News International was facing three fresh inquiries into the conduct of its journalists and executives following the Guardian’s disclosures that Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire paid £1m to keep secret the use of criminal methods to get stories.
The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced he was intending to launch an urgent review of the evidence relating to phone hacking gathered in the investigation of the News of the World reporter Clive Goodman, who was jailed for obtaining information illegally.
A powerful Commons select committee said it would be calling senior managers from News International to give evidence as early as next week to clarify what they knew about malpractice by journalists at the News of the World. Andy Coulson, the former editor of the paper and now the Conservative party’s director of communications, will be asked to appear. He has always denied he knew reporters working for him had hacked into the mobile phones of politicians and celebrities.
The Press Complaints Commission also announced it was conducting an inquiry.
At Westminster, senior Labour figures continued to call for Coulson to resign and the prime minister said that there were “serious questions” to answer.
Gordon Brown was responding after the Guardian revealed that News Group, the publishers of the News of the World, had made the £1m payout to secure secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of journalists using private investigators to illegally hack into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures. It is also alleged journalists gained unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and phone bills. Targets included John Prescott and Tessa Jowell.
The chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Gordon Taylor, last year received £700,000 from News International in compensation and legal costs, and agreed not to discuss the case.
However, hundreds of other public figures may also have been targeted. Some said they were seeking legal advice. Among them were the celebrity publicist Max Clifford and TV presenter Vanessa Feltz. Lawyers told the Guardian that News International could face expensive legal actions if it was proved that its reporters were engaged in behaviour that breached privacy.
The Met’s assistant commissioner John Yates said Scotland Yard would not be reopening its files because no new evidence had come to light and the original inquiry had concluded phone tapping had occurred in only a minority of cases.
That decision was criticised later when John Prescott, one of those whose phone was allegedly hacked, told the BBC’s Newsnight “serious questions had to be answered” despite Yates’s statement. “Frankly he has come out, he has defined in a very narrow way what he is going to look at, and then gives a report that everything is OK,” he said.
Legal experts said the Yard’s decision would not affect the ability of alleged hacking victims to sue for breach of privacy.
The parliamentary inquiry will focus on executives at News International, including Rebekah Wade, the outgoing Sun editor who has been promoted to News International chief executive; Stuart Kuttner, the News of the World’s outgoing managing editor; Colin Myler, the current News of the World editor; and Les Hinton, the former chairman of News International.
John Whittingdale, the chairman of the committee, said he was particularly keen to question Hinton, who told a previous hearing Goodman had been acting alone.
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, was forced to defend Coulson, but Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, last night insisted that Coulson should lose his job.
Cameron told reporters: “It’s wrong for newspapers to breach people’s privacy with no justification. That is why Andy Coulson resigned as editor two and a half years ago. Of course I knew about that resignation before offering him the job. But I believe in giving people a second chance. As director of communications for the Conservatives he does an excellent job in a proper, upright way.”
The Tories also pointed to Scotland Yard’s decision not to reopen its inquiry.
Nevertheless, the DPP said he was setting up a team to review the evidence and the decision taken over the material discovered during the police inquiry into Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator who was also jailed. “In the light of the fresh allegations … I have ordered an urgent examination of the material supplied to the CPS by the police,” he said.
He was taking this action “to satisfy myself and assure the public that the appropriate actions were taken”. He said the evidence was extensive and complex, “but it has all been located and a small team is rapidly working through it … It will necessarily take some time. I am only too aware of the need for urgency.”
News International broke its silence last night, but did not address the specific allegations made by the Guardian, saying: “News International is prevented by confidentiality obligations from discussing allegations made in the Guardian newspaper.” It said its journalists had complied with relevant legislation and codes of conduct since February 2007, after the Goodman case and Coulson’s resignation.
Alan Rusbridger, the editor in chief of the Guardian, said: “We note that News International has not contested any part of the Guardian coverage – including the central assertion that the company had paid a record £1m to ensure secrecy over damages paid to victims of illegal phone-hacking.”
Who wants Ireland’s blasphemy law?
New rules which forbid causing ‘outrage’ among religious people have baffled Ireland. We were getting along just fine without them
I’m not sure which piece of unpopular Irish news is being buried by which: the announcement of a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty, or the shuffling through of a law creating penalties for blasphemy, an offence that has never properly existed in the Irish state.
While there is certainly a store of resentment in the population at being asked to vote again (that is: vote properly, you morons, as the government is barely holding back from saying) on the Lisbon treaty, there is a certain sense of bafflement at the new blasphemy legislation, smuggled in under the guise of defamation law reform. Nobody wanted this law: no one can think of a single thundering priest, austere vicar, irate rabbi or miffed mullah ever calling for tougher penalties for blasphemy. Certainly there were the frequent, and frequently ignored missives from Armagh, warning the Irish not to abandon God for 4x4s and Nintendo Wiis. And there was widespread dismay when popular comic Tommy Tiernan pushed the Bible-baiting a bit too far on the Late Late Show. But never did anyone suggest we needed tough blasphemy laws. Until the justice minister, Dermot Ahern, decided we needed to fill the “void” left by our lack of one.
Technically, Ahern is correct that Bunreacht na hÉireann requires that blasphemy be a criminal offence. However, no one ever bothered to formulate what the exact offence might be, and we muddled on for quite a long time without anyone worrying about this (perhaps, as a friend pointed out to me, because all blasphemous material was grabbed by the all-powerful censors long before it could ever get to court). In 1999, there was an attempt to prosecute a newspaper for a cartoon mocking the church, but the judge in that case noted that he could not prosecute, because there was no definition of what legally constituted blasphemy. Well now there is. And it concerns itself with what might or might not cause “outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of [a] religion” (note, not just Christianity, as was the case with English blasphemy law: this is, at least, equal opportunities idiocy).
As Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland has pointed out:
So Irish law has now enshrined the notion that the taking of offence is more important than free expression. If something might cause a motivated group to be “outraged”, rather than, say, cause them to live in fear, then it is illegal, with a fine of up to €25,000 payable.
Note the ease with which a prosecution could be brought, and the punitive nature of the fine: this is not legislation that simply serves to tie up a few loose ends.
The minister claimed that his only alternative to this legislation was to have a referendum. This again, is technically true: any constitutional changes in Ireland require this. But the minister dismissed the notion of organising a referendum as being too costly in these straitened times.
Yet today, we are told there is to be another Lisbon referendum in October. Wouldn’t it have been sensible to hold both the Lisbon referendum and a referendum on the abolition of the concept of blasphemy from the constitution on the same day, cutting down on costs? Wouldn’t it, minister?