purejuice

Part of the hair-raising pleasure of observing British politics is the skill with which rhetoric -- learned at the Oxford and Cambridge debating societies, which are the launch pad for careers in politics -- is deployed.

There's a classic name for this one, lobbed by Cameron, which only a Brit would know, having read it in the original Greek how-to by silver-tongued Demosthenes. Like the double-half-hitch-Tongue-Fu-Phi-Epsilon-whammy.

Cameron asserted this in his speech to Parliament today, and the salient bit which raised the hair on my arms was how he reframed what could easily be seen as a coverup -- his chief of staff's refusal to be briefed on hacking and/or his employee, Coulson -- as the right and proper thing to do.

No 10 has now published the full email exchange between my chief of Staff and John Yates and it shows my staff behaved entirely properly.

Ed Llewellyn’s reply to the police made clear that it would be not be appropriate to give me or my staff any privileged briefing.

The reply that he sent was cleared in advance by my Permanent Secretary, Jeremy Heywood.

Just imagine, Mr Speaker, if they had done the opposite and asked for, or acquiesced in receiving privileged information – even if there was no intention to use it.

There would have been quite justified outrage.

To risk any perception that No 10 was seeking to influence a sensitive police investigation in any way would have been completely wrong.

Mr Yates and Sir Paul both backed this judgment in their evidence yesterday.
http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/statement-on-phone-hacking/

I am almost certain that Yates and Sir Paul said nothing of the kind. And I'm certain my fiancé is on the case, since parsing who is lying seems to be his mandate at this point.

On the other hand, a reasonably trustworthy straight arrow leftish pundit says:
In another easily-missed aside, Cameron argued that Llewelyn was guiding the police towards not acting improperly.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/steve-richards/

It was by no means easily missed but stood out as some sort of pixelated and vibrating version of another reality.

I wonder what it does mean?

...cripples the inquiry by adding the BBC, one of Murdoch's betes noire, to the list of press suspects to be investigated. The Guardian and the Independent, who have lead the phone hacking inquiry, are also to be added to the list of media to be investigated by the judicial inquiry Cameron himself set up two weeks ago to contain the phone hacking scandal.

"And not just at NI but also ... the BBC, the Independent and the Guardian. This is a cathartic moment to sort it out and put it on a proper footing."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/20/phone-hacking-commons-debate-verdict

This also makes the inquiry untenable in terms of getting it done with dispatch.

The inquiry has been divided into two parts, with the investigation into hacking allegations to start only after criminal allegations have been settled.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/20/cameron-media-regulation-leveson-inquiry-bbc

In other news of tiny nuggets that are likely flashpoints, the BBC reports that Murdoch has given his lawyers, Harbottle and Lewis, permission to respond to police and judicial inquiries. Harbottle are the people who sat on incriminating hack/bribery emails for years. Harbottle screamed bloody murder Tuesday after the Murdochs' testimony that Harbottle's response to inquiry was limited by attorney-client privilege. In a statement, Harbottle implied that if NI released them from the confidentiality privilