Scotland Yard’s new criminal inquiry, dubbed Operation Weeting, has led to the arrests of a total of nine reporters and editors, with more expected. And the police have opened another inquiry into allegations that some officers were paid for confidential information by reporters at News of the World and elsewhere.
The Metropolitan Police itself is now the subject of a judicial inquiry into what went wrong with their initial case, as well as into the ties between the department’s top officers and executives and reporters for News International.
At a parliamentary committee hearing last week, three current and former officials who ran the case were openly mocked. One member of Parliament dubbed an investigator “more Clouseau than Colombo.”
At the hearing, the senior investigator in charge of the day-to- day inquiry, Peter Clarke, blamed The News of the World’s “complete lack of cooperation” for the shortcomings in the department’s initial investigation.
While editors were not sharing any information, they were frequently breaking bread with police officers. Andy Hayman, who as head of the counterterrorism unit was running the investigation, also attended four dinners, lunches and receptions with News of the World editors, including a dinner on April 25, 2006, while his officers were gathering evidence in the case, records show. He told Parliament he never discussed the investigation with editors.
Mr. Hayman left the Metropolitan Police in December 2007 and was soon hired to write a column for The Sunday Times, a News International paper. He defended the inquiry that he led, writing in his column in July 2009 that his detectives had “left no stone unturned.”
Three months later, Mr. Wallis, the former deputy editor of The News of the World, was hired by Scotland Yard to provide strategic media advice on phone-hacking matters to the police commissioner, among others. Scotland Yard confirmed last week that the commissioner, Sir Paul, had personally approved nearly $40,000 in payments to Mr. Wallis for his work.
But when Mr. Wallis was interviewed last April by a New York Times reporter working on a story about the hacking, he did not disclose his new media role at Scotland Yard. In the interview, Mr. Wallis defended both the newspaper and the vigor of Scotland Yard’s initial investigation.
I was exaggerating for comic effect ofcourse, but I do think that individuals like Klass play incredibly malignant roles in society through using their celebrity to promote cosmetic surgery (which as far as I'm concerned is a close cousin of eugenics) and to give murderous tyrannies like Dubai the veneer of glitz and glamour. It is precisely through such seemingly benign mediums that ruling class values are transmitted in liberal democracies.
