15 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
A leaked Daily Mail story about advances in the investigation of the murder of Stephen Lawrence undermined the probe into the teenager’s death, the Leveson Inquiry heard this morning.
The Metropolitan police’s DCI Clive Driscoll, who led the re-opened inquiry into the teenager’s murder, described a November 2007 meeting he sought to hold in secret with Stephen’s mother, Doreen, and her lawyers.
Driscoll said while he was on the train home that evening, he received a phone call saying a story following the meeting would be running in the Daily Mail the next day.
“Stephen’s family were distraught about this,” Driscoll wrote in his witness statement, adding that the story “undermined” the Met’s relationship with the Lawrence family. “When this happened it was almost like going back to square one,” he wrote.
“Every time a story leaked to the press I had to repair relations with the family,” he wrote, adding later that the volume of leaks led him to believe that “someone was deliberately attempting to disrupt the investigation”.
Driscoll said he had “nothing but respect” for Stephen Wright, the Mail journalist whose name appeared on the November 2007 story. “No-one has tried harder, no organisation has tried harder to bring justice to Stephen’s parents,” Driscoll said, “but we were getting there, and it was undermining that inquiry, and I can’t understand that.”
“I have admiration with what the paper did in supporting the family, I have admiration in Mr Wright pursuing it. The bit I can’t understand is why, when you get there, you would then do anything to undermine it.”
Driscoll says he does not know who leaked the story about the meeting to the Mail. As a result, “everyone became a suspect”.
He added that Wright was spoken to by the police following the story and did not write a second piece. The journalist also maintained that the article did not come from a police source.
“I do not believe Mr Wright would have done anything to deliberately undermine the investigation,” Driscoll wrote.
The officer also thanked the paper for choosing not to publish another piece related to the Lawrence inquiry, which he said would have had “a serious consequence on the investigation we were planning.”
Driscoll admitted that the nature of Lawrence’s murder in 1993 — one of the “defining murders of its time”, he said — meant it would always generate a certain amount of press interest. In his written evidence he noted that a “significant amount” of information about the investigation was being leaked to the media, namely the News of the World, in October 2007. “This was incredibly damaging,” he wrote.
Also in the witness box this morning was the Sun’s crime editor, Mike Sullivan, who said he believes that the Metropolitan police have grading charts on individual journalists with a marking system to show the favourability of the coverage towards the police. Yet the Met’s counsel, Neil Garnham QC, denied this was the case.
Sullivan also criticised the Filkin report into press-police relations for its “patronising” tone towards journalists, adding that he does not know any journalists who will “pour alcohol” down sources’ necks to get a story.
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14 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The president of the Crime Reporters’ Association, Jeff Edwards, was encouraged by his former boss at the News of the World to bribe police officers for information, the Leveson Inquiry heard today.
Edwards joined the now defunct tabloid in 1981 and was appointed crime correspondent soon after. Around the end of 1983, his then line manager told him he was unhappy with his work, arguing that he was not producing enough stories.
Pressuring him to improve his performance, Edwards’ boss told him: “we have plenty of money available, let your contacts in the police know that we will reward them for good information.”
“I do not remember what I said in return but I remember being worried about both my job and what my boss was suggesting as I had never paid police officers before, and was worried about the legal and ethical issues involved,” Edwards wrote in his witness statement.
“No more was said for about three or four weeks, but I did not offer bribes or rewards to any police contacts and clearly my performance was still not good enough because the News Editor confronted me again. He was angry and again said words to the effect that I should be paying police officers to induce them to pass on information,” he continued.
“I do remember that I became upset and said to him that I disapproved strongly of such methods and said something on the lines that I thought we were about exposing hypocrisy and corruption and yet here we were with him instructing me to bribe police officers.”
Edwards added that he felt this was the “final nail” in his coffin: “I remember him becoming angry and saying words to the effect that ‘if you will not do my bidding I will find someone who will’.”
He was removed from his position as crime correspondent and returned to the main newsroom as a general reporter the following week.
Edwards said he worked with “many excellent and enterprising journalists who upheld the best traditions of the profession” at the News of the World, but noted his feeling that there was a “section of the staff who displayed dishonest and devious behaviour”. He said the culture at the Daily Mirror, where he later became chief crime correspondent, was “far removed” from that of the Sunday tabloid.
Elsewhere in his oral testimony, Edwards claimed the police operate on a “blame culture” during crises or scandals, and will take the “easier option” of closing down “as much engagement as possible.”
He advocated “delicate adjustments” being made to the rules of engagement between police and the press, pushing for a more “common sense” approach rather than what he termed a “carpet-bombing of the system.”
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with further evidence from crime reporters, as well as former Times lawyer Alastair Brett and Peter Tickner, former Director of Internal Audit at the Metropolitan police.
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14 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
Crime reporters have lamented the current atmosphere of more restricted contact between the press and police at the Leveson Inquiry today.
Testifying this morning, the Guardian’s Sandra Laville said that there has been an “over-reaction” by the Metropolitan police in response to the Inquiry into press standards, and that “open lines of communication, which have been there for many years, are being closed down”.
