The transcripts of the official inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. More…
Thank you.
I agree. I think the other way of looking at it is there used to be a phrase about minimum models, so the minimum model of how to deal with car crime is this, and if you add all the minimum models together, they're bigger than the Metropolitan Police ...
I think I would like to take the opportunity of writing to you, because I think it is a matter that needs to be seen, in a sense, at the end of the evidence. I think there's something here about trying to get a picture. But I'm very ...
No.
No, but there has always been a rogue element of the private investigation industry, so it wouldn't surprise me that such a report existed.
Serious Organised Crime Agency.
I am entirely with you, sir, and I think that you are proper to have asked the question and I hope I've answered it properly, which is that it makes a very difficult piece of public perception and that, that, should be thought of very carefully when somebody was ...
I do think that's right, but, you know, again, I don't know the exact circumstances, but I think if the issue you are reaching for is the issue of public perception, then I think that that is something that should be taken into account by people making the ...
I think that's right.
Yes.
Yes, I think it does. I think it's at that point one has to consider whether somebody else should make the decision. I mean, as an example, and it was a term of art only lawyers would know, I discovered the word "recuse", and I commented on that in ...
Well, I think it's twofold. One is the perception not only of the public but of the more junior officers, who must look at this and wonder whether this is a proper use of public time and public money. And secondly, the very perception that the Inquiry has already ...
If you're referring to the level of contact with the media, then yes, I have concerns about that and I particularly have concerns, if it's true, and I believe it is, in front of the Inquiry that there were a large number of dinners and large amounts of ...
I think you might be a little more precise.
Well, again I won't comment any further than in the book. I was satisfied, so were my management board colleagues, that the leak in question was his responsibility. He has denied it ever since, but to the extent that any leak can be satisfied with a very small group ...
No. And I think it would be fair to say that, as I've said on a number of occasions outside this Inquiry, that the proudest achievement of my entire career was the entire reconstruction of rape investigation in the Met in the 1980s and, no, I do not take ...
Only that I disagree with some bits of it. Some of it was accurate, but it is just to say that, you know, I think Brian was a very fine officer, but for a variety of reasons, his last period with the Met was very unhappy, and that unhappiness has ...
It is indeed. No, it's not actually Shakespeare, when I think about it. It's "No greater fury than love to hatred turned". It's a poem.
No. I think the final sentence is the important point: it has to be the responsibility of chief officers and the new police and crime commissioners to get this right.
Just the bottom of paragraph 67, Mr Jay. I do think Elizabeth Filkin's comment that "contact is permissible but not unconditional" should be nailed to the front door of the police station, as it were. That's a really good phrase. What I disagree with is then a whole ...
The problem here is to analyse from the outside the motivations of individuals. I have nothing to suggest that any individual took a decision based on an overestimate of the importance of the influence of any organisation. The problem is that the levels of contact within people from that organisation ...
I don't think that's the case, but I mean we haven't yet discussed this. There is no question that we were aware -- and I use "we" loosely as the senior officers of the Met along with the rest of the establishment -- that newspapers were very difficult animals ...
Yes, I think I do. I rephrase that: I do think I should have been aware of them, because they were revealing a trading in information which appeared to involve police officers. I have no idea why they didn't appear.
Apart from a general sense that, you know, yes ...
No. And nor does it justify a decision two years further on when the same situation was not apparent.
Quite.
That everybody thought the same way.
But I am clear, and I'm quite prepared to say it, that was a decision which appears to be too hasty, and I thought some of the way in which Sir Paul Stephenson suggested the closed mindset of because it had been Peter Clarke who had made the decision ...
I don't know what happened in the following days.
I'm sorry, at this stage you pass my sort of knowledge about it.
I was starting with that point. It wasn't a refusal.
The answer is, in John Yates' expression, it was an extremely -- it was a poor decision, that's what he says. From what I can see, that decision was just too quick. It was just why have -- why could ...
No, no, in a sense I hadn't finished the paragraph.
Is it the following year? In that case, I will withdraw that. But as I remember reading that, I thought, "This has to be investigated", it was so wide.
So going back to the 2009 article, which obviously I --
It is invidious to criticise from the outside, but I will say that not so much about the article in July 2009, but in September 2009 I was in New York when the New York Times article was written, which was extremely lengthy --
I was.
Except -- if it had been another politician of some sort who had never had the kind of things that Mr Blunkett had passed through, I probably wouldn't have asked the question, but I did know about what he'd been through and I knew he was wildly concerned about ...
I don't know that it is fair. It was in my mind that he would ask me because I knew how concerned he was and had been all along about where allegations about his private life were coming from in the newspapers. I mean, yours is a perfectly proper ...
I only discovered that now. I didn't know then, at the time.
That is correct. I was slightly surprised to read this in the Guardian, and I had no recollection of this, so I thought it was correct to phone Mr Blunkett this week and ask him for his recollection, and again it fits very closely what I've just said to ...
Not in so many terms, but I certainly understood the matter to be over.
Yes, just to the extent they pleaded guilty and they'll be sentenced in January.
No. I think the important point to recognise at this stage in August 2006 is any conversation with either Andy Hayman or Peter Clarke -- and I did have many -- would have been absolutely dominated by the airliners plot. I mean, we had, as I will talk about in a minute ...
Yes, that could have happened.
I would have -- yes. We are talking entirely hypothetically, but that's what I would imagine.
It would have been -- to transfer it to another directorate would have -- if that directorate had objected, which it might well have done at that stage, that would have had to have been decided by the Deputy Commissioner or Commissioner, that's what they're for, but normally it would ...
At the period of August through to January/February of that year, I don't think it would have been considered. Not on what I knew or what maybe my deputy knew or something like that -- had he known, I'm not saying he did, but we have cold case ...
I am agreeing with you, sir. I merely am reporting how it happened and when it happened in relation to myself and at that stage I didn't ask the question which now looks so obvious, as to how many other people there were.
