Keep up with all the latest developments as the phone-hacking scandal intensifies following the resignation of the Met police chief, Sir Paul Stephenson, and the arrest of Rebekah Brooks
10.55am: My colleague Vikram Dodd says the Metropolitan police authority's professional standards cases sub-committee is meeting now in private. It is believed to be discussing John Yates. As the BBC have already reported, the MPA is expected to make a statement at about 12.30pm.
10.51am: Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, and Kit Malthouse, his deputy and chair of the Metropolitan police authority, are holding a press conference this afternoon at around 2pm, I've just been told.
10.48am: My colleague Paul Owen has been going through today's British press coverage of the phone-hacking scandal. All the Guardian's stories on the subject are here, including Nick Davies's analysis of Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation and his round-up of the questions the media committee should ask Rebekah Brooks and the Murdochs tomorrow.
In the comment pages, Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan examine the impact of the scandal on Murdoch's US businesses.
One likely consequence would be what Corporate Crime Reporter's Russell Mokhiber calls 'a wishy-washy non-prosecution settlement' wherein News Corp would admit to the crime without being convicted, and pay a financial settlement. Mokhiber noted that, in a 2008 [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] case against Siemens for widespread bribery, Siemens paid $800m but avoided a criminal conviction that would have jeopardised its standing as a US defence contractor.
As for the alleged phone hacking of 9/11 victims, if News of the World employees did engage in illegal attempts to access voicemails, and the FBI investigation can ferret out sufficient proof to seek indictments, then the most likely outcome would be extradition requests against the alleged offenders, which could drag on for years.
Investors in BSkyB have told the Financial Times they are reserving judgment on whether James Murdoch should stay as chairman until he has given evidence to the media committee tomorrow. One investor said:
We think we should have a non-Murdoch chairman, but we'll wait to see what Tuesday brings. Having said that, I would be more worried if I was a News Corp shareholder. In the States, there is more than a sense that things aren't real till they've happened on television.
In the Independent, political editor Andrew Grice assesses the damage the scandal has caused David Cameron so far.
[Most] dangerous is that the prime minister may appear in voters' eyes to have some dodgy friends and look just as bad as the Labour lot, part of the old rather than the new politics.
The same thing happened to Tony Blair, although it took longer … This crisis has understandably shaken the Cameron circle. Some dared to hope the storm had passed their door last week when the prime minister announced the judicial inquiry and disclosed his contacts with the media, a welcome burst of transparency. Yesterday they realised the storm is still gathering pace. It could last for years. No one knows where it will end, least of all Mr Cameron.
The Daily Mail reports that actor Jude Law claims he was a victim of hacking while in the New York – 'meaning News international could be prosecuted in the US'.
The Times's lead editorial seems glad to be able to change the subject slightly from News International, the paper's owner, to the Metropolitan police.
The public may be disgusted by illegal and immoral practices among tabloid journalists, and dismayed by the thought of politicians unbalanced by the urge to keep the favour of newspaper executives. At the point at which this sorry tale touches the police, however, it becomes frightening. Unless a huge amount of what has been alleged these past two weeks is sheer fiction, Britain's police are riven with corruption on an institutional scale. Journalists who bribe policemen are indicative of a flawed industry. Policemen who can be bribed are indicative of a flawed state.
The Sun, also a News International paper, has a page on hacking, but points out in a piece on the arrest of Rebekah Brooks:
She was NOT quizzed over anything to do with the Sun, which she edited from 2003 until 2009.
The Daily Star goes with 'Becks: I was hacked', reporting that David Beckham fears his phone was hacked over the course of a decade and that he is 'threatening to launch a multi-million-pound law suit', according to 'pals'.
And in case you missed it over the weekend the Economist had a very clear run through the phone-hacking story so far, starting with 'the parlous state' of Prince William's knee in 2005. Their graph showing the relatively small profits of News Corp's publishing divisions versus its cable TV is interesting too.
10.47am: The Metropolitan police authority will make a a statement about John Yates at about 12.30pm, the BBC reports.
10.43am: According to the BBC's Nick Robinson, who has posted a blog on this, John Yates was in charge of carrying out 'due diligence' on the former News of the World deputy editor Neil Wallis before the Met decided to hire him on a part-time basis to give PR advice.
