The director of public prosecutions faced the Commons home affairs committee and managed to tell them very little
When the two Murdoch newshounds were arrested over the phone-hacking scandal, MPs on the Commons home affairs select committee sounded keen to be as mean to the News of the World as the redtop often is to them. "Perfect timing," beamed the panel's Labour chairman, the wily Keith Vaz. His colleagues looked less than upset.
Alas, the MPs had reckoned without the presence of their star witness. Keir Starmer QC is director of public prosecutions (DPP) and nine times voted Britain's fairest man by a committee of serving police officers, 250 former jurors and the inmates of Belmarsh prison. Don't even think about making sly, prejudicial remarks in Keir's presence, you MP creeps!
"It just means I have to be so careful" in not talking about a continuing investigation, Starmer explained as he scrupulously drew their attention to caveats in his evidence.
These included a brief admission that at one stage even he had read the law on illegal data interception wrongly. From here on in, the Keith and Keir show could go only one way: on to the high moral ground.
Just imagine a combination of Bob Parr (aka Mr Incredible) and Martin Shaw, playing both Judge John Deed and Inspector George Gently. Only then will voters have some measure of the noblest legal mind since Gandhi traded in his wig for a sheet or Clark Kent his specs for magic Y-fronts. Why, there is even a Keir Starmer Appreciation Society on Facebook.
Wholly coincidental to the arrests, the DPP had been booked for a session with the Vaz committee to help untangle a dispute that has divided white-van Britain for months: who is telling the truth, Scotland Yard's acting deputy chief bottle-washer, John Yates, or human rights barrister-turned-Britain's Fairest Man? It's a real puzzler.
For months, Yates of the Yard (actually, he's taller than that) has been telling us all that the Met's initial 2006 inquiry into phone hacking – the one that collared a "rogue reporter" and his wireman – had not been extended to hundreds of other celebs, including John Prescott and Sienna Miller ("Are they an item?" the NoW had wanted to know). Why? Because of legal advice from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). His hands were tied.
Starmer (surely named after the saintly socialist rather than the popular French cocktail) was not in charge of the CPS in 2006. But he says has now looked into the affair as deeply as Galileo examined the movements of the heavenly bodies. As a result he has publicly disputed Yates's version: even in 2006, the CPS had given the Yard two legal options to prosecute, he said; and it never said anything that would narrow the scope of police inquiries.
For good measure, Starmer did it again last week, via an uncompromising 11-page letter to the MPs. Brainy Dr Julian Huppert, a Leon Trotsky lookalike who is actually Lib Dem MP for Cambridge, was thrilled. "This is actually one of the most compelling pieces of legal literature I have ever read," he trilled. The rebellious Tory Mark Reckless, a barrister himself, waved his pink copy of the Starmer letter and indulged in reckless cross-examination of the great man.
Speaking "as a non-lawyer", Labour's Bridget Phillipson (27) bravely confirmed that the ambiguous legal point underpinning Yates's case for not trying very hard had never actually been tested in law! It was merely the provisional and pragmatic opinion of some busy lawyers.
Throughout these exchanges, the man who put the star into Starmer kept saying: "What I don't want to do is put words into the mouth of Mr Yates" (to verbal him as coppers used to say in earlier episodes of The Bill), and: " I don't think it is for me to criticise others." With no blood visible on the carpet at the end of this saintly performance, chairman Vaz did his best to hide any disappointment. "We will write to Mr Yates," he purred.