Leveson may not get down to phone hacking detail ‘until 2015’

So the Lord Justice Leveson Inquiry will make the Royal Courts of Justice its home for the duration of its work. That’s where Lord Hutton held his inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the death of David Kelly.

The aura of a courtroom lent a certain gravitas to proceedings that were already pretty weighted with significance as the Prime Minister was summoned from Number 10 for questioning along with most of the senior members of his staff. But when will the Leveson inquiry actually get round to looking into the detail of who said what to whom over phone hacking?

The answer to that lies in the hands of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, the police chief in charge of the hacking (and other covert surveillance) investigations. How long will it take her team to wrap up investigations and any prosecutions?

One senior police officer with years of experience in this sort of thing said he would be surprised if the police were clear of all this before 2015. So the Royal Courts of Justice could be, from October, the setting for a rather different sort of business – seminars about ethics, broader questions of journalistic practice etc.

As for Sue Akers’ work, there is word that a hefty amount of News International data that her team had thought destroyed has in fact been successfully retrieved. The police know who initiated the attempt to destroy the material, I hear.

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