TOP METROPOLITAN Police officers will appear tomorrow before a key House of Commons committee to face questions about the force's much-criticised investigation into the News of the Worldphone-hacking allegations.
The instruction to appear for assistant commissioner John Yates came after he apologised for his decision not to reopen the inquiry in 2009 after new allegations that thousands of people had been targeted by private investigator Glenn Mulcaire on the tabloid’s orders.
Two former officers, Andy Hayman and Peter Clarke, will also appear, along with deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, who is in charge of the current inquiry Operation Weeting, into the newspaper’s phone-hacking, but also into the investigations that the Sunday tabloid regularly made illegal payments to police officers.
Accepting that it was “a cock- up” not to investigate further in 2009, Mr Yates defended the decision on the basis of what it knew at that time. “Were we lethargic, complacent or corrupt? I don’t think we were any of those, certainly not corrupt.”
The Metropolitan Police had been shocked to learn that the News of the Worldhad hacked the voicemail of murder victim Milly Dowler. "My byword has always been, 'you look after the victims and the job will always resolve itself'. I always put the victim first but here I didn't follow my principle and that is my greatest regret." Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the Commons home affairs committee, made it clear that Mr Yates would face tough questioning, particularly since he had told MPs in a previous appearance that "everything had been done properly" in the investigation.
Conservative MP David Davis, who was defeated for the Conservative leadership by David Cameron, said that there were “virtually systemic failures” in the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the News of the World.
The police, he said, had failed to investigate News International's current chief executive Rebekah Brooks, after she told a House of Commons committee in 2003 that the News of the Worldhad paid police officers for investigation, even though that is illegal.
Dismissing Mr Yates’s defence that he did not have the resources to investigate further in 2009, Mr Davis said: “It is apparent that pretty much every piece of information that’s come out and caused such shock in the last week was actually sitting in bin bags in Scotland Yard.”
However, Mr Davis offered support to Mr Cameron for his decision to hire former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his press chief. “It’s very easy . . . in a week in which the entire evidence has changed . . . to say ‘Oh well, why didn’t you have hindsight’.”
