Yard ‘tipped off Rebekah about hacking in 2006’

SCOTLAND Yard tipped off Rebekah Brooks as early as 2006 about the full extent of phone-hacking at the News of the World, the Leveson inquiry heard.

Police told Mrs Brooks, then editor of The Sun, they were confident that private detective Glenn Mulcaire and the Sunday newspaper’s royal editor Clive Goodman were ‘bang to rights’.

Detectives had established that Mulcaire – working solely for the News of the World – had hacked more than 100 victims’ phones and had been paid more than £1million by News International. The revelations were con- tained in an internal News of the World email read out at the Leveson inquiry yesterday.

The damning email undermines News International’s claims – which they were still clinging to until 2010 – that phone-hacking was not a widespread problem at the paper but the work of Mulcaire and Goodman alone.

It also exposed the cosy relationship between the Metropolitan Police and Rupert Murdoch’s News International group.

The email, headed ‘strictly private and confidential’, was sent on September 15, 2006, by Tom Crone, the Now’s legal manager, to the paper’s then editor Andy Coulson. This was after Mulcaire and Goodman had been arrested, but before their conviction.

Mr Crone wrote: ‘Here is what Rebekah told me about info relayed to her by the cops.

‘They suggested that they were not widening the case to include other NOW people, but would do so if they got direct evidence, say NOW journos directly accessing the voicemails (this is what did for Clive).’

The email also noted: ‘The only payment records they found were from News International, ie the NOW retainer and other invoices, they said that over the period they looked at (going way back) there seemed to be over £1million of payments.’ Mr Crone’s message concluded: ‘They’re going to contact RW (Rebekah Wade, Mrs Brooks’s maiden name) today to see if she wishes to take it further.’

Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested on August 8, 2006. On November 29 that year they pleaded guilty to intercepting voicemail messages left on royal aides’ phones and were jailed on January 26, 2007.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission said last week it was investigating a senior Yard officer for allegedly inappropriately passing information about the 2006 phone-hacking inquiry to a News International executive.