SCOTLAND YARD has yet to answer questions from former British prime minister Gordon Brown about whether his mobile phone was illegally intercepted by a private investigator for the News of the Worldwhen he was chancellor of the exchequer.
Questions were raised by Mr Brown earlier last year, when he was still at No 10, after he became concerned for reasons unknown that investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was on a £100,000-a-year contract with the tabloid, had listened in to his voicemails.
Mulcaire and News of the Worldroyal correspondent Clive Goodman were jailed in 2007 for intercepting messages on mobiles belonging to model Elle Macpherson, publicist Max Clifford and MP Simon Hughes, but the tabloid has since argued that the duo acted on their own.
The newspaper’s then editor Andy Coulson resigned from his post the day after they were convicted and he resigned again on Friday, this time as prime minister David Cameron’s chief communications official. He said the controversy was distracting him from his duties at No 10.
It now has the potential to become a major political and business crisis since the crown prosecution service has thought better of an original decision to close the file in December, saying then there were no grounds for prosecutions. Senior executives for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp are now deeply concerned that the affair could threaten its multimillion bid to take full control of BSkyB, which needs government and regulatory approval.
Liberal Democrat secretary of state for energy Chris Huhne said yesterday that the protests by the News of the World, since 2007, that the scandal involved a rogue reporter and detective working alone were "not consistent".
Speaking to BBC One's The Politics Show,he said: "It seemed to me clear that the number of people that were being hacked clearly was not consistent with it being one rogue reporter," but he added that he had no reason to disbelieve Mr Coulson's denials of involvement.
Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, speaking on Sky News, said: “Hacking into people’s phones is illegal. Obviously the criminal law has got to be complied with and if it is broken, then it should be investigated by the police and it should be enforced. Nobody is above the law, no newspaper editor, no journalist.”
Keeping the focus on the prime minister’s judgment for hiring Mr Coulson after he stood down from the tabloid, she said: “I think that David Cameron was wrong to appoint someone to the heart of the government, to the heart of Downing Street, who had actually been editor of a newspaper at a time when criminal activity was going on,” Ms Harman said.
So far, the rest of Fleet Street has taken a softly-softly attitude to the story of Mr Coulson’s difficulties, partly because it was an open secret in the trade that mobile hacking was widespread in the late 1990s and early part of the last decade.
On Saturday, Tim Montgomerie, the editor of the influential conservativehome blog, claimed that Mr Coulson had been pushed to quit Downing Street by Mr Murdoch, who spent all of last week in London. However, Mr Montgomerie quoted no sources for his claim.
Media academic Prof Brian Cathcart last night pointed out that Mr Murdoch’s son James was directly involved in 2008 in the settlement of an action taken over the hacking of the phone of Gordon Taylor, the then head of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
Expressing his lack of faith in the Metropolitan police’s conduct of the investigation, Labour MP Paul Farrelly said an outside force should be brought in: “There’s a real issue here of credibility in the Metropolitan police and the crown prosecution service.”
