It’s not just Rebekah in the frame in phone hacking row
Ed Miliband has just called for one over-arching judge-led inquiry into the media, the police, the lot. And he says it should be formed pronto even if it can’t start public hearings for some time.
He’s painting David Cameron as out of touch with public opinion for letting the Sky takeover go forward (neatly avoiding the fact that he wasn’t exactly standing in front of the train himself until very recently).
He says he won’t be buying the News of the World this Sunday. More advertisers are quitting the News of the World as I write. Maybe when Tesco goes, Rebekah goes?
But the Rebekah resignation will really be about the advertisers not about the wider picture. Advertisers will need a head to roll before they can, gingerly, creep back into business with Murdoch. The public, on the other hand, might be looking for a bigger act of contrition, something a little more convulsive.
Will punters shun the News of the World this Sunday? Is it the sort of readership that responds to Twitter campaigns? Is it not as squeamish as some? One colleague just said to me, they’ll carry on eating bacon and not want to know about what’s going on in the abattoir. There’s another school, of course, that their outrage will find an outlet and feed a boycott.
How convulsive could the changes be to the political landscape? Will Murdoch and the red tops really lose their influence?
Listening to the emergency debate on hacking yesterday, one MP after another nervously criticising the great Murdoch empire, was a bit like watching the prisoners emerging blinking into the light in “Fidelio”. It really is worth a read – you can see it here.
In that debate, Alan Johnson spoke candidly about his own failings in not pursuing the police investigation more. As Home Secretary, he says, he asked John Yates at the Met why they weren’t digging more and implies the answers were “evasive, dishonest or lethargic … or was it being all three?”
There was implied criticism for John Yates in the Prime Minister’s words as well at Question Time when he reassured MPs that the current police investigation “does not involve police officers who were involved in the original investigation that so clearly did not get to the truth.”
John Yates is currently Assistant Commissioner at the Met in charge of counter-terrorism. Alan Johnson said later in the main debate that the then DPP chief back in 2009, Keir Starmer, said to him that there was no cause for any further investigation “on the information given to him by the police – those were the precise words used”.
The implication being that the war of words between the DPP and the Met over who was to blame for the original investigation is not over and will resurface in future inquiries if not before.