| Robert Reiner | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
"An enduring, if not ecstatically happy, marriage" was how Sir Robert Mark, Metropolitan police commissioner in the early 1970s, described the police-press relationship. Media representations of policing have been a perennial source of concern to the police. Mark, commissioner at the height of the 1970s revelations of institutionalised corruption at the Yard, launched a policy of openness to the media. He saw this as the best way of limiting the damage from the flow of revelations about a corrupt "firm within a firm" uncovered by a 1969 Times investigation – incidentally using a secret tape recorder to bug conversations between bent detectives and a criminal. Since Mark, openness towards the press has remained the general strategy, although at times particular causes celebres have soured relations and led to temporary withdrawal of police co-operation.
The phone-hacking allegations that continue to be levelled at the News of the World – since the original 2006 convictions of its royal affairs correspondent Clive Goodman and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire – raise deeply disturbing issues about the relationships between press, police and politicians. The alarming picture that is emerging suggests a burgeoning media-political-policing complex, to adapt Eisenhower's famous valedictory 1961 remarks about the military-industry-government nexus.
The detailed reports by the Guardian's Nick Davies and others, and more recently the New York Times, present considerable evidence suggesting that the original police investigation pulled its punches. It sought to limit the allegations to tapping the phones of some members of the royal family, and failed to follow leads implicating Andy Coulson, then the NoW editor, currently David Cameron's director of communications. This is especially striking when Assistant Commissioner John Yates's stonewalling of the latest round of allegations is contrasted with his vigorous pursuit of the cash-for-honours inquiry into the then Labour government. It also seems that in the face of continuing revelations both the previous Labour government, and now the coalition, have been all too ready to accept police assurances that their inquiries have been as thorough as possible.
The implication is of police and politicians being deeply fearful of, and subservient to, the media, especially the Murdoch empire. One aspect of this is enticing future career prospects for retiring cops and ministers. Andy Hayman, who as assistant commissioner was in charge of the original inquiry, subsequently became a columnist for the Times. He has used this platform to seek to rubbish the Guardian's claims, although he now supports a new investigation in the light of the fresh evidence that has come to light this week. At a more fundamental level, police and politicians tremble for fear of tabloid accusations of incompetence, folly or worse.
Yates's performance on the Today programme on Monday, and before the home affairs select committee yesterday, was cogent (as befits one of the new breed of highly educated chief officers and a possible future commissioner). But it left enough questions open for the committee to announce it would hold a fresh inquiry into phone hacking. The whole scandal has been likened to Watergate, but it seems neither the police nor the government has learned the crucial lesson: that a cover-up is liable to become a bigger problem than the original accusation. Both the Met and Theresa May would have been better advised to welcome an independent inquiry. Robert Mark's stance of complete openness (in principle rather than practice – he resigned when the Police Complaints Board was established in 1976) remains the best way of drawing the sting of allegations. Unless, of course, there is something to hide.
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