No, I'm not kidding. We really have to defend the Guardian

Are YOU sitting comfortably? Then prepare for a shock. You may even like to pour yourself a stiff drink. I’m about to defend the Guardian.

First, though, the caveats. When I heard that Scotland Yard was using the Official Secrets Act in an attempt to force Guardian journalists to name the sources of their stories about the phone-hacking investigation, my instinctive initial reaction was: serves them right.

Even those of us who find the Guardian insufferably smug, self-righteous and censorious applauded the journalistic operation which uncovered the extent of wrong-doing by some executives at the News of the World.

The revelation that a private investigator employed by the Screws had hacked into the voicemail of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler escalated the affair from a piece of politico/media navel gazing to a full-blown public scandal.

Last night, News International, the paper’s publisher, agreed to pay the Dowler family £2 million compensation, with a further £1 million going to charity.

Settlement: Rupert Murdoch's News International have reportedly agreed to a £3 million payment in connection with the Dowler case

Journalists are not naive. We all knew that some reporters at the rougher end of our trade pulled a few strokes in pursuit of their exclusives. But none of us was aware of the depths of immorality and illegality to which they were prepared to sink, or the industrial scale of their hacking.

The boil had to be lanced and the stench won’t abate until the worst offenders have been brought to justice. So for that, the Guardian is to be congratulated.

My argument all along wasn’t that the Guardian should not have pursued the story, simply that the whole business has been blown horribly out of proportion.



It was always going to end in tears. And so it has proved. The problem arose when the Guardian, in collusion with the BBC and grievance-driven politicians, seeking revenge over the parliamentary expenses scandal, turbo-charged the crimes of a handful of hacks into an attempt to smear and discredit the newspaper industry as a whole.

They contrived to create the impression that all journalists and papers — with the honourable exception, naturally, of the Guardian — are venal and corrupt.

There was barely-disguised glee in Left-wing circles when the News of the World, Britain’s best-selling Sunday newspaper and one of the world’s longest-established titles, was forced to close, throwing hundreds of blameless employees out of work and depriving hard-working newsagents of a valuable source of income. The death of any newspaper should be an occasion for sadness and regret, not gloating.



Yet, as a result of the hysteria surrounding phone hacking the demise of a few more newspapers may be hastened. And free speech and plurality of opinion will go the same way.

A maelstrom of madness has been unleashed and there’s no certainty where it will all end. The law of unintended consequences has kicked in. Phone hacking has already claimed the scalps of a number of senior News International journalists and executives, as well as bringing down two top Scotland Yard policemen.

Shamed: ex-Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, accepted a £12,000 freebie from a health farm

While ex-Commissioner Paul Stephenson brought about his own downfall by accepting a £12,000 freebie from a health farm, his able assistant John Yates could have survived in a less febrile political climate.



But with the witch-hunters of Westminster and the Guardian banging on the door of Scotland Yard, Yates’s close relationship with the former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis proved fatal.

What we are witnessing now is the kind of guilt by association which is the hallmark of every fascist society in history.

By delicious irony, it is the Guardian itself which has fallen foul of the new spirit of suppression, which deems that any contact between any journalist and any police officer is a criminal offence.

The Yard wants to use the Official Secrets Act to force reporter Amelia Hill to disclose evidence which could identify the detective on the inquiry who provided her with the information to break the story that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked.

As I said earlier, there’s a temptation to conclude: serves them right. The Guardian opened this can of worms. Let them live with the consequences.

But any inclination towards schadenfreude must be resisted. What’s at stake here is nothing less than the future of our free Press.

Attempting to use the Official Secrets Act to interfere with a legitimate journalistic investigation is outrageous. How dare the Yard claim that this information was not in the public interest? How dare they try to put the frighteners on reporters?

If they get away with this, what next? Will they start arresting political correspondents who are fed a few Budget secrets in advance of the Chancellor’s speech?

The Attorney General may yet intervene, but what is worrying here is the atmosphere in which the police are emboldened to use such draconian tactics against journalists.

Some sections of the constabulary need no encouragement to abuse their power, as demonstrated when the Official Secrets Act was invoked to arrest the then Tory home affairs spokesman Damian Green in 2008, at the behest of that pillar of rectitude, then Home Secretary ‘Jackboots’ Jacqui Smith. Green’s ‘crime’ was to obtain some classified statistics which proved that Labour was lying about immigration.

The Official Secrets Act was being employed merely to punish someone for embarrassing a political opponent.



We don’t know what motivated the Yard to dust off the Act again in this latest case. Perhaps it, too, is embarrassed at the Guardian’s disclosure of the contacts between senior officers and News International and the failure properly to investigate phone hacking in the first place. That excuse won’t wash.

Who authorised it? New commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, since his feet aren’t under the top table yet. But in an acting capacity, he has been in overall charge of the phone-hacking inquiry, known as Operation Weeting.



If ever Scotland Yard needed the smack of firm leadership, it is now.

Hogan-Howe has the chance to demonstrate his independence from politics. Phone hacking has already occupied too much police time.

There are now 130 officers working full time on Weeting and related inquiries, who could more productively be assigned elsewhere. As yesterday’s terror plot arrests in Birmingham demonstrate again, we face more pressing problems than discovering who hacked into Ulrika Jonsson’s voicemail.



While investigations are continuing into last month’s riots and billion-pound frauds in the City; and householders are forced to defend themselves against intruders, the number of coppers listening to phone messages is ludicrously disproportionate. This column has always defended the police’s initial reluctance to devote too much time to hacking at a time when officers were working flat out to stop terrorists blowing up airliners.

But even if this monstrous action against the Guardian is withdrawn, or fails, there are still disturbing indications that our free Press is under assault on several fronts.

Journalists working on crime stories unrelated to phone hacking have been receiving calls from the Yard’s Anti-Corruption Unit demanding to know the source of their information.

Two separate internal inquiries into relations between reporters and police officers have begun.

Free speech, not just investigative journalism, is in mortal danger. Call Me Dave has set up the Leveson inquiry into the Press, largely to assuage his guilt at his own incestuously close links with News International.

Witnesses who have been summoned to appear tell me that the list of questions they have been issued with in advance can all be summed up as: when did you stop beating your wife?

There is an appetite among a growing number of politicians to force statutory regulation on newspapers.



It’s not difficult to understand why. Westminster is still furious at the way in which the Daily Telegraph exposed the expenses scandal after buying a stolen computer disk. While receiving stolen property is technically against the law, who could argue that publication of the information on that disk was not in the public interest?

There are also senior police officers who would like to muzzle the Press.

Newspapers such as the Mail have been prominent in exposing corruption and malpractice in the police. Plenty of bent coppers would have escaped punishment without investigations by the media.

The Press can’t be trusted to regulate itself, so the argument goes. But the phone-hacking scandal was uncovered not by the police but by a brilliant Guardian investigation.



End of an era: The death of any newspaper should be an occasion for sadness and regret, not gloating

News International shut the News of the World in the face of a wave of revulsion from readers and an advertising boycott.



The decision was driven by commercial pressures, not because of the threat of any legal sanction — other than the arrest of a number of former members of staff alleged to be involved in hacking.



We shouldn’t lose sight of that, whatever the subsequent fall-out.



That’s why we should put our rivalry and differences aside and defend the Guardian.



You can’t have a free society without a free Press.



This isn’t just an attack on the Guardian, it’s an attack on us all.



It must not be allowed to succeed.



