NoW hit with new phone-hacking allegations
Police reopen phone-hacking inquiry at News of the World
Kelly Hoppen accuses paper of hacking within last year
Acting head of Met police quizzed on investigation
Click here for key points from Tim Godwin's evidence
4.27pm: A disturbing new line from the lawyer acting on behalf of Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman:
Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman suspect that their mobiles may have been intercepted during the time when Ms Ash was at home recovering from a life threatening infection of MSSA that required hospitalisation and that the highly personal telephone voicemails left by her children may have been compromised.
This is extremely upsetting for the whole family. Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman will be applying to the Met for disclosure of these documents so that they can get to the bottom of what actually happened.
4.13pm: Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman are considering taking legal action against the News of the World over allegations of phone hacking, the Guardian can confirm.
Here's a statement from the pair's lawyer:
The actress Leslie Ash and her husband, the ex footballer Lee Chapman asked the Metropolitan Police in October 2010 whether there was any evidence that their mobile telephone messages had been intercepted by the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire during the period when he was working with News of the World.
Earlier this month, the Met responded by saying that there were several documents that contained Leslie Ash's name, address, mobile telephone numbers and account details. Lee Chapman was named and his details were also on several documents.
Very worryingly, their teenage childre! n's mobi le telephone details had also been recorded by Glenn Mulcaire. Despite this evidence being held by the Met, the Met's stance was that "it is not necessarily correct to assume that Mr Mulcaire's possession of the ...information was for the purposes of interception" and "we suggest she contacts her mobile phone provider". They would not release the documents without a court order.
3.48pm: The actor Leslie Ash and her husband, the ex-footballer Lee Chapman, are preparing legal action over the suspicions their phones may have been hacked by the News of the World, Sky News reports.
The pair, who were red-top regulars in 2006, have added their names to the growing list of people taking legal action against the paper.
3.45pm: Afternoon, Josh Halliday here taking over from Matthew Weaver. This just in: Chancellor George Osborne has been defending Andy Coulson.
"Andy Coulson did a good job as director of communications," he said. "There was never any complaints about how he did that job which is pretty unique when you look at the people who've done that job in the past.
"He resigned because in his own words investigations into the News of the World were a distraction to that job. Phone hacking is illegal and the police need to follow the evidence wherever it leads them."
It was Osborne, you might recall, who personally suggested hiring Coulson in 2007 after his resignation as editor of News of the World.
2.54pm: My colleagues James Robinson and Vikram Dodd have the latest on the new police investigation.
It starts:
The head! of the Metropolitan police said today that "no stone will be left unturned" in the fresh investigation into the News of the World phone hacking allegations announced yesterday, four years after the initial convictions in the case.
Speaking at a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority in London's City Hall this morning, acting commissioner Tim Godwin promised a "robust investigation" that "will restore the confidence for those victims who feel we have not given them the service (they deserve)".
2.46pm: Time for a bit of we told you so.
Last September the Telegraph's Benedict Brogan dismissed the phone hacking allegations as leftist conspiracy theory.
Yet there was nothing said that should trouble Mr Coulson or Mr Cameron. Nothing we have read or heard since the NYT published its report suggests there is enough new material to justify CPS charges, let alone another investigation.
Similarly Donald Trelford in the Independent wrote:
The Guardian, the BBC and MPs can drip-feed allegations for ever, but only if Coulson faces criminal charges, or is shown to have lied to MPs, will he lose his job. Making phone-tapping charges stick is difficult. Just because a private detective or reporter has mobile numbers in his notebook, it doesn't prove that any calls were made. Detective agencies do legitimate work for newspapers, so substantial bills from them prove nothing.
It seems a shame that the News of the World should take such a kicking at a time when it has published a number of important scoops, several of them exposing corruption in sport. "Muck-raking" was the disparaging word used by MPs for this kind of journalism. It is a term the press should be proud of, for as MPs should know only too well there's! a great deal of muck out there to be raked.
2.31pm: A summary of the Kelly Hoppen case has been made available by the court. See below.
2.25pm: Broadcaster and criminologist Roger Graef looks at the history the cosy relationship between the police and the tabloids. It helps explain the narrowness of the initial phone-hacking investigation, he argues in this Comment is free piece.
2.04pm: ITV's Lucy Manning tweets a bit more information on the Jowell story:
1.32pm: Tessa Jowell, the shadow Cabinet Office and Olympics minister, claims her phone might have been hacked as recently as last week, according to a Twitter update from ITV.
