Geoffrey Cox questions the decision not to investigate wide-scale phone hacking in 2006

Geoffrey Cox questions why, when the police had informed the Attorney General in 2006 that a “vast number” of phone numbers belonging to high-profile individuals had been tapped, was the recommended wider investigation rejected in favour of focussing on a single case at Buckingham Palace.

Mr Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con): I want to raise three points. Although I congratulate the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) on his Committee’s report, one or two loose ends seem not to have been followed up. On 30 May 2006, a Crown Prosecution file note recorded that the police had written a briefing paper informing the Attorney-General and the then Director of Public Prosecutions that

“a vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. These may be the subject of wider investigation.”

In a memorandum dated 8 August 2006, a senior Crown Prosecution Service lawyer wrote:

“It was recognised early in this case that the investigation was likely to reveal a vast array of offending behaviour.”

However, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police concluded that aspects of the investigation could be focused on a discrete area of offending relating to two officials at the palace and the suspects Goodman and Mulcaire.

From those documents, it is absolutely manifest that the Attorney-General in the previous Government, who sits when appropriate in the Cabinet, was informed that there was “a vast array” of offending behaviour in which hundreds of celebrities, Members of the House and of the other place and others had had their phones accessed without authority. Why was nothing done?

The Leader of the Opposition has left the Chamber. Can he or former members of the Cabinet tell us whether the Attorney-General in 2006 brought to the attention of his colleagues the fact that a vast array of offending behaviour had been committed by News International but it was not intended that it be investigated by the police? The Attorney-General has a solemn duty to draw to the attention of the Cabinet such matters if they affect the public interest. The Attorney-General has a right of oversight of the CPS—the ultimate resort—and could at least instruct that advice be given to the police on such matters. Why was nothing done?

I invite the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee to call for that evidence and to examine it closely, because it seems to me a matter of the most pressing public interest.

Mr Straw: The hon. and learned Gentleman invites members of the then Cabinet at large to say whether the information was ever shared with them by the then Attorney-General. I can only speak for myself. I served in that Cabinet and subsequent ones and on no occasion do I recall that Attorney-General, or any Attorney-General, ever informing members of the Cabinet either at a formal meeting or informally, of an ongoing investigation. Even when I was Home Secretary, the Attorney-General of the day would never have informed me about an investigation and decisions he or she had made, nor would I have sought that information.

Mr Cox: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that information, but the fact remains that the Attorney-General under the previous Government appears to have countenanced a prosecution strategy when he and the then Director of Public Prosecutions knew that the voicemails of hundreds of individuals had been accessed.

Keith Vaz: I will write to the previous Attorney-General today to ask for that information.

Oliver Heald rose—

Mr Cox: I will give way to my hon. Friend.

Oliver Heald: When the former Home Secretary spoke a moment ago, he used the words, “or informally”. Does my hon. Friend think that one aspect that may need examining is whether the matter was another subject that fell into the “sofa Government” category, and that the Attorney-General may have spoken to the Prime Minister or one or two others, but it was not brought before the full Cabinet?

Mr Cox: The matter needs to be closely examined, and the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee has taken it on board. With the greatest respect to the Attorney-General at the time, if he was informed of the matter, he should have interested himself in exactly how the investigation would be conducted. On the face of it, an enormous amount of wrongdoing was simply ignored. The police appear to have proposed a strategy, which would, as the briefing paper put it to the Attorney-General, “ring-fence” Mulcaire and Goodman and exclude a whole raft of serious criminal wrongdoing from investigation. That may well have affected Members.

I do not know to whom the Committee refers when it says that neither Ministers nor the police escalated the matter. As the Committee put it, if Ministers at the time had taken those issues sufficiently seriously, the matter would have been investigated. The truth would have been discovered then and we could have avoided a whole series of events that we now know unfolded.

My second point is about the review suggested by then Deputy Assistant Commissioner Yates. The Home Affairs Committee has rightly judged, in tone and substance, its criticisms of Mr Yates and Mr Hayman. There are serious questions to be asked about why an investigation or a review—I appreciate that it was not a formal review—that was carried out in eight hours apparently failed to read material that, as the former Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions was able to determine in a few minutes, gave rise to the gravest illegalities. On the face of it, that is either wilful blindness or rank incompetence. Whatever the reason, Mr Yates’s resignation was right and done for proper reasons. It is inconceivable that, if the exercise had been carried out properly, the material would not have come to light in 2009. Questions arise about the closeness of officers of the Metropolitan police to News International and whether that deflected and deterred them from a rigorous analysis of the evidence that had been in their possession since 2006. It was not only in their possession, but, as the memorandum of 30 May 2006 to the Attorney-General shows, they had discovered that it included

“a vast array of offending behaviour.”

Mr James Clappison (Hertsmere) (Con): I do not know many of the details that my hon. Friend has given to the House, but the Select Committee heard that a great deal of the evidence was never examined, either in the original investigation or in the course of the review, so it could not be known what possible criminal behaviour had occurred, in addition to the hundreds and thousands of names involved. The e-mails that my hon. Friend mentioned are slightly different. News International supplied them internally and they had not been held by the police. They were supplied to the solicitors who gave them in May to the former DPP, who quickly saw wrongdoing in them.

Mr Cox: My hon. Friend is right that new material was supplied by Harbottle & Lewis, but I am referring to material that was in the possession of the police in 2006—mobile phone records, about which they told the then Attorney-General, “Look we’ve got a vast array of offending behaviour here. What are we going to do?” The instruction—or at least the approval—that came from on high appears to have been, “Confine it. Keep out the penumbra of offending behaviour you could examine and confine it to Mulcaire and Goodman.” That was wrong. With hindsight, we now see that that judgment was fundamentally flawed. The matter should have been investigated. Why was it not?

One cannot resist the conclusion that, until it became apparent that ordinary members of the public—Milly Dowler, soldiers who fought for this country—had also been subject to hacking, the Labour Government’s approach was that politicians and celebrities were fair game, so it was not a serious matter. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee reported that Mr Clarke gave as his justification the fact that he did not have many resources and that he was also dealing with terrorism at the time. Frankly, the clear impression is given that the matter was not very serious. One suspects that that is why no action was taken.

It has been suggested that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was wrong to decline an invitation to be briefed in 2010. The surprise is that the offer was ever made, not that it was declined. The chief of staff did exactly the right thing. In 2010, when The New York Times published the report, the Prime Minister was right: he needed evidence. He could not act on anything else.

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EARLIER IN THE SAME DEBATE

Mr Cox: May I take the right hon. Gentleman back to 2006? Did he find as part of his investigation that the Attorney-General had been informed in 2006—on 30 May, to be precise—that a vast array of numbers had been tapped by investigators employed by News International? The then Attorney-General’s approval was sought for a much narrower focused investigation, which plainly, by implication, was given. Is it not clear that Ministers knew in 2006 that there was a great array of tapped phone numbers that could have given rise to a wider investigation, but they never allowed the police, or instructed the police to carry it out?

Keith Vaz: No witness who came before the Committee has said that to us, but I am happy to write to the previous Attorney-General to ask whether in fact he or she—I have forgotten who it was at the time—was informed.

Clearly the Director of Public Prosecutions was informed, and the Attorney-General has superintendence over the DPP.

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