Crown Prosecution Service continue phone hacking investigation in wake of trial by charging two more senior figures but drop cases against six others
The Crown Prosecution Service has announced today that it has authorised the Metropolitan Police to charge Jules Stenson, former features editor of the News of the World and to summons Neil Wallis, former deputy editor of the News of the World on a ‘phone hacking’ charge.
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Baroness Onora O’Neill:
Pic credit: Flickr
This month the Equality and Human Rights Commission weighed into the controversy over the treatment of women by radical Muslims.
It issued strict guidelines forbidding the segregation of men and women at universities, colleges and student unions except for acts of religious worship following controversial suggestions that this had been happening in the UK at university meetings. As to be expected the ECHR was on the side of the equal treatment of women at all times.
Not highlighted was the position of Baroness Onora O’Neill, the three day a week chairman of the ECHR appointed by former culture secretary, Maria Miller, to replace Trevor Phillips. It is highlighted in an article by me in Tribune magazine this week.
Baroness O’Neill,a 71 year old philosophy don, whose academic career is mainly based in an all women’s college in New York and as a former principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, was of course thoroughly in favour of that move in the UK.
What is not so widely known is that the Baroness is also a trustee of a university in the Middle East in Sharjah,in the United Arab Emirates. Indeed the ECHR website omits the appointment – along the lines that she has so many that it was not worth mentioning.
But in this context it is more than a little relevant. Sharjah, the most conservative of the Emirates, has strict laws about the role of women in society. Its 2001 decency laws have very strict views about the relations between men and women.
It says: “A man and a woman who are not in a legally acceptable relationship should not be alone in public places, or in suspicious times or circumstances.”
Now Baroness O’Neill is a trustee of the American University of Sharjah which as she points out educates men and women and does not have the same segregation as the next door University of Sharjah which has separate men and women’s campuses.
However a reading of the American University’s Code of Conduct makes it crystal clear how students have to behave. It is subject to Sharjah’s law, which includes a strict ban on alcohol and no unsupervised visits to the student halls of residents where 2000 students stay.
There is a night curfew in operation – all students have to be in their rooms by midnight ( I.0 am is allowed at weekends) and even male and female friends are banned form being alone together in the halls of residence.
I quote from the rules::
• Visitors are allowed for limited hours and are only allowed to meet the residing students in the TV lounge and the computer labs; exceptions to this rule are mentioned below
• Mothers and sisters can visit the AUS women’s dormitories only and for a limited time.
This is subject to the approval of the dorm supervisor. Other family members can meet
the women students in the Women Welcome Center building
• Fathers and brothers can only visit the AUS men’s dormitories for limited time and this is
subject to the approval of dorm supervisor.”
The rules on dress are also restricted:
I quote: “Inappropriate dress for both males and females is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, tank tops, clothing that is very tight or transparent and indecently exposes the waist or back or shoulders or cleavage, and short clothing above the knee or very short pants. Moreover, clothing must not display obscene or offensive pictures and slogans.”
I can’t imagine any of this being imposed on British university students. I was interested to find out how the noble Baroness squared her two roles in two different cultures. Did she secretly disagree with Sharjah’s strict ban on alcohol and strict control of the sexes? Or would she like to impose similar restrictions on British students( she might be a teetotaller!) and not believe in sex before marriage.?
But she was being very silent. All she would say that the university was co-educational and she was not paid to be a trustee by the Arabs.. But it was not her financial gains that really interested me, it was her hypocrisy of legislating for rules in one country ( the UK) while backing a regime in the Middle East that did the very opposite.
Dan Evans, the journalist who helped blow the story that there was phone hacking at the News of the World gets his reward. He gets a one year suspended sentence for admitting what others tried to deny.
The former Sunday Mirror and News of the World journalist Dan Evans was, today, sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment, suspended for one year. Mr Evans had pleaded guilty to two phone hacking offences, misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice by lying in a civil claim brought by Kelly Hoppen.
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What the judge said about Coulson and the other defendants in full.Andy Coulson got 18 months in jail.
R –v- Coulson and others.
Sentencing Remarks
Parliament has decided that it is a criminal offence to access the voicemails of other people without their consent or an order of the court. Parliament has decided that the offence applies to members of the press in the same way as it does to all other citizens. This law provides the same protection to all citizens including those who, for one reason or another, are in the public eye. Parliament set the maximum sentence for the offence of intercepting communications at 2 years imprisonment and Parliament has decided that the same maximum sentence applies to an offence of conspiracy which can cover, as it does in this case, a very large number of individual offences.
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Further problems for Andy Coulson prior to his sentencing as Neville Thurbeck’s mitigation plea says phone hacking was sanctioned by him and Stuart Kuttner, the managing editor, who was acquitted by the jury last week.
Phone hacking at the News of the World was sanctioned by managing editor Stuart Kuttner and three other top executives at Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper group, one of its most senior journalists told a court yesterday.
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The CPS pushes ahead with a retrial of Coulson and Goodman on bribery of police to obtain copies of internal phone directories. The prosecution also summarised its case against all FIVE News of the World journalists convicted of phone hacking. He described the News of the world as a ” thoroughly criminal enterprise” and said the five hackers should pay £700,000 between them top cover the prosecution’s costs. Another bad day for bad journalism.
Andy Coulson, former award-winning editor of the News of the World, is to face a re-trial over allegations he approved cash bribes to “palace cops” to obtain copies of phone directories for the Royal Family, the Old Bailey heard today.
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Andy Coulson, Cameron’s Red Top Shaman
I am rather surprised in the wake of Coulson’ s conviction for conspiracy over phone hacking none of the commentators have picked up the extraordinary passages about his appointment to the Tory Party in Matthew D’Ancona’s revealing book In It Together, The Inside Story of the Coalition Government.
