Leveson-watchers were expecting the second part of the inquiry, focusing on the relationship between the press and the police, to be the most interesting. And so it is.
On 27 February, we had Sue Akers, a deputy assistant commissioner at the Met, telling Lord Justice Leveson that there was “a culture at the Sun of illegal payments” to police officers and public officials, with one trousering £80,000 over a number of years. (Contrast that with the Times’s report a few days after the most recent arrests, worrying that a Sun hack was “questioned over a £50 lunch claim”.)
The next day, former BBC Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames told the inquiry that she was placed under surveillance by the News of the World after her husband, a police officer, became the “face” of one of several tortuous investigations into the murder of a man named Daniel Morgan. One of the suspects was Morgan’s business partner, Jonathan Rees, a private investigator paid £150,000 a year by the NoW when it was edited by Andy Coulson. She told the inquiry that Rees, who was eventually tried for the 1987 murder in 2011 (the case collapsed), had “close links” to the paper’s news editor.
So why was Hames put under surveillance? Paragraph 40 of her witness statement puts it clearly: “I believe that the real reason for the News of the World placing us under surveillance was that suspects in the Daniel Morgan murder inquiry were using their association with a powerful and well-resourced newspaper to try to intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation.”
If that is true, it’s frightening. And the Leveson inquiry can never be mocked as a “celebrity hurt-feelings tribunal” again.
Her kingdom for a horse
Next to those two allegations, it was easy to miss the news that Scotland Yard had tipped off News International’s chief executive Rebekah Brooks about the extent of hacking as early as 2006. Sportingly, they asked her if she “wishe[d] to take it further” than the arrests of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire.
The flood of new revelations not only makes the abrupt closure of the NoW more and more understandable, but the opening of the Sun on Sunday a provocative move. By Tuesday, things were looking so bad that some suggested the story of the Met “loaning” Rebekah Brooks a retired police horse had been deliberately leaked to divert attention. That’s possibly a bit far-fetched – not to mention a terrible idea, given that the intricacies of claim and counter-claim are hard to keep up with, but “she was so close to police they lent her a horse” is easily digestible. It’s the £1,645 duck house of Hackgate.
Out to lunch
I hope there’s better to come from WikiLeaks’s latest venture, the release of five million emails from the US-based intelligence firm Stratfor. So far, observations by this apparently shadowy organisation include the breathless: “I got a lot of info on [Swedish politician] Carl Bildt. . . Bildt apparently super tall, has photographic memory and is very smart. . . Bildt believes that Sweden should become a world power.” (That was marked “SPECIAL HANDLING: Secure”.)
Another email promisingly begins: “Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.” However, it turns out to be responding to Rob in the finance department, who complains that “someone has taken the lunch that I brought in. . . That’s commonly known as stealing”.
Past tents
My morning walk to work is a little less interesting now that the Occupy protesters have been evicted from St Paul’s. Every morning, there was a quiet bustle of activity; later, there were talks in the “university tent” and pleas for food donations outside the canteen. Did the protesters achieve their aims? It’s impossible to say, not least because their aims were so nebulous. Unlike many protest movements, they did not start timid and become more radicalised – they started off fighting for the dismantling of capitalism and ended up arguing for their right to exist. With the tuition-fee protests more violent and the outcry against the coalition’s NHS and school reforms likely to be deeper and more widespread, I doubt Occupy will be more than a footnote in the history of David Cameron’s coalition goverment. But still, as I trudge past the steps of the cathedral, its cream stone looks suddenly bare.
Setting the Vagenda
I gave up women’s mags for blood pressure-related reasons some years ago, but I might be tempted back by the online-only Vagenda, which is acerbic and hilarious in equal measure. Its tagline is “Like King Lear, but for girls” – which is how Grazia described The Iron Lady – and it has the pasted-up look of an old-school underground magazine.
Vagenda was started less than a month ago by a group of largely anonymous female writers who decided “the women’s press is a large hadron collider of bullshit and that something needed to be done”. As someone who never again wishes to be told which £900 handbag is “this season’s must-have” because its makers have bought a shedload of adverts, I applaud it.
Dislike a Virgin
Sorry to turn this page into First Thoughts on Virgin Media, but I read Peter Wilby’s travails with the company with interest last week, as I had an engineer due round to instal my broadband on Saturday. Internet providers come just above letting agents (and below budget airlines) on my League of Companies Who Treat You Badly Because They Can Get Away With It, so I was shocked to my core when the whole thing went without a hitch. The engineer departed, I retired to my bedroom to work on my laptop . . . and the door refused to shut. Yes, he’d wired the cable right into the door frame.
Next week: Peter Wilby
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