“It affects everything I do at the moment,” she said. She told the Inquiry that when she recently approached a senior ranking officer to ask him about a subject he knew well, he said he had to ask the Met’s press officer who then refused her access to him. Laville said this was “absolutely not” how it was in the past.
The reporter stressed that the country’s police force needed to be held account, which could not be done by journalists relying solely on official sources. She warned that limiting information to official sources might drive information “underground” and turn it into a “black market”.
“I think we already have laws and guidelines in place and I think they should be reiterated,” Laville said. “You can regulate as much as you like, unless you can trust them [police officers], I don’t think it’s going to work.”
The Independent’s Paul Peachey added that there was a concern that the current eagerness to drive information through official channels — namely the police press office — would lead to less contact between the media and the force, and that restricting information further would be a “worrying trend for the way we hold the police in this country to account.”
Jonathan Ungoed-Thomas of the Sunday Times told the Inquiry he disagreed with recording every exchange between journalists and police officers, as suggested in the recent Filkin report into press-police relations. “It would be a mistake to unnecessarily restrict flow of information between journalists and police officers,” he said.
Laville defended using informal contacts as a source for information alongside official channels, noting that they often bring “texture” and “colour” that official sources might not provide.
She disagreed with the view of former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Condon that hospitality can be “the start of a grooming process that can lead to inappropriate or unethical behaviour”, calling the suggestion “faintly ludicrous”.
“These people are grown-ups, they make life and death decisions,” Laville said.
She said that she saw it as “perfectly legitimate” and part of “normal human relationships” for meetings between journalists and police officers to take place in a social setting, noting that taking contacts out for drinks occurs in every journalistic sector.
She noted differences between Condon’s and Lord Stevens’ commissionerships in dealing with the media. “Under Lord Condon you could not talk to an officer without a press officer present,” Laville said, noting that his successor adopted a policy of “more openness”.
She stressed that the press and police have for years had a “mutually beneficial relationship” and that it was in the public interest. “It’s lasted for a long time because it actually works,” she said, but added that she believed that training on both sides could help to “understand each other’s worlds”.
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13 Mar 12 | Leveson Inquiry
The Metropolitan police’s senior press officer has told the Leveson Inquiry that she was not aware that the force had hired a former executive editor at the News of the World as part of a PR consultancy arrangement until after his contract had been terminated.
Giving evidence this morning, Sara Cheesley said she only became aware of Neil Wallis’s £24,000-a-year PR consultancy at Scotland Yard in July 2011. Wallis’s company, Chamy Media, provided communications advice to the Met on a part-time basis from October 2009 to September 2010.
Cheesley said she was “a bit surprised” when she learned of the contract. An incredulous Lord Justice Leveson said: “I am just surprised that you didn’t know anything about him at all.”
Also giving evidence today was the Met’s communications chief Dick Fedorcio, currently on extended leave from Scotland Yard since August pending an investigation into Wallis’s contract arrangement.
Leveson questioned him about the possibility of a “reputational risk” for the Met hiring Wallis months after the Guardian reported on phone hacking at the now defunct tabloid. “And here you were contemplating giving a chap who was deputy editor at the time?”
Fedorcio, who has been the Met’s director of public affairs since 1997, responded that he did not see it that way at the time. In his witness statement he wrote that “on a professional basis, Nell Wallis fully met my requirements; we knew nothing about Neil Wallis that would be to his detriment.”
“There was no indication that he was suspected of involvement in criminality — he had never been named, implicated or questioned regarding phone hacking; he had never been required to resign over the issue at the paper; the phone hacking investigation was closed; and Nell Wallis was no longer employed by the News of the World and was now setting up his own media business,” Fedorcio continued.
He added that former assistant commissioner John Yates had asked Wallis in August 2009 if “there was anything that was going to emerge at any point about phone-hacking that could ’embarrass the MPS, me, him or the Commissioner’,” and that Yates received “categorical assurances that this was the case”.
“As John Yates had obtained and recorded this assurance I felt there was no need for me to repeat the question,” Fedorcio wrote.
In his oral testimony he revealed he was “surprised” about the extent of the out-of-hours meetings between Yates and Wallis, but said he was aware that the two “got on well” and that there was “banter” between them over football matters. Fedorcio added that, had he known the pair were close, he might have thought that hiring Wallis was inappropriate.
He also clarified that Wallis himself had put his name forward for the position over a lunch, “rather than it being proposed by anyone else”, as Ferdorcio had suggested to the Home Affairs select committee in July 2011.
He also revealed that on one occasion in 2010 he let former News of the World crime editor Lucy Panton type a story from his email account on his standalone computer, as the reporter was “under pressure” from the tabloid to file copy. He recalled that Panton had arrived at an end-of-the-week meeting, which Fedorcio had set up with the tabloid paper in order to work with them at an earlier opportunity on stories, with her notes for a story on former Metropolitan Police commander Ali Dizaei, who was jailed for corruption in 2010.
“I was present in the office throughout this time, and therefore got advance sight of a story about an MPS officer,” he wrote in his witness statement, admitting to the Inquiry later that it “may have been an error of judgment”.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow, with evidence from crime reporters.
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