In a series of purple passages he describes the determination of both George Osborne and David Cameron to woo him to become the £275k Conservative Party’s director of communications on 9 July 2007 – so soon after he resigned from the News of the World as editor over the conviction of Clive Goodman for phone hacking.
It is quite clear from Matthew’s account that Coulson himself had reservations about taking the job – which led him to become the Downing Street press secretary by 2010 at a salary of £140,000 a year – and in hindsight might suggest he was worried about further fall out over the phone hacking scandal.
But what is more extraordinary are the purple passages about Cameron’s passion for his professional abilities.. George Osborne is portrayed as a hard-headed strategist – Matthew describes his view of Coulson as ” a street fighter who could take the battle to Labour and win in a media knife-fight.”
But Cameron comes over as besotted with Coulson. According to Matthew ” Cameron..was awestruck by his communications director, whom he privately described in lyrical language.”
” He treated Coulson as a red top shaman, a source of secret knowledge about the world of tabloids, Essex and kitchen- table politics. The phone hacking story refused to go away but Cameron was determined not to yield to those who urged him to ditch Coulson.”
Matthew later adds – and remember that this written before the trial verdict – that Cameron was determined he must follow him into Downing Street and as a result didn’t want ” to ask too many questions.”
He writes:” Coulson had the talent of the outsider, and exercised a quietly magnetic influence upon his privileged bosses, bringing Billericay to Bullingdon.”
All this makes Cameron’s badly timed apology for appointing him show Cameron up as shallow turncoat. While it may not quite rank as an equivalent of Peter thrice denying Jesus, it says something about how a man who treats Coulson as a Messiah figure to connect with the working class and then distances himself as fast as he can when he is down and out. Particularly when it is clear from Matthew’s account that Coulson more than once offered to resign because of his Murdoch past.
Coulson has had a bad time – his trial and subsequent conviction – has led to a jury hearing about his ” love cheat “affair with Rebekah Brooks , his bullying manner from co accused Royal reporter Clive Goodman, and how he listened to the David Blunkett love tapes before publishing the story.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not sorry for Coulson or his fate but I do think the Prime Minister is being let off far too lightly. Peter Oborne has already exposed flaws in his apology statement, Matthew D’Ancona,a Tory insider himself, to my mind, exposes flaws in Cameron’s own character.
Lord Justice Leveson: Pic courtesy of Leveson inquiry website
Yesterday’s clash between Ed Miliband and David Cameron over the Coulson affair was dominated by the Prime Minister’s assertion that he had been cleared by the Leveson inquiry of doing anything wrong.
He could happily quote Leveson’s findings which clear not only him but Rebekah Brooks – also now cleared of knowledge of phone hacking by a British jury – of behaving badly in any improper relationships between Number Ten and the Murdoch empire.
But delve a bit deeper into this rather contorted report – all one million words of it – which probably neither Cameron nor Miliband have – and you will find quite a different story.
Go to Volume Four and Appendix Five – and get one of the most devastating critiques of the incestuous relationship between top politicians and the media I have ever read from a High Court judge in my 27 years of political journalism.
As I reported before “he attacks what he calls the ” inappropriate closeness” between media bosses and successive governments not just now – but for over 35 years. Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown and Cameron are all indicted in a damning charge sheet.
He baldly states “ politicians have conducted themselves in a way that I do consider has not served the public interest”.
He accuses them of being vulnerable to unaccountable interests, missing clear opportunities to address public concern about the culture, practices and ethics of the press and seeking “ to control ( if not manipulate) the supply of news and information to the public in return for expected or hoped-for favourable treatment by sections of the press.”
He concluded that all this gave rise to “legitimate perceptions and concerns that politicians and the press have traded power and influence in ways which are contrary to the public interest and out of public sight. These perceptions and concerns are inevitably particularly acute in relation to the conduct by politicians of public policy issues in relations to the press itself.”
Some exoneration for Mr Cameron and his predecessors!
If Labour had been sharp enough yesterday Ed Miliband could have rebutted Cameron’s confident assertions. But it may not be surprising that he missed it – because of the mismatch between Leveson’s conclusions and his comments on the sad state of the relationship between leading politicians and media proprietors. It has close similarities to the way the Hutton inquiry exonerated Blair and Campbell despite revealing some devastating facts.
But in no way can either Cameron or Murdoch be complacent about their respective roles in trading power for influence which is at the heart of why both the mainstream media and politicians are widely distrusted by the general public.
And with more to come no politician can afford to brush this aside as ” a here today, gone tomorrow” story!
Despite the hype this is the REAL cost of the trial. Note the astonishing figure that 5500 people are thought to have been hacked by the News of the World. What a disgrace to journalism if this figure is indeed accurate. I note that 3500 people have been informed that they were hacked.
In response to the advance media storm last night (before the trial had closed) the CPS have released the following statement
“This case was not about whether phone hacking took place or whether public officials were paid for information; there are a significant number of recent convictions which show that both did happen.
“This has been a lengthy and complex trial which was required to explore a culture of invading privacy. Despite a number of applications by the defence to have the case thrown out the Judge agreed that the evidence was sufficient for consideration by the jury.
“The jury has found that Andy Coulson, former editor of a national newspaper, conspired with others to hack phones. Others who have admitted their role in this illegal practice – Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck, James Weatherup, Glenn Mulcaire and Dan Evans – all now face sentencing…
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The trial today came to an untimely end with the judge criticising the Prime Minister for his comments about Coulson before the jury could decide on a verdict on the last charges against the PM’s former press secretary. Now there could be a retrial.
Prosecutors will announce within days whether Andy Coulson will face a re-trial on charges he and former News of the World colleague Clive Goodman paid cash bribes to police officers guarding the Royal Family, the Old Bailey was told today.
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Westminster Confidential 