ITV's political reporter Lucy Manning tweets:
Tessa Jowell confirms to ITV News she has been in touch with police this week about possible attempt to hack into her phone last week
1.05pm: Just after Godwin and Yates gave their answers to the MPA, phone hacking came up in the House of Lords when Lord Fowler made that call for a full-scale investigation.
Here's a PA report of what was said:
Lord Fowler, a former journalist and chairman of the House of Lords communications committee, said the News of the World had been "directly conspiring against the public".
Lord Fowler asked government spokesman Lord Wallace of Saltaire: "Do you remember the Watergate scandal when one brave newspaper protected the public interest?
"Has not exactly the opposite happened in the phone hacking scandal where you have one newspaper, and possibly others, not exposing injustice but instead directly conspiring against the public.
"Do you agree that after any further criminal proceed! ings the re will be a need for a full-scale inquiry to see what happened and how the public can be protected?"
Lord Wallace highlighted the action that had already been taken by the Met in the light of the new evidence.
Lord Prescott, a possible victim of hacking, said the Met, newspaper editors, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and the Crown Prosecution Service had all previously put it down to a "single rogue operator".
He said: "After a number of inquires they still came to that conclusion. That is unacceptable. These acts were committed to undermine the human rights of the individual."
Lord Wallace replied: "My understanding is the police have informed all those for whom they have evidence that their phones were hacked.
"They have in addition found a great many other names which were clearly targets of inquiry for which the police do not have information whether their phones were hacked or not. This is part of the ongoing and widening inquiry in which the police now have to be engaged."
Labour's Lord Soley said there was an "underlying problem with the culture of journalism".
"This started with fishing expeditions to see if they could pull up any interesting stories," he said.
"Can we have a major effort at some stage to get journalists to recognise they have a cultural problem here and the PCC is not addressing it in the way that it needs to?"
Lord Wallace said "the press as a whole face a crisis of trust that is at least as great as the crisis of trust in politics that we ourselves need to address".
"We look to the press to act up to their own responsibilities, which it is very clear many of them have been failing to do," he said.
And he added: "It is evident that the role of the Press Complaints Commission and the role to which its code of practice is enforced and how well it is observed is one of the questions we will have to address.
"While the government believes that a press free of state intervention is fundamental to our dem! ocracy t here is no place for illegal activity."
Labour home affairs spokesman Lord Hunt of Kings Heath pointed to comments made by former Met assistant commissioner Brian Paddick that the police had a fear of upsetting newspaper editors.
He asked: "Does that not argue for greater media plurality in this country. In that regard why is the government so reluctant to refer the proposed dealings by News Corporation into BSkyB to the Competition Commission?"
Lord Wallace replied: "We are all aware that this raises some very large questions about the future of the press, the relationship of press and police and the role of a plural press in our democracy."
1.01pm: Here's a list of everything that Rupert Murdoch owns. You have to scroll a long way down to get to the bottom.
12.55pm: ITN has footage of Lord Prescott calling for a full judicial review into the "incompetence" of the Metropolitan police. The former deputy prime minister described News International as a "rogue company", but said his biggest concern was the police handling of the investigation.
12.50pm: The Press Association news agency has sent some more full quotes from the evidence session. Here's acting deputy commissioner John Yates on whether he had been "tetchy" at a previous meeting:
If I did appear tetchy it was because I was expected to act on facts that were not in any way able to be developed into evidence. I was being asked to act on rumour, innuendo and gossip. I have always said we will respond to any new evidence and that is exactly what we have done today. This is the first significant new evidence that may have a chance of being admissible. We have set up a new team to deal with that and we need to let them get on with it.
This is the first time we have announced a new investigation with new material where there is a prospect of developing some promising lines of inquiry.
Yates denied coming under pressure to keep th! e case c losed and said he would be the "last person" to bow to any.
This is Liberal Democrat Lady (Dee) Doocey's call for the case to be passed to an independent body:
have real reservations about the Met conducting this inquiry. I do not think it will be seen to be independent. For the Met's sake, for everyone's sake, it would be good and helpful if it was dealt with by an independent body so that justice is not just done but is seen to be done.
12.16pm: The Tory peer, Lord Fowler, has called for a full inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal. He made the comments in the House of Lords, according to the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg.
