other individuals ever reached the News of the World?”

He replied:

“I have seen no evidence of that.”

Mr Coulson said in evidence that during his editorship he

“never condoned the use of ’phone hacking and nor do I have any recollection of incidences where ’phone hacking took place. My instructions to the staff were clear: we did not use subterfuge of any kind unless there was a clear public interest in doing so; they were to work within the PCC Code at all times.”

The Committee stated in its report:

“Evidence we have seen makes it inconceivable that no-one else at the News of the World, bar Clive Goodman, knew about the phone-hacking…The newspaper’s enquiries were far from ‘full’ or ‘rigorous’, as we—and the PCC—had been assured. Throughout our inquiry, too, we have been struck by the collective amnesia afflicting witnesses from the News of the World.”

Since that time there have been a stream of revelations, and it has become increasingly clear that phone hacking was widespread and involved a large number of people. Most of that evidence, certainly in the early stages, came from the material seized by the police from Glenn Mulcaire, which they were required to divulge only when the civil cases came to court and they were asked to do so by the solicitors acting on behalf of the people bringing civil cases. The key point is that almost every piece of evidence we are now learning about has been in the possession of the police since 2006. That raises very serious questions about why it was not pursued, and why we were told repeatedly that the evidence did not exist, and why the police assured us that there was no evidence to suggest that the investigation should go any further.

All phone hacking is wrong and illegal, but there is no question but that the revelations that the phone of Milly Dowler was hacked, if that was the case, represent a new low, as do the subsequent revelations about the victims of the 7 July bombings and their families, and other murdered children. The truth of these matters is still not wholly clear and there is an ongoing police investigation, which nothing must be allowed to impede. We need to know whether the allegations are true—and if they are, who commissioned those phone hacks and who else knew about it.

There is a swirl of rumour about who might or might not have had their phones hacked, and there are also rumours about other newspapers. I must say that I suspect that, just as Clive Goodman was not a rogue reporter, so the News of the World was not a rogue newspaper. We need to get to the full facts. There needs to be a full inquiry, and the police, the Press Complaints Commission and the press as a whole need to be held to account.