When is Ed Miliband going to nail Cameron on the Handy Andies scandal?

Former cop Andy Hayman….butter wouldn’t melt?

 

Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband seems rather too squeamish to ask a direct Prime Minister’s Question of David Cameron about Andy Coulson’s position.

In the light of Coulson’s increasingly incredible protestations of innocence, a number of observers and commentators are wondering why Mr Ed doesn’t hoof the ball at this apparently open goal.

Last December 13th, The Slog ran a largely ignored piece about upcoming personal privacy prosecutions against the News of the World. Acting on information received about major celebrity cases, I suggested that further releases of Met evidence about the infamous hacking case were now almost certain to be demanded. This has already happened in one case; it is about to happen in several others.

I understand this is a coordinated campaign – which some claim was hatched at London’s Groucho Club – to force out the truth about not only Andy Coulson, but also regarding the activities of Andy Hayman, the former top terrorist policeman now employed by…..News International paper The Times. Andy Hayman was in charge of…..the investigation into the News International hacking scandal when…Andy Coulson was NoW editor.  News International is owned by…..Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch threw his weight behind the Cameron Conservatives in the General Election. David Cameron’s Comms Head at Number Ten is now….Andy Coulson.

In February of last year, Andy Hayman wrote a column in The Times, in which he stressed ‘It is vital that the police are vigilant against corruption in their ranks’. This is perhaps apt coming from a chap who, in 2007, was the subject of a £15,000 expenses probe while still working on anti-terror at the Met. In December 2007, Hayman finally resigned under the threat of disciplinary action over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and allegations that he was both cavalier with his expenses, and enjoying an inappropriate affair with one of the IPCC’s senior members.

Now he finds himself working at a newscorp group under increasing pressure to come clean over the illegal phone-hacking culture allegedly approved and used by Andy Coulson. Hayman himself, of course, was fingered by several journalists (and hacked victims) as the man blocking access to evidence that would reveal Coulson to be a serial liar.

Newscorps actions over the affair look less than innocent. To date, the Murdoch press has paid out huge sums (£700,000 in the case of PFA chief Gordon Taylor) to gag victims of the phone hacking. The claim of many involved in these cases has always been that Andy Coulson had full knowledge of the routine (but illegal) phone hacking throughout its existence at the News of the World.

Although Coulson has always denied this, during November last year The Slog was unable to find a single mainstream journalist who believed his account. But in a new development, late last week sources close to the upcoming private legal cases against Newscorp insisted that the evidence released will blow Coulson’s ‘ignorance’ defence apart….and potentially implicate Hayman.

Not only has Hayman seemed to many to protect Coulson, the Daily Mail alleges that the former News of the World editor did Hayman a favour in his less than accurate coverage of the Jean Charles de Menenez shooting case. (Most of the pro-police ‘facts’ presented in that double-page spread were later hotly denied or discovered to be without foundation).

None of this smells right. In September last year, Lord Prescott intervened to give a formal statement expressing his ‘desire to uncover why the Met failed to notify thousands of hacking victims targeted by the NoW, and why they failed to follow up the evidence’. Hayman gave evidence in the case that there were ‘a handful’ of such victims. The Slog understands that, following the next case to go before the Courts, this too should be proved an obvious lie.

The affair has now gone well beyond being blogosmear rumour-factory stuff….if indeed it ever was. It seems about to become an enormous scandal – one that will almost certainly involve  the Prime Minister being potentially embroiled in a plot to pervert the course of justice against one of his major election backers, and his own most senior communications employee.

If and when senior Newscorp staff are implicated in the affir, it will mean the vindication of Vince Cable wanting to ‘get’ Murdoch as a media mogul of malign influence. And it will of course throw a huge cloud of doubt over the inquiry into Murdoch’s desire to fold the rest of BSkyB into his News International empire.

Sources in the Conservative Party were tight-lipped this morning about what if any action Cameron has decided upon, although I understand that the PM has now been given ‘serious warnings’ by at least two senior colleagues.

There is an absolutely fundamental issue at stake here involving equality before the law. The Labour Party has set out its stall as the champion of equality. Why has Ed Miliband so far not asked a PMQ on the subject? Will he ask one this coming Wednesday? Or could it be that Andy Hayman is Too Big to Fall?