A curious, alarming anomaly was revealed last Wednesday during a session of the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee. A very senior police officer told the committee that while investigating the News of the World phone-tapping incident, an unequivocal piece of evidence had not convinced his officers that it required further investigation.

       This evidence was the now infamous email sent from junior screws hack, Ross Hall (AKA Hindley) to contract private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, which said: ‘This is the transcript for Neville,’ with the transcript of a message left on the voicemail of Gordon Taylor, boss of the PFA, intercepted and recorded by Mulcaire.

       Mulcaire pleaded guilty to hacking into Taylor’s voicemail after he’d also admitted to hacking into the voicemails  of  members of the Clarence House staff. He was jailed for these offences (which the News of the World encouraged him to commit by giving him a special contract signed by former Screws news editor, Greg Miskiw), and he served his sentence.

The Metropolitan Police investigation, headed by Detective Chief Superintendent Philip Williams, decided that despite the email’s clear reference to senior Screws hack, Neville Thurlbeck, clearly connecting him to an illegally acquired phone message, there was no basis for questioning Thurlbeck. There was, they said, no evidence to put to him or any other News of the World staff whose names had cropped in connection with this entirely unroyal-related hacking.

If this seems strangely lacking in diligence on their part, it seems even more so after hearing evidence given to the committee, after the police had appeared, by Mark Lewis, the lawyer who successfully sued the News of the World on behalf of Gordon Taylor. We learned from him that after he had acquired a court order requesting documentary evidence of Taylor’s complaint from the Metropolitan Police, Detective Sergeant Mark Maberly told Lewis that he “wasn’t having everything, but we’ll give you enough to hang the News of the World over Gordon Taylor”.

This statement, as reported by Lewis is unequivocal, and it’s out of the question that he would dissemble in front of a Parliamentary Committee. Besides, the Screws offered a £1m to shut Taylor up before the case got to court, so the evidence clearly was damning (for they had denied any knowledge of the offence until Lewis produced the Met’s evidence).

Why on earth didn’t the Met choose to prosecute the paper themselves when they had such a clear case? Lewis’s evidence makes a nonsense of what Asst Com Yates had told the committee only half and hour before. He should be called in again to explain himself.

The police had been asked by one of the MPs about their relationship with the News of the World. Not surprisingly Yates offered some weasel stuff about needing to a have a relationship with such an “important newspaper”.

If the MPs had asked Yates if he knew who sponsored the Annual Police Bravery awards, I wonder if they would have been surprised to hear that it is in fact the Screws  stable-mate, the Sun, and the News International top brass all attend this lavish ceremony each year, including of course Rebekah (née Wade) Brooks now CEO of News International, and, no doubt, a good friend of the Met brass-hats. [see: http://www.peterburden.net/archives/280 ] And I’ve long wondered why the Met have so often gone along with some of the absurdly fanciful ‘criminal investigations’ spun out of nowhere by Screws star, Mazher Mahmood.

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