Police under pressure to reopen phone hacking case

Senior Liberal Democrats have joined calls for a new inquiry – while Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman said the police had a clear duty to uphold the law.

Ms Harman said today that the police must investigate allegations of phone-hacking by journalists, amid reports that Gordon Brown may have been among the victims.

Mr Brown was said to have written at least one letter to the Metropolitan Police over concerns that his mobile phone was being targeted while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, according to a report in the Independent on Sunday.

The concerns were said to have coincided with the latter stages of Andy Coulson’s editorship of the News of the World.

Mr Coulson announced his resignation as David Cameron’s director of communications on Friday amid ongoing claims of phone hacking at the News of the World while he was editor.

Mr Brown’s office declined to comment on suggestions that the former prime minister had raised the matter with the police, but Ms Harman said that it was important that all allegations were properly investigated.

“Hacking into people’s phones is illegal. Obviously the criminal law has got to be complied with and if it is broken then it should be investigated by the police and it should be enforced,” she told Sky News.

“Nobody is above the law, no newspaper editor, no journalist.”

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Police inquiry ‘lacklustre’

Earlier, Tony Blair’s former communications director Alastair Campbell denounced the “lacklustre” way in which the police had investigated the phone hacking allegations as a “scandal”.

“When you compare and contrast the way the police pursued Tony Blair on the so-called cash-for-honours nonsense and the lacklustre way in which they have handled this, then there is a very, very big difference,” he told Sky News.

“There must be reasons behind that which will, I think, become part of an unfolding scandal.”

Net widens

Yesterday, a media lawyer claimed that the phone-hacking allegations were not just confined to one newspaper.

Mark Lewis, who acted for Gordon Taylor of the Professional Footballers’ Association in a damages claim against the News of the World, told Channel 4 News he was representing four people who believe they were targeted by other newspapers.

Meanwhile, Labour MP Chris Bryant, who instigated the Parliamentary investigation into the phone hacking scandal and who believes his phone messages were hacked by Glenn Mulclaire, told Channel 4 News last night: “I’d quite like them to contact all 3,000 people who are on that list. They might want to know, they might want to take action. I only know about it because I happened to write to them on the off-chance.”

“The argument that there was just one rogue reporter has become increasingly unsustainable,” he added.

Mr Coulson has always denied he had any knowledge of his staff illegally accessing phone messages of public figures and celebrities while he was in charge of the News of the World newspaper.

He resigned as editor in 2007 after the paper’s royal editor Clive Goodman, and private detective Glenn Mulcaire, were jailed for phone hacking.

The Sunday tabloid has repeatedly said phone hacking was the act of a single rogue reporter without editorial consent.

Scotland Yard said yesterday that the matter was closed and it would not be reopening the investigation.

However, Mr Bryant continues to call for a full police inquiry. He told Channel 4 News last night: “The News of the World at the moment have apparently compounded the computer that relates to the Sienna Miller case, I don’t understand why the police haven’t impounded it. It seems to me that the victim has to come up with the evidence, not the police.”