I understand that Yates received categorial assurances from Wallis that nothing would emerge that would embarrass either of them or the commissioner.
The Met took the view that Wallis had never been 'in the frame' over phone hacking - a view that only changed more than a year later when News International revealed new information at the beginning of this year.
Robinson says that Yates has no intention of resigning. The Metropolitan police authority is expected to look into Yates's conduct in this matter. But Robinson says that such inquiries are relatively routine and that they do not normally lead to senior officers being suspended.
10.22am: Good work from the BBC's James Landale. Journalists travelling with the prime minister in South Africa initially thought that the British contingent would get just one question at the Cameron/Zuma press conference. In the event, two British journalists were called. But Landale, who was called first, made up for this by managing to get five questions in all in one go. Here are the key points.
• Cameron revealed that parliament will meet on Wednesday to allow him to make a statement to MPs about the phone hacking affair. In response to Landale, Cameron said that extending parliament for an extra day (recess was meant to start on Tuesday afternoon) 'may well be right'. A few minutes later Cameron said he was calling for parliament to sit on Wednesday. If the prime minister is calling for this, then we can be confident that it is going to happen.
This is another win for Ed Miliband, who beat Cameron to it in calling for parliament to sit on Wednesday - albeit only by about 20 minutes. It is possible that Miliband may even have known in advance that Cameron was going to say this (because decisions about the timing of parliamentary business are discussed through 'the usual channels'). But that doesn't really matter. Whether by deviousness or intuition, Miliband has - yet again - made it look as if Cameron is following his lead on this issue.
• Cameron rejected Sir Paul Stephenson's suggestion that the Met's decision to hire Neil Wallis was equivalent to Cameron's decision to hire Andy Coulson. Stephenson made this claim in his resignation statement. (See 8.34am.) Here's how Cameron responded.
I think the situation in Metropolitan Police service is really quite different to the situation in government, not least because the issues that the Metropolitan police service are looking at and the issues around them have had a direct bearing on public confidence into the police inquiry into the News of the World and indeed the police themselves.
• Cameron defended his decision to travel to Africa while there is a crisis in London. 'Just because you are travelling to Africa doesn't mean you've lost contact with your office,' he said.
10.11am: Cameron is taking another question.
Q: Has your position been compromised? Was it a mistake to come to Africa?
Cameron says it is important for the prime minister to come to Africa with business leaders to promote business.
As for the police investigation, it should go wherever the evidence leads. He has said that publicly many times, and privately many times to the Met too.
That now needs to be taken forward by new leadership.
As for Andy Coulson, no one has argued that the work he did in goverment was bad.
The situation with the Metropolitan police is different. They had known of the relevant allegations for a long time.
Cameron says he is asking for parliament to sit on Wednesday so that he can make a statement to MPs. (He is more explicit than he was a few minutes ago, when he was only suggesting that parliament should sit on Wednesday.)
10.02am: The first question is from James Landale from the BBC.
Q: What is the difference between Sir Paul Stephenson employing Neil Wallis to do his PR and you employing Andy Coulson to do yours? Do you accept that your position would have been 'compromised' if Stephenson had told you about Wallis? Was it right to come on this trip? And should John Yates resign?
Cameron says it is right for Britain to be engaged with South Africa and Africa as a whole.
He says he would like to thank Sir Paul Stephenson for the work he has done for the Met.
As he told Stephenson on Tuesday, the Met investigation must go wherever the evidence takes.
But the Met is not in the same position as the government. Public confidence in the Met has become an issue. The government has set up a judicial inquiry. It has demonsrated 'transparency' in terms of media contact. Cameron himself has answered many questions on this.
• Parliament should meet on Wednesday, Cameron suggests, so that he can make a statement to MPs updating them on his progress setting up an inquiry.
Theresa May is making a statement today, he goes on.
As for going on the trip, he says that just because he is in Africa, that does not mean he is not in contact with the evidence.
As for who should replace Stephenson, he says that is a matter for the Metropolitan police authority.
