THE PHONE-TAPPING scandal at the News of the World escalated yesterday after the Metropolitan Police, which has been sharply criticised for its investigation up to now, was forced to launch a new inquiry that will leave "no stone unturned".
Questioned in London, acting Metropolitan Police commissioner Tim Godwin promised “a robust investigation” that would restore the confidence of scores of people; some famous, some not, who believe their voicemails were intercepted by the tabloid.
Detectives refused to re-open the inquiry 18 months ago, but the story has refused to go away despite the 2007 jailing of a reporter and a private detective after it emerged that the tabloid had paid £1 million in out of court settlements to victims.
The Crown Prosecution Service, which announced earlier this week that it would have all the files held by the police examined by a specially drafted lawyer, said as recently as December that no grounds for new prosecutions existed.
Now, however, the police say the situation has changed following the newspaper’s decision to hand over emails that implicated a senior executive – fired earlier this week – but it failed to explain why it had not examined those emails itself during its inquiry.
Defending his 2009 decision not to re-open the investigation, Met assistant commissioner John Yates said the latest information from the News of the Worldwas "the first significant new evidence that may have a chance of being admissible" in court.
Labour MP Tom Watson has claimed that detectives “appeared to have failed to follow available evidence and had concealed evidence” in an attempt not to upset relations with the tabloid and other titles owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
Former Labour minister Tessa Jowell, whose voicemails were listened in to 28 times during 2006, said she was warned last week by her mobile telephone company that someone had tried and failed to access her voicemail.
The controversy, which has already claimed the job of David Cameron’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, now threatens to engulf other British media. It is an open secret that phone hacking was rampant in the early part of the last decade.
In the House of Lords, the Conservative Party’s former chairman Lord Fowler demanded a full-scale government inquiry, describing the scandal as “Watergate in reverse”, where newspapers conspired against the public interest, rather than defending it.
Meanwhile, TV presenter Leslie Ash and her husband, former footballer Lee Chapman, have joined the growing list of celebrities and others who are taking civil actions against the News of the Worldfor breach of privacy.
The couple, who wrote to the Met last October inquiring if there was any evidence to suggest their voicemails had been intercepted, claim that there is now evidence that both they and their children may have been targeted after Ash suffered a life-threatening MRSA infection in 2004.
Earlier this month, it emerged that four pieces of paper referring to Ash were found in notebooks held by jailed private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, along with five references to her husband and several more about their children.
Suggesting that the couple should contact their mobile phone company, the police then told the couple that it was “not necessarily correct to assume” that Mr Mulcaire had held the information “for the purposes of interception”.
Responding to news of the fresh policy inquiry, Tony Blair’s former communications director Alastair Campbell tweeted: “‘No stone unturned’, says Met re new phonehack inquiry. Better be different to the one that has sat doing nothing for four years then.”