12.14pm: David Cameron won't be meeting or speaking with Rupert Murdoch during the News Corporation chief's trip to London or Davos, the prime minister's official spokesman just told lobby journalists.
12.12pm: This is rather good. In a variation on those numerous Downfall parodies some wit has put phone-hacking subtitles to the film the 2006 film The Lives of Others. (If you haven't seen the original, it's about the Stasi in East Germany.) Enjoy.
12.10pm: My colleague Paul Owen rounds up the key points from Godwin and Yates's evidence to the Metropolitan Police Authority:
Acting Met commissioner Tim Godwin confirmed the phone-hacking investigation into the News of the World had been reopened.
The new investigation will be led by deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, the head of organised crime and criminal networks at the Met police.
Assistant commissioner John Yates, who was asked in 2009 by the Met to conduct a brief review of how it had investigated News International after the Guardian claimed hundreds of voice messages had been hacked into, said those revelations and others in the New York Times did not represent any n! ew infor mation to the police. But that had now changed, he said, following the News of the World's decision to pass on significant new information to the police.
Godwin agreed to release the minutes of a meeting between the police and the News of the World.
12.00pm: Was phone hacking conducted on an industrial scale? The Guardian discovered that 4,332 names or partial names, and 2,987 mobile phone numbers, were involved; the Data Blog list mentioned earlier shows the names of the 120 of them so far identified.
PA has some fuller quotes from acting commissioner Tim Godwin explaining the new inquiry and defending the Met's handling of the case:
It will be very robust and it will be under scrutiny as it should be. It will restore confidence in victims who feel they have not been given a service. It will be with no stone unturned. We have some of the most skilled investigators in the country and you will be proud of what they do.
Godwin explained that the inquiry has been transferred to the Met's specialist crime directorate and will be led by deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers.
He said the Met was "not afraid" of being held to account over its decisions but detailed questions could only be answered after the criminal process had finished.
We have a full-blown investigation under way and we do not want to do anything that will undermine the prospect of any prosecutions that may occur. We need to allow Sue Akers and her team to robustly pursue the evidence and lines of inquiry, which is what everyone expects us to do.
At the end of this process, when we draw a line under the legal process, and there are a number of judicial matters, there are questions people will want to ask.
11.45am: This seems like a good time to remind you of what John Yates told the culture committee in September about following up Nick Davies' investigation in the Guardian (full transcript here). Here's an extract:
Yates: Well, there is no evidence of an offence being committed, which is what I said first. There is no evidence. Reading that document is no evidence of an offence. There is no evidence that there are any other links between Neville [a name mentioned in an email containing the transcript of hacked messages that had been sent by a reporter at the News of the World], whoever he may be, and [private investigator Glenn] Mulcaire [who was jailed for hacking into messages]. As I say, we looked at his computers, so it is not as if we ignored this, but we looked at all of his computers, looked for the links in terms of any contact and there is no contact. As I say, both our view and the advice of leading counsel and the CPS was that there were insufficient grounds to certainly arrest or question; it would not take us any further.
And here's Guardian reporter Nick Davies's evidence to the Commons home affairs committee last October. Here's an extract:
The decision not to investigate all the leads in the phone data and the subsequent decision not to fully search and analyse the seized material meant that there was a failure to investigate all those who may have been involved in associated criminal activity.
Police chose not to seek a production order requiring the News of the World to disclose internal records. Instead, as evidence to the media select committee disclosed, they wrote a letter to the newspaper asking them for disclosure of a list of items. The newspaper refused to comply, and Scotland Yard accepted this without further action.
Police also chose not to interview any reporter, editor or manager at the newspaper other than Clive Goodman. Emerging evidence about the phone data and other material in the possession of the police reveals that ! they wer e in possession of evidence which implicated named employees of the News of the World in dealing with the interception of voicemail messages. It is not clear whether police knew that they had this evidence and chose not to pursue it; or whether their decision not to fully search and analyse the seized material meant that they were unaware of it.
11.28am: The publicist Max Clifford (left), who sued the News of the World for breach of privacy and was paid approximately 1m to drop his legal action over the interception of his voicemail messages, has just told BBC News it will be very difficult to get to the real truth now compared to three or four years ago. He said the police were up against some very clever and powerful people. The police have a very, very close working relationship with Fleet Street, he said; that makes a difficult situation more difficult. He called for an independent body to investigate, and repeated his claim that phone-hacking was widespread, not just at the News of the World, until four years ago. There must be a lot of journalists who are worried, he said.
