The Royal Courts of Justice have heard hundreds of criminals claim that the police are bent. On Thursday, it was a respectable group of public figures including three former cabinet ministers and an erstwhile police chief who claimed that Scotland Yard had twisted the truth and buried the evidence in their case.

In a series of attacks, the Metropolitan police were accused of misleading the high court, parliament and the public over the phone-hacking scandal; and of keeping hundreds, possibly thousands of victims in the dark in a way which shielded Rupert Murdoch's News International from embarrassment and expensive legal settlements.

The evidence emerged at a hearing in which Lord Prescott, the former Europe minister Chris Bryant and the Met's former deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick sought permission for a judicial review of police handling of the affair.

Three others including the former media, culture and sport secretary, Tessa Jowell, asked the court to be recognised as interested parties.

In written and oral submissions, the court was confronted with claims that the News of the World's private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, had:

• Intercepted 45 voicemail messages from Prescott and sent an email about them to an executive at the News of the World but the Met told him repeatedly that he was not a victim of hacking.

• Kept notes on Bryant including a list of 23 numbers which made calls to his mobile phone – information which could have been obtained only by hacking his voicemail – and yet police told him there was no evidence his phone had been hacked.

• Listed Paddick on his computer as "a project" and collected phone details for him, his partner, his former partner and numerous associates, but the police had told him only that Mulcaire had written his name, rank and address on one piece of paper.

James Lewis QC, for the Met, acknowledged "some operational shortcomings" and that some victims had not been told there was clear evidence of their messages being intercepted. He said the evidence in relation to these claimants had not been clear until very recently.

Lewis said that, having seized 10,000 pages of notes from Mulcaire, the original inquiry in 2006 failed to enter the material on to a computer system or to search and index it.

In 2009, after the Guardian revived the affair, Scotland Yard started transferring material to a database but overlooked numerous documents and scanned others in a form that was not searchable, with the result they gave misleading replies to some public figures who asked if there was evidence they were victims. It was only when Scotland Yard launched Operation Weeting in January that the material had been fully searched and indexed.

A written submission by the claimants' solicitors, Bindman and Co, said that last autumn the police had told the high court they had given all of the claimants a complete summary of all of the relevant evidence in their possession.

Yet it had now emerged that not one of the claimants had been given an accurate or complete account of the material which police held. Hundreds, if not thousands, of victims had been left in the dark by Scotland Yard.

The effect of this had been to protect News International from expense and embarrassment: "We share the disquiet of the public about the police's motivation for playing down the scale of unlawful behaviour and the way in which News International has, as a result, been shielded."

The submissions summarised evidence to parliament by Scotland Yard's assistant commissioner, John Yates, who had explained the narrow focus of the original investigation and the small number of victims who had been warned by claiming that the Crown Prosecution Service had given police a very narrow interpretation of the law on interception.

The submission recorded that this claim had been "strongly contradicted" by the head of the CPS, Keir Starmer QC.

Claims by Yates that Scotland Yard had asked the four leading mobile phone companies to liaise with customers who had been victims, had been contradicted by all four companies who said they had received no such request from police.

The interception of Prescott's messages, the court was told, was achieved by targeting the phone of his then chief of staff, Joan Hammell.

Glenn Mulcaire had emailed an editorial executive at the News of the World on 28 April 2006 referring to 45 messages left on her phone by Prescott and providing detailed instructions about how to continue accessing Hammell's phone.

This was at a time when Prescott's private life was under tabloid scrutiny. That email had finally been disclosed by the News of the World on 26 January this year.

Bindman's submission said that, unlike Prescott, Tessa Jowell had been approached by police in 2006.

"However, she was not told the extent of the interception and was also left in the dark about precisely what had happened to her private information.

"Nor did she realise that the private information of close friends, cabinet colleagues and family members had been compromised.

"She has now been shown a very substantial amount of material by the new inquiry and is at a loss to understand why material which was available to police in 2006 was not shown to her."

The submission concludes: "The Metropolitan police misled the claimants and the wider public by stating that there was only 'a handful' of victims; and that, where there was evidence of hacking, victims were told.

"When those who thought they might have been victims contacted the police for fuller information, many were wrongly told that there was no evidence of hacking.

"It has now emerged that, contrary to the picture painted by the police, that telephone interception was extremely widespread."

The police argued in court that, although there had been some failures, Operation Weeting had provided an adequate remedy and there was no case for a judicial review.

Mr Justice Foskett said he would make a decision in the near future whether to allow the review.