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Public Confidence in the Media and Police

Absolutely. Then there were the subsequent civil cases, which could only be brought once The Guardian had run its story suggesting that there were many more victims of phone hacking. Some people started writing in to the Metropolitan police and then suing the police to force them to give them the information, so that they could then take action against News International and get full disclosure from it. It is only as a result of those cases that the cover-up has effectively been smashed apart. There remains this issue of the material that was gathered and put into a file in 2007, including various e-mails and other pieces of paper, and given to Harbottle and Lewis. Only this year, it was shown to the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, who said that, within three minutes of looking at it, he could see that there was material relating to the payment of police officers that should always have been given to the Metropolitan police. That seems to me a far greater criminal offence than the original criminal offence of phone hacking. That is why my concern is about the cover-up at the heart of this. Yesterday, Rupert Murdoch was asked whether he was responsible and he said, ““No,”” but I am afraid that in this country we have to have a much stronger concept of responsibility. It is not just about whether something happens on one's watch—that is ludicrously broad. If someone has taken all due diligence steps to try to ensure that criminality has not happened, then of course they are not personally responsible. But if someone's argument is, ““Our company is so big that I could not possibly be expected to know whether my journalists were being arrested for criminal activity or whether I was paying out £2 million in hush money,”” then one must question whether they have a proper corporate governance structure or system in place to make sure that the same thing does not happen again next year or next week—or even that it is not happening now.