They've had years to prepare for this. I think it's going to be a bit more difficult to get to the real truth in 2011 than it would have been two or three years ago ... You're dealing with very, very clever people who have been put on alert three or four years ago that this day might be coming.
11.25am: MPA member Cindy Butts asks whether police should have uncovered the new information earlier.
Godwin said he is "entirely satisfied" that the serious crime directorate is now handling the case under Sue Akers.
11.18am: Godwin says the police need to do a very thorough and good investigation based on the new information. He repeats that Sue Akers will be leading the inquiry and not Yates.
Yates says his team have been "babysitting" the investigation since the Goodman/Mulcaire case. Now a new investi! gation i s being launched.
11.17am: Here is a full list of the phone-hacking victims identified so far.
11.11am: MPA member John Biggs says there is a danger that John Yates becomes part of the story. The Met needs to guard against this, he says. Yates has been involved in high-profile investigations such as the cash-for-peerages inquiry and has been named "Yates of the Yard" by parts of the press.
11.08am: Here is a list of the members of the Metropolitan police authority.
11.07am: Godwin insists that the police "look forward" to meeting the MPA, and are never tetchy.
Yates says he apologises if he appeared tetchy. I was being asked to act on rumour, innuendo and gossip at that time, he says. I have had no pressure over the case, Yates says.
11.04am: In response to complaints from MPA members about lack of transparency, Yates says he would not disclose details of celebrities affected without their permission. Godwin says the new investigation will leave "no stone unturned".
MPA member Jenny Jones accuses Yates of being "tetchy" with the MPA when this was last discussed. She paraphrases him as saying "don't you worry your pretty little heads about it", before acknowledging that he didn't actually say anything so "sexist" but she does say he had a "disregard for our questions".
"We need to understand your motives," she says. "How can we be sure there is no fear or favour in the way the investigation is moving?"
She asks Yates to give details of "misreporting".
10.55am: Godwin agrees to release the minutes of the meeting between the police and the News of the World. "We are not afraid of transparency," Godwin said.
Yates points out that that News International is a "big beast". He says:
We have lots of meetings with News International every day of the week about lots of different aspects of poli! cing.
10.53am: Godwin said there had been a good relationship between the CPS and the police during the investigation.
Yates insisted that the CPS had access to all the material, contrary to claims in the New York Times.
Yates said the police have been going through a list of celebrities affected since last July. He pointed out that the police could not release the information without a court order. "Perhaps we haven't explained that," Yates said.
10.50am: Here is a transcript of MPs on the culture, media and sport committee questioning assistant commissioner John Yates and detective chief superintendent Philip Williams in September 2009
10.49am: John Yates, an assistant commissioner in the Met police, said he was asked to "establish the facts" after the Guardian investigation last March. He said the revelations were new to the media, but not new to the police. The New York Times investigation in September also "fell well short" of offering new information, he said.
But that has now changed, he said.
10.46am: Speaking at the MPA Tim Godwin, the acting commissioner of the Met police, confirmed that the investigation has been reopened.
The original phone-hacking organisation was carried out by a counterterrorism unit. The new investigators will be led by Sue Akers, he said.
10.41am: Brian Paddick (left), the former Metrpolitan police deputy assistant commisioner who is taking legal action against the force over phone-hacking claims, has just been speaking to BBC News. My colleague Paul Owen was watching. Paddick said the Met police needed "public trust and confidence" in order to operate, "and are very concerned how they are perceived by the public".
The last thing the police want is to upset newspaper editors that may result in biased reporting about the police.
Of his own case, he said: "It's b! een like pulling teeth getting information from the police."
10.39am: There's a live feed of the MPA hearing with acting commisioner Tim Godwin here.
10.13am:Number 10 is trying to distance itself from the latest scandal, according to the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson.
On his blog he wrote:
Downing Street moved to distance the prime minister from this scandal, insisting that he had had no conversations about the subject when he met James Murdoch and a senior company executive for dinner over Christmas. Mr Cameron will be relieved to learn that his soon-to-be-retiring director of communications Andy Coulson is not said to be named in the latest evidence.
The BBC's business editor, Robert Peston, claims News International has uncovered four emails showing that Edmondson had full knowledge of phone hacking.
News International has passed the emails - described as "devastating" by a source - to the police, which has opened a new enquiry into the alleged illicit hacking of mobile phones of well-known individuals.
