Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Jan Klimkowski]

You really couldn't make this shit up.

If this was a screenplay, this scene could only be framed as impressionistic story telling.

It has a clear symbolic value rendering words superfluous.

Yard chief ate with ex-deputy NoW editor after bid to halt Guardian story

Sir Paul Stephenson tried to persuade Alan Rusbridger to halt hacking investigation and then had dinner with Neil Wallis

David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 March 2012 19.12 GMT

The then commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, dined with the former deputy editor of the News of the World hours after trying to persuade the Guardian to drop its investigation into phone hacking, it has emerged.

The Leveson inquiry into press standards was told that Neil Wallis, who was by that time on the payroll of the Met as a public relations adviser, was an acquaintance of Stephenson. Wallis was later to be arrested for questioning in connection with the hacking scandal.

The inquiry heard that Stephenson went on 10 December 2009 to see the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, after being briefed by Assistant Commissioner John Yates that there was no new hacking evidence to investigate. Many believed the hacking allegations were politically motivated, Stephenson said, though he acknowledged he would have behaved differently had he been properly briefed.

After failing to dissuade Rusbridger, he went to dine with Wallis, Yates and the Met's public relations chief, Dick Fedorcio. The appointments diary recorded it as a private dinner, which Stephenson said was held "at a pub/restaurant that I frequented socially".

The Guardian editor was unaware that Stephenson knew Wallis, that he was planning to dine with him or that the Met was employing him. Rusbridger wrote asking for an explanation as to why he had not been told when the commissioner had expressed his "strong feeling" at the meeting that the Guardian's reporting was "over-egged and incorrect". He never got a reply.

Asked if he had been trying to persuade the Guardian to drop its coverage, Stephenson said: "No, I don't think I was." But he agreed: "There was very much a backcloth that this was about politics over substance."

He said: "I was being briefed that there was no good value in expending additional police resources" on the matter. Stephenson, who conceded he had not read the original Guardian articles, told Leveson: "I was only as good as the briefings I got."

Diary entries disclosed a pattern of socialising with Wallis similar to the meals in expensive restaurants with two other senior officers, Yates and Andy Hayman.

Between 2006 and 2010 Stephenson had eight meetings with Wallis, who was also at a Scotland Yard reception for Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor appointed as David Cameron's media adviser.

Restaurants visited included Luciano in St James's Street, on 23 June 2009, a few days before the Guardian broke its story alleging a News of the World hacking cover-up at a senior level.

Stephenson said he knew at the time that Wallis was a friend of Yates who went to football matches with him. Asked by Leveson whether he had not himself become a friend of Wallis, Stephenson said he regarded him more as a "light acquaintance".

Stephenson said he had first been introduced to Wallis as a deputy commissioner fresh from Lancashire at a dinner with Fedorcio on 19 September 2006.

This apparently cordial dinner took place despite a "tense standoff" between the News of the World and police, who had arrested Mulcaire and Goodman, and attempted to search the paper's premises on 8 August of that year. Police have told Leveson the paper's staff were completely unco-operative and officers had feared violence while inside the NoW offices.

The inquiry has heard that four days before Stephenson's first Wallis encounter, on 15 September 2006, an as yet unnamed senior police officer briefed Rebekah Brooks, the then Sun editor, assuring her that police were not planning to pursue any other News of the World journalists.