Crimewatch girl: NOW harassment campaign wrecked my marriage
FORMER Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames broke down in tears at the Leveson inquiry yesterday as she blamed a campaign of surveillance and harassment by the News of the World for the collapse of her marriage.
She said it began after her then husband, Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook, appeared alongside her on the BBC1 show in 2002 to appeal for fresh information about a notorious murder of a private investigator.
Within days, DCS Cook, a senior investigator on the inquiry, found the family home was being watched by two vans leased to the News of the World.
Miss Hames told the inquiry the paper was in collusion with suspects in the murder case, and set out to ‘intimidate us and so attempt to subvert the investigation’.
In response to a request by the Metropolitan police to explain the surveillance, the paper’s then editor, Rebekah Brooks, said it was investigating suspicions Miss Hames and Mr Cook were having an affair.
But Miss Hames told the inquiry into press standards that Mrs Brooks’s explanation was ‘absolutely pathetic’, given that it was common knowledge the couple had been married for several years and had two children.
Miss Hames, herself a former Scotland Yard officer, believed her family’s privacy had been invaded because the now-defunct tabloid had ‘close links’ to suspects in the 1987 murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan.
‘I think any reasonable person would find it difficult not to feel that in some way there was some collusion between people at the NOW and the people who were suspected of committing the murder of Daniel Morgan,’ she said.
In May 2011, Scotland Yard officers informed Miss Hames her details had been found in the notebooks of Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator working for the NOW.
The information included her payroll and police warrant numbers, her home address and mobile phone number. She said she was ‘horrified’ because ‘ this information could only have come from one place, my MPS ( Metropolitan Police Service) file’.
Guardian journalist Nick Davies earlier told the inquiry there had been an unwelcome crackdown on police talking to the Press since the hacking scandal broke.
He said two police officers had even been threatened with up to 18 months in jail recently for speaking to journalists without permission. He believed the arrests of the officers were a ‘worrying sign’ of a ‘tightening up’ of contact between police and the media, adding he was not aware of any suggestion any payment was involved.
‘We have to defend unauthorised contact,’ he said. ‘Without unauthorised contact, the Metropolitan Police would have been allowed to carry on misleading press, public and Parliament about the phonehacking scandal.’