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Scotland Yard acting deputy commissioner defends himself after criticism from MPs
Scotland Yard's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, has continued to fight his corner in the face of further allegations that he misled parliament over the phone-hacking scandal.
In written evidence to the home affairs select committee, Chris Bryant MP, who first laid the charge against Yates in the House of Commons earlier this month, claimed that:
• Yates had always maintained there were very few victims in the affair, yet a briefing paper produced by Scotland Yard during the original inquiry had recorded that "a vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals have been identified as being accessed without authority."
• Yates had told the home affairs committee last September that there was no evidence that MPs' phones had been tapped, yet "at least eight MPs that I am aware of, have now been shown evidence that has been in police possession since 2006 that shows precisely that."
• Yates claimed that police had approached all known and suspected victims, yet they had failed to inform a number of people who had now been confirmed as victims including, Bryant said, the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, actor Sienna Miller and her friends and family and interior designer Kelly Hoppen.
• Yates had failed to tell select committees that police never fully searched the material which they seized in 2006 from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the affair, and since this had later proved to include 2,978 mobile phone numbers, "it is difficult to see how his assertion that there were very few victims can possibly have been based on fact."
Yates emphatically denied he had ever misled parliament. He defended his position on the central point of law which has become the subject of a public dispute between him and the director of public prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC.
Yates has consistently said that it is an offence to intercept voicemail only if it has not already been heard by its intended recipient. On this narrow interpretation, the hacking affair involved few victims and few offenders.
However, the DPP has told the committee in writing that prosecuting counsel in the original inquiry in 2006 never adopted this interpretation and that it played no part in the charges brought against Mulcaire and the News of the World's royal correspondent, Clive Goodman, or in the legal proceedings generally.
Yates stood his ground. He said Bryant had been wrong to claim in the House of Commons on 10 March that the CPS had never advised police to adopt this narrow interpretation.
He provided the committee with a written summary of evidence which he gave last week to the media, culture and sport committee listing a series of occasions on which the CPS had specifically told police that they had to prove not only that voicemail had been intercepted but this had happened before their intended recipients had heard them. "That advice permeated the entire inquiry," he said.
Yates told the committee that the advice had remained unchanged until October 2010, when Scotland Yard started a new inquiry and the CPS advised them to take a broader approach, simply regarding all interception of voicemail as illegal.
He said Bryant had been wrong to suggest that in October 2010 the CPS had formally warned police that the previous advice had been wrong.
"A different QC had provided some differing advice. It signalled an intention to take the broader view for the future." He said Bryant had now "absolutely conceded" that he had been wrong on the point.
However, in his written evidence, Bryant conceded only that "it is true that during the very early days, a lawyer at the CPS may have advised" adopting the narrow version of the law. He quoted the DPP's claim that this advice "had no bearing on the charges brought against the defendants or the legal proceedings generally."
He suggested that that the original CPS advice had been set aside during the original inquiry, in August 2006, when David Perry QC was brought in as prosecuting counsel. "Perry expressly wrote to the CPS on October 3 2006 that all that they had to prove was that the message had been listened to by Mulcaire, not that the message was virgin."
Bryant went on to accuse Yates of misleading the culture, media and sport committee last week: "Even in his evidence to the DCMS committee last week, he disingenuously only referred to advice prior to August 9th 2006, before the first meeting at which David Perry gave the advice that secured the conviction of Goodman and Mulcaire." The committee chairman, Keith Vaz, said the DPP would be giving evidence on the matter.
The committee also asked Yates whether police had ever questioned Rebekah Brooks, the former editor of the News of the World and the Sun, over her 2003 evidence to a select committee that her journalists had paid the police for information. Yates said she had not been questioned but that Scotland Yard was currently 'researching' the matter to see what had been done about it.
Yates was challenged by Mark Reckless MP to explain why he was willing to use public money to pay for lawyers to threaten newspapers whose reports he found objectionable, while victims of the hacking affair had had to spend large amounts of their own money to take civil actions to uncover the truth about crimes committed against them. Yates said the two points were completely separate and that, while he had asked for authority to use public funds for his legal advice, he had no intention of suing.
Bryant referred to recent disclosures about a series of dinners where Yates and other senior officers met News of the World editors: "The Met have not helped themselves by having regular meetings with the News of the World at the same time as they are supposed to be investigating them." There was, he said, "a serious risk that they might be perceived to be in collusion with the newspaper." Yates said police were "duty bound to engage at various levels with politicians, businessmen and media" and suggested that he had probably had more lunches with the Guardian than with the News of the World.
Bryant told the committee that he commended the current Yard inquiry under Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers. But he added: "The Met not only failed to do a full investigation in 2006; they have consistently and repeatedly failed to interrogate the evidence they seized in 2006; they have misled individual victims and potential victims; they have opened themselves to charges of collusion by frequently socialising with journalists and executives at the very organisation they were supposedly investigating; and they have consistently failed to give the full picture to this committee. Most worryingly, they have, for whatever reason, failed to expose the full degree of criminality involved, leaving victims to fend for themselves by dragging information out of the Met in civil court."