10.11am: Lord Prescott has called for a judicial review into Met police handling of News of the World phonehacking allegations, according to ITV News.
10.07am: Journalist Rowena Davis will be live tweeting the Metropolitan Police Authority meeting where the acting head of the Met, Tim Godwin, is likely to be questioned about Scotland Yard's investigations into phone hacking.
9.58am: News of the World has issued a firm denial of Hoppen's allegation that it was hacking her messages within the last year.
We have carried out an extensive investigation led by a team ! of indep endent forensic specialists and we have found no evidence whatsoever to support this allegation. The civil litigation is ongoing, as is the internal investigation and until both are concluded it would be inappropriate to comment further. However we are disappointed the BBC chose to lead with this misleading report without giving the News of the World an opportunity to respond.
Radio 4's Today programme carried this item this morning. It said "the BBC has seen evidence that suggests a News of the World reporter was listening in to mobile phone messages as recently as last year."
Steve Hewlett, presenter of Radio 4's Media Show, told Today presenter Evan Davis that the Metropolitan Police are "right in the soup" over the phone hacking investigation, and that the story now "almost certainly extends beyond the News of the World".
Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the Metropolitan Police Authority, said the Met now have to "really come clean and own up to all the information they've got" on phone hacking, raising questions as to whether another force should investigate the case.
9.28am: Mark Thomson, Kelly Hoppen's lawyer has issued a statement confirming that her court case against the paper began as early as July last year. Yet it is only now that News of the World is taking action.
Thomson's statement says:
We have recently been approached by a number of journalists who have questions about the court action taken by our client Kelly Hoppen, the interior designer.
We can confirm that we act for Kelly Hoppen who started legal proceedings in March of last year 2010. On 17th March 2010 Mr Justice Eady granted various orders including a disclosure order against a mobile telephone provider. The Judge approved a short summary of the reasons for the orders as attached. Following the disclosure by the telephone provider, on 23rd July 2010 , pursuant to another order of Mr Justice Eady ! the defe ndants have been named as Dan Evans, a journalist and News International Supply Company Limited, who are defending the action. The action continues.
9.07am: The scandal appears to be deepening. The News of the World is now being accused of phone hacking within the last year. Kelly Hoppen, a leading interior designer who is stepmother to the actor Sienna Miller, is suing the paper, and one of its feature writers, Dan Evans for "accessing or attempting to access her voicemail messages between June 2009 and March 2010."
Nick Davies reports:
Details of the case remain concealed by court orders. However, a senior News International executive has claimed that Dan Evans' defence is that he phoned Kelly Hoppen's number for legitimate reasons and accidentally accessed her voicemail when the keys on his own phone got stuck.
It is the timing of the alleged hacking which will cause most concern to Rupert Murdoch's News International. The company have claimed repeatedly that only one of their journalists was involved in the illegal interception of phone messages - the royal correspondent Clive Goodman who was sacked and jailed in January 2007.
The fact that the hacking is alleged to have continued after Goodman's jailing will also cause problems for Scotland Yard. In December, the Guardian disclosed that the Yard had failed for four years to investigate evidence in its possession that the News of the World's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, had targeted the phones of Sienna Miller, her former partner Jude Law, their friends and family.
The development comes hot on the heels of a fresh investigation being launched by the Police into hacking at the paper, after being passed "significant new information". The paper has sacked its assistant editor (news) Ian Edmondson.
Later t! his morn ing the acting head of the Met Police, Tim Goodwin, will appear before the Metropolitan Police Authority where is likely to face questions about the police handling of the issue.
News International boss Rupert Murdoch, is said to be in London to deal with the crisis. Can he put out the fire? asks Emily Bell.
Rupert Murdoch isn't known for allowing egregious errors in his staff go unpunished, but he has had his eye off the newspaper ball in the UK for quite some time, certainly since buying the Wall Street Journal in the US in 2007.
Now the mess of the phone hacking threatens something that is extremely important to Murdoch: his business interests. It threatens to scuttle the buy-back of BSkyB shares, currently being scrutinised (although that is rather a strong word) by Jeremy Hunt, and although the story has not exactly been front-page news in every paper in the US, the hacking case certainly has the potential to dent Murdoch's reputation in his most important territory.
So far Rupert Murdoch has been kept remote from the unfolding saga. Now he has put himself at the centre of it. Whether he can control it is an open question.
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