9.58am: In a 'crisis', it is important to take 'urgent and decisive action', David Cameron says. But he's not talking about phone hacking. He's talking about the famine in the Horn of Africa.
9.57am: David Cameron is speaking now. He is talking about the strength of Britain's relationship with South Africa.
9.52am: The Cameron/Zuma press conference is starting now in Pretoria. As Nicholas Watt reports, Cameron's visit is about promoting trade, and the opening remarks are partly focusing on this. But I'll be concentrating on what Cameron has to say about the crisis in London.
9.43am: On Friday Rupert Murdoch struck an apologetic tone when he was filmed talking about his meeting with the parents of Milly Dowler. But, in private, what does he really think about what's going on. According to Andrew Neil (a former Murdoch executive), today's editorial in the (Murdoch-owned) Wall Street Journal sums it up best. As Neil says on Twitter, it's pretty defiant. Here are some extracts.
It is also worth noting the irony of so much moral outrage devoted to a single media company, when British tabloids have been known for decades for buying scoops and digging up dirt on the famous. Fleet Street in general has long had a well-earned global reputation for the blind-quote, single-sourced story that may or may not be true. The understandable outrage in this case stems from the hacking of a noncelebrity, the murder victim Milly Dowler.
The British politicians now bemoaning media influence over politics are also the same statesmen who have long coveted media support. The idea that the BBC and the Guardian newspaper aren't attempting to influence public affairs, and don't skew their coverage to do so, can't stand a day's scrutiny. The overnight turn toward righteous independence recalls an eternal truth: Never trust a politician ...
We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world.
The prize for righteous hindsight goes to the online publication ProPublica for recording the well-fed regrets of the Bancroft family that sold Dow Jones to News Corp. at a 67% market premium in 2007. The Bancrofts were admirable owners in many ways, but at the end of their ownership their appetite for dividends meant that little cash remained to invest in journalism. We shudder to think what the Journal would look like today without the sale to News Corp ...
The political mob has been quick to call for a criminal probe into whether News Corp. executives violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with payments to British security or government officials in return for information used in news stories. Attorney General Eric Holder quickly obliged last week, without so much as a fare-thee-well to the First Amendment.
The foreign-bribery law has historically been enforced against companies attempting to obtain or retain government business. But U.S. officials have been attempting to extend their enforcement to include any payments that have nothing to do with foreign government procurement. This includes a case against a company that paid Haitian customs officials to let its goods pass through its notoriously inefficient docks, and the drug company Schering-Plough for contributions to a charitable foundation in Poland.
Applying this standard to British tabloids could turn payments made as part of traditional news-gathering into criminal acts. The Wall Street Journal doesn't pay sources for information, but the practice is common elsewhere in the press, including in the U.S.
9.37am: Here is what Ed Miliband is going to say in his speech later this morning about extending the sitting of parliament for an extra day.
Rebekah Brooks has been arrested, the Metropolitan police commissioner has resigned, tomorrow we will have some of the most important select committee hearings in modern times and the prime minister has decided to leave the country, not to return until after parliament breaks up for summer.
In these circumstances the right and responsible thing for the government to do must be to extend the parliamentary session for at least 24 hours so the House of Commons meets on Wednesday. It would give MPs have the chance to debate the issues arising from the select committee hearings and ensure the prime minister answers the many unanswered questions that he faces.
Unless the government agrees to parliament meeting on Wednesday, MPs cannot do their jobs properly and the prime minister has no chance of sorting out this crisis.
9.31am: Brian Coleman, a Conservative member of the London assembly, has called upon John Yates to resign from the Met. Coleman has just put out this statement.
The commissioner has done the right thing by resigning, and accepting the error of judgement in employing Neil Wallis. [Assistant commissioner] Yates, who has shown that his stewardship of the original hacking enquiry was to put it bluntly, inept, should go, and go now. Sir Paul has set the example to follow. Until Yates has resigned and left Scotland Yard for the last time, the Metropolitan Police cannot hope to move on and restore confidence.
9.28am: Ed Miliband is calling for parliament to sit on Wednesday, according to Sky, so that MPs can discuss the issues raised by tomorrow's culture committee hearing with Rupert and James Murdoch. At the moment tomorrow is meant to be the last sitting day before the summer recess.
9.27am: David Cameron is in South Africa, where he is about to give a press conference with the president, Jacob Zuma.
9.13am: Thank you to all the readers who have been posting links to interesting phone hacking-related articles that the rest of us may have missed. Here's a selection.
• David Carr at the New York Times says the crisis has cast doubt on Rupert Murdoch's approach to burying corporate problems (via apint4me).
'Bury your mistakes,' Rupert Murdoch is fond of saying. But some mistakes don't stay buried, no matter how much money you throw at them.
Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.
• Bloomberg suggests News Corporation would be worth 50% more without the involvement of Rupert Murdoch (via RobSanderson).
• Adweek has video of Michael Wolff, Murdoch's biographer, saying that the chances of there being a 'combustible moment' at tomorrow's select committee hearing are high (via @gryff).
• Johnlifebooks on his blog asks how cosy the relationship was between Rupert Murdoch and Bertie Ahern.
9.02am: Yvette Cooper (left), the shadow home secretary, is doing her best to use Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation to cast doubt on David Cameron's judgment. Here's an extract from the statement that she made late last night.
Ultimately Sir Paul has taken responsibility for a saga which he makes clear in his statement he had no direct involvement with from the beginning, because of the continued speculation around the appointment of Neil Wallis.
It is striking that Sir Paul has taken responsibility and answered questions about the appointment of the Deputy Editor of the News of the World whereas the Prime Minister still refuses to recognise his misjudgement and answer questions on the appointment of the Editor of the News of the World at the time of the initial phone hacking investigation.
On the Today programme this morning she made a slightly different point. According to PoliticsHome, here's how she put it.
It was interesting in what Sir Paul said yesterday that one of the reasons that he felt he clearly could not tell the home secretary, the mayor, downing street, about that contract that he had with Neil Wallis - he couldn't tell them because of the relationship between the prime minister and Andy Coulson. That seems to me to be unprecedented. I cannot think of any case where the police commissioner should not tell the home secretary because he was worried about the prime minister's relationship to somebody involved in the criminal investigation.
(Actually, Cooper is wrong about this. There is a precedent for the Met not being able to discuss operational details of an investigation with Number 10 because of Number 10's relationship with those under investigation - cash-for-honours.)
8.55am: News Corporation shares have fallen to a two-year low in Australia (where markets have been open all day, because of the time difference). My colleague Graeme Wearden has filed a story. Here's an extract.
Shares in News Corp fell as much as 7.6% on Monday on the Australian stock market as traders reacted to the resignation, and subsequent arrest, of Rebekah Brooks, and the resignations of Les Hinton, chief executive of Dow Jones and a key Murdoch ally, and Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police.
In late trading, they were 4.2% lower at AUS$14.14, their lowest level since July 2009. News Corp's Australian shares have now dropped by nearly 20% since the crisis began on 4 July. News Corp's US-listed shares are expected to mirror the Australian losses when trading begins on Wall Street.
8.52am: According to the Press Association, the Labour MP Tom Watson has reportedly written to the Serious Fraud Office asking officers to investigate payments allegedly made by News International to cover up the hacking scandal. The SFO said it will study Watson's letter when it arrives.
8.50am: Kit Malthouse, the deputy mayor of London and chair of the Metropolitan police authority, has just told BBC News that he does not expect John Yates to resign.
8.42am: Boris Johnson (left), the mayor of London, has just been on the Today programme. He said that, in the light of Sir Paul Stephenson's resignation, questions would now be asked about John Yates, the assistant commissioner of the Met, and his relationship with Neil Wallis. According to PoliticsHome, this is how Johnson put it.
The professional standards committee of the Metropolitan police authority is meeting this morning and I'm sure that questions surrounding other officers will be asked. I think John Yates has done a very, very good job on counter terrorism, I think he's been a very, very fine officer in that respect. Clearly there are now questions about his relationship with [Neil] Wallis and all the rest of it, and I'm sure that the MPA is going to be having a look at it.
8.34am: One of the key factors that seems to have led to Sir Paul Stephenson's decision to resign was the row about the Met's decision not to tell ministers that the force had employed Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World, until the end of last week. This is what Stephenson said about it in his resignation statement.
