Sir Paul Stephenson and John Yates

It may seem as if I'm the only one in the world who doesn't have an opinion on the resignations of Sir Paul and John Yates, there is a reason for that.

I am one of the MPA members who sits on the Professional Standards Cases Sub-Committee.  This may sound like an innocuous little bureaucratic backwater but it is the committee which deals with public complaints about senior Met officers.  As a member I have been and will continue to be directly involved in disciplinary matters relating to phone hacking.

It would be unfair and unprofessional to comment publicly on issues I may have to decide upon in the future, hence the lack of posts on this issue.

The TA is the Army

The BBC are running a headline which states "Army may face cuts to fund TA reservists", clearly as a TA officer I'm pleased that the review of reserves is likely to increase the support for and expectations of the TA.  As a Conservative I'm less pleased to hear that the regular army may face a further financial squeeze.

The UK is unusual in that the full time element of its armed forces greatly outnumber the part-time element, with the regular army being three times the size of the TA.  The Indian army the reserves are almost twice the size of the regulars and in the US Army they are almost equal in number, it isn't surprising to hear that the MOD is looking at shifting the balance here in the UK too.

I hope that this situation won't create tension between the regular and reserve forces which have worked increasingly closely over the last few years, it's worth remembering that the TA is part of the army, not a separate body.  The story would be more accurate if it said that the funding was to be rebalanced between the regular and reserve elements of the British Army.

Opportunistic hypocrisy

This morning's session of Mayoral questions was not a great advert for the Assembly.  It was clear that the Labour group was under instructions from Livingstone to parrot his attack on Boris over the News of the World phone hacking scandal.

The sum total of Livingstone's attack is that Boris has had meetings and lunches with members of the News International team and that last year he said that the allegations made by Sean Hoare in the New York Times were "codswallop".

This would be pretty partisan and opportunistic on it's own but coming from Ken Livingstone it is particularly crass.  Livingstone, who was Mayor of London at the time of the phone hacking, also had lunches with News International executives including with James Murdoc in October 2006, two months after the phone hacking arrests.  He has also written almost 30 articles for News International publicaions and spent millions of pounds of tax payers' money with a celebrity PR firm own by Rupert Murdoch's son-in-law.

People in glass houses and all that....

Media monopolies are a bad thing

The left are jumping with joy that Rupert Murdoch, their bête noire, has been damaged by the News of the World scandal and now want to see the BSkyB deal get spiked too.

Murdoch has never been popular with the liberal and left of centre but losing the support of the Sun before the last general election was the last nail in any relationship that might have existed.

The Murdoch owned media is almost exclusively right of centre in its output and clearly the left don't want to see an increasingly powerful media player with a quasi-political agenda. They are probably right to feel uncomfortable about that.

On a different note.

The BBC is almost exclusively left of centre in its output and clearly the right don't want to see an increasingly powerful media player with a quasi-political agenda. They are probably right to feel uncomfortable about that.

News of the World closure

I wouldn't be surprised if Murdoch had half an eye on closing the NOTW for a while.  He is an astute businessman and national newspapers are very expensive to produce and distribute.

In order to ensure that every petrol-station, supermarket, corner-shop and newsagent in the country has at least a few copies to sell News International need to print almost twice as many copies as they expect to sell.  They also need to distribute bundles all over the country during the night and arrange for the unsold copies (which the retailers do not pay for) to be collected and pulped, this is a huge logistical task.  The expense of all that is compounded, in the NOTW case, by the need to keep a parallel team of staff doing basically the same job as the team at the Sun.

Closing the NOTW on purely cost grounds would have been financially beneficial but reputationally damaging.  Once the NOTW's reputation was shot to bits, and its advertisers and readers fleeing, it became an easy decision to close the paper, rationalise the staff under the Sun brand and save a huge amount of money.

There may well have been some contrition in the closure of the NOTW but mainly it would have been a sound business decision.

I was wrong

The depth of the phone hacking scandal is far greater than I thought.  It seemed to be about a few celebs and a lot of faux anger from the Labour party who clearly saw it as an opportunity to put David Cameron under pressure because of his employment of Andy Coulson.  It is clearly so much more than that.

I still believe Andy when he says that he didn't know about the hacking, more so now we can see just how filthy the whole thing was, but it is clear that there was an acceptance of "no questions asked" information gathering.

David Cameron is right to call for a public inquiry into this issue.  The UK media is hugely important and I naturally feel very uncomfortable at anything which might look like limiting a free press, but it is in all our interests for public confidence in the papers to be maintained.

The attacks by the Labour party were opportunistic and may have blinded many Conservatives to the potential scale and implications of the phone hacking.  Labour run the risk of over playing the situation again.  By trying to tie this in with the BskyB acquisition, the employment of Andy Coulson etc. they are trying to embarrass the Conservatives rather than find the truth.

With regard to the police and their relationship with the media I'm going to keep quite on that for the moment.  As I sit on the MPA's Professional Standards Cases Committee I may have to decided on cases linked to this.