Let’s put Hyphen-Howe and the CPS in the dock

THANK God for the jury system. Four Sun journalists have been acquitted at the Old Bailey of a series of trumped-up, politically motivated charges which should never have been brought to court.

even the judge admitted he found it difficult to explain what this extraordinary trial was all about.

I could have told him in a nutshell. This was a show trial, designed to remind us who runs Britain and demonstrate that they will resort to any measure to crush dissent. And that includes criminalising our Free Press.

The Political establishment, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police wanted to teach these uppity red Top hacks a lesson the rest of Fleet Street would never forget.

If they’d had their way the defendants would all have been found guilty and been given long prison terms.

Much to the establishment’s dismay, the jury decided that all four journalists were simply doing their job — which is to disclose inconvenient truths the authorities would rather keep secret.

Their alleged ‘crime’ was to pay public officials for information, something which the jury decided papers were entitled to do in order to expose wrongdoing.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the CPS and the police were making up the law as they went along, so desperate were they to pin something on the red Top Press. In the opinion of any number of lawyers, what the Sun Four were charged with isn’t even a crime.

The Old Bill pay informants, so why shouldn’t newspapers? There was a time when we were all on the same side and shared a common interest in pursuing truth and justice.

Not any more. The careerist Commissioner of the Met, Bernard Hyphen-Howe, acts as if the police are the paramilitary wing of the political class and the Press are the enemy. Under his command, there have been more detectives trying to convict journalists than investigating major crimes such as murder and terrorism.

This trial had nothing to do with industrial-scale phone-hacking by some newspapers, which we all found abhorrent and agreed the guilty must be punished.

No, this was part of the concerted campaign to control the flow of information and bring the Press to heel. The Gestapo tactics have been a monstrous abuse of police powers. Journalists have been dragged from their beds at dawn, their homes ransacked, their families intimidated.

Why did the cops who searched the home of former Sun deputy editor Fergus Shanahan feel it necessary to sift through his daughters’ knicker drawers?

Why did they confiscate intimate love letters and confidential bank statements? What did Plod expect to find: a hand-written confession hidden in a wardrobe?

Shanahan’s alleged ‘crime’ was said to have occurred a decade earlier when he signed the expenses of fellow defendant John Kay, who was accused of paying a contact at the Ministry of Defence for information the public had every right to know.

Did they ever get round to trawling through the laptops they seized? None of the alleged ‘evidence’ from forensic searches of any of the four journalists’ homes was ever produced in court.

UNDer Hyphen-Howe, abusing police powers has become standard practice in certain cases. It isn’t just the ‘ arrest-first-look- for- evidence- later’ mentality, which we’ve seen employed not just against journalists but also celebrities falsely accused of ‘historic’ sex abuse.

There has also been the outrageous extension of police bail, which left suspects such as Shanahan and his colleagues in legal limbo for three-and-a-half years — their professional and private lives in tatters.

And a few weeks ago it was revealed that the police had been deliberately misusing anti-terror laws to hack into journalists’ mobile phones in an attempt to discover the identities of their sources.

All this at a time when the Met was zealously investigating reporters suspected of phonehacking. You couldn’t make it up.

Since 2011, a hundred journalists have been arrested or interviewed under caution.

Fourteen have now been cleared of all charges, 13 have been convicted (mainly in connection with phonehacking), with four cases ending in short jail terms. Others are either facing retrial or haven’t yet been told whether they will be charged.

So far the bill to taxpayers stands at £33 million — money which could more profitably be spent pursuing real criminals. In the wake of the latest Not Guilty verdict, several sensible newspapers, including this one, are demanding that this witchhunt is wound up immediately.

The curtain on this grotesque circus can’t come down soon enough for me. I’ve been writing about it since the beginning. As far as I’m concerned, though, calling a halt to the prosecutions doesn’t go nearly far enough.

I’d completely understand if the Sun Four decide to put their ordeal behind them and never want to see another lawyer in their lives. But they should seriously consider instructing their legal teams to sue the police and the CPS for wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution.

At the very least there should be a full public or parliamentary inquiry into this wicked assault on our Free Press.

If any other group had been singled out for such intolerable, heavy-handed persecution there would have been howls of outrage from Left-wing MPs, civil liberties groups and the BBC.

They’ve never met a miscarriage of justice they couldn’t exploit, from the Birmingham Six to the Guildford Four. At one stage, I believe the Guardian was even calling for the release of the Dave Clark Five.

All those ‘ British residents’ allegedly wrongfully accused of terrorism by the Americans are hosed down with compensation by British taxpayers — even when they were actually resident in Afghanistan or Pakistan when they were arrested.

While the Sun Four don’t fall into that category, they have been horribly mistreated by the State. Surely, they too should be entitled to some retribution.

Those responsible for their ordeal must be called to account for their actions. Hyphen-Howe should be forced publicly to explain why he thinks it’s reasonable to treat middle-aged journalists like terrorists or armed robbers. And why it is necessary to ransack their homes and intimidate their families.

The Met Commissioner and the CPS should also explain why the hell it has taken three-and-a-half years to bring people to court?

Do they think securing four short jail sentences for phone-hacking justifies spending £33 million of taxpayers’ money?

The former head of the CPS, Keir Starmer, should be asked if he came under any outside political pressure to bring prosecutions against Sun journalists.

STArMer has always been a prominent Labour supporter and has now been parachuted into a safe seat. And it is well known that senior Labour figures vowed revenge on The Sun after it switched support to the Tories at the last election.

I am not suggesting that Starmer was anything other than scrupulously impartial.

But since he now says he can’t recall the evidence which led to these high-profile prosecutions, it is vital we are told precisely why the decision to charge the four men was taken.

Legitimate questions such as these must be asked because we, the paying public, have an inalienable right to know what is being done in our name.

After all, if we can have the Leveson Inquiry into the Press, why not a judge-led inquiry into the ‘Culture, Practices and ethics’ of the Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service?

The problem might be finding a suitable judge to preside. Look at the trouble they had finding someone to sit on the Paedos In High Places inquiry. Maybe we should ask a journalist to chair it.

The truth, sadly, is that it’s never going to happen because the arrogant, self-serving, self-selecting elite who now run this country are obsessed primarily with self-preservation.

Only last week, Jeremy Heywood, Sir Cover-Up as he is dubbed, revealed plans to prevent civil servants talking to the Press.

The authorities want to silence whistle-blowers and shackle our Free Press, by law if they have to. That’s what the vindictive persecution of the Sun Four was really all about.

Thank God for the jury system. But if juries keep delivering the ‘wrong’ verdict in cases like this, no doubt they’ll try to get rid of them, too.