The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith last night said the Metropolitan police's handling of the News of the World phone hacking allegations threatened to undermine people's faith in the police and described the Met's claims that the case had been the subject of the "most careful investigation" as "clearly misleading".
On the day the head of the Met said that "no stone will be left unturned" in its fresh investigation into the allegations announced this week, four years after initial convictions in the case, Goldsmith criticised both News International and the Met. "I am pleased that the issue is now finally being addressed with more vigour. What has happened is an outrage on so many levels," he said.
"The fact that a powerful newspaper organisation has abused its position and broken laws in this way is bad enough … But failure by the police to properly investigate it is even more serious. Our police force has a better reputation for honesty than any other I can think of, but this scandal threatens to completely undermine people's faith in it."
The Met's acting commissioner Tim Godwin had earlier promised a "robust investigation" that would "restore the confidence for those victims who feel we have not given them the service [they deserve]" at a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority in City Hall.
Godwin was forced to defend the Met's decision not to have reopened the case sooner, given the series of allegations made by the Guardian and the New York Times over the past 18 months about the extent of the practice at the paper.
Jenny Jones, a Green party member of the London assembly, told acting assistant commissioner John Yates – who was also at City Hall – that he had "got quite tetchy" at a previous hearing when asked why he had decided not to reopen the case sooner. Yates reviewed the phone-hacking evidence in July 2009 after the Guardian revealed the paper's owner, News International, had paid about £1m in out-of-court settlements to victims of hacking including Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, to settle privacy cases. Yates decided the case should remain closed.
"If I did appear tetchy it was because I was expected to act on facts that were not in any way able to be developed into evidence," Yates said. "I was being asked to act on rumour, innuendo and gossip. This is the first time we have announced a new investigation with new material where there is a prospect of developing some promising lines of inquiry."
Goldsmith said: "It was always obvious that the crimes weren't limited to a couple of rogue reporters, and yet were it not for a newspaper's campaign and brave action by a handful of high profile victims, the truth would simply have been buried.
"Right up until last summer, the Met was still maintaining that the case had been the subject of the "most careful investigation". That is clearly misleading.
"We need to know why the Met has been so reluctant to investigate, and we need to know absolutely, and for sure that this new investigation will be exhaustive."
Yates said "the original investigation was constructed with the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service]", prosecutors had "access to all the material" and the scale of the prosecution was a matter for the CPS.
The new material which led to the reopening of the investigation is a set of emails sent by sacked News of the World journalist Ian Edmondson, which were passed to the police by News International this week after an internal investigation. They are rumoured to contain the names of other News of the World executives, although the paper has not confirmed this.
Jones also questioned Godwin and Yates about the ties between the police and News of the World journalists and demanded to know how often senior officers and reporters at the paper were in contact. "Coffee, lunch, dinner, dance – it would be useful to have that [information]," she said. "We need to understand your motives. How can we be sure there is no fear or favour in the way the investigation is moving?"
Godwin replied: "I haven't had any meetings with the News of the World. I would be the last person to bow to pressure to drop the case." Yates said: "News International is a big beast and we have a lot of dealings with them every week, so don't be surprised if there are meetings."