Now let me turn to the reported displeasure of the prime minister and the home secretary of the relationship with Mr Wallis.
The reasons for not having told them are two fold. Firstly, I repeat my earlier comments of having at the time no reason for considering the contractual relationship to be a matter of concern. Unlike Mr Coulson, Mr Wallis had not resigned from News of the World or, to the best of my knowledge been in any way associated with the original phone hacking investigation.
Secondly, once Mr Wallis's name did become associated with Operation Weeting, I did not want to compromise the Prime Minister in any way by revealing or discussing a potential suspect who clearly had a close relationship with Mr Coulson. I am aware of the many political exchanges in relation to Mr Coulson's previous employment — I believe it would have been extraordinarily clumsy of me to have exposed the Prime Minister, or by association the Home Secretary, to any accusation, however unfair, as a consequence of them being in possession of operational information in this regard. Similarly, the Mayor. Because of the individuals involved, their positions and relationships, these were I believe unique circumstances.
Consequently, we informed the chair of the MPA, Mr Malthouse, of the Met's contractual arrangements with Mr Wallis on the morning of the latter's arrest.
There has been some debate about what Stephenson meant by 'compromising' the prime minister. My reading of this is that, by not telling Cameron that Wallis was a suspect, Stephenson thought he was ensuring that Cameron could not be accused of interfering with the investigation.
But, in her interview on the Today programme this morning, Theresa May, the home secretary, said that Stephenson should have told ministers earlier. I've taken her quotes from PoliticsHome.
I've been absolutely clear through out all of this, as has the prime minister, that the Metropolitan Police must investigate all allegations and take it as far as it goes and it is their job to do that, and to do that thoroughly and properly.But, if the Metropolitan Police find at any stage that they have a potential conflict of interest, I think it's right for them to be transparent about that, and that's why I think it would have been right for us to have been told about the issue in relation to Neil Wallis at an earlier stage.
I made that absolutely clear to the commissioner last week that it had concerns about the fact that we had not been told earlier. I think that we should have been.
In her interview May also suggested that Tim Godwin, the deputy commissioner of the Met, would take charge until a new commissioner was appointed.
8.29am: 'The number of dead bodies on the stage is beginning to resemble the final scene of a Shakespearian tragedy' is how the Guardian puts it today. Hard as it is to believe, it is less than two weeks since Nick Davies and Amelia Hill launched their story about Milly Dowler's phone being hacked by the News of the World.
Since then the repercussions of the story have been extraordinary, culminating yesterday in the surprise resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan police. Now there is even speculation that the affair could eventually bring down David Cameron. That seems utterly fanciful - although anyone who claimed to be able to predict with confidence exactly where this will end would be a fool.
For a catch up on what has happened over the last 24 hours, here the summary posted at the end of yesterday's Guardian live blog.
• Met police commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson has resigned. In a parting shot to David Cameron he said the prime minister risked being 'compromised' by his closeness to former News of the World editor Andy Coulson.
• Former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks has been bailed after being arrested and questioned for 12 hours. She is due to return to a police station in October.
• David Cameron, who has been informed of Stephenson's decision, has cancelled plans to visit Rwanda and Sudan during his visit to Africa in order to return earlier to the UK.
• Labour leader Ed Miliband has called for new media ownership rules to limit Rupert Murdoch's 'dangerous' and 'unhealthy' concentration of power.
• An advert placed by News International in Sunday's national newspapers described how the company is 'putting right what's gone wrong'.
Today we'll be hearing more from Theresa May, the home secretary, about the resignation of Stephenson. She has already been giving interviews - I'll summarise them shortly - and she will make a statement in the Commons at 3.30pm.
Ed Miliband, whose reputation as Labour leader has been transformed by his adroit handling of the crisis, is giving a speech that will cover some of the wider implications at 11.30am. And the Commons culture committee, which is preparing for its historic hearing tomorrow, will have to take a decision about whether or not Brooks can appear following her arrest and release on bail yesterday.
But those are just the developments we can anticipate. No doubt, there may be some surprises too. I'll be focusing on phone hacking all day and bringing you all the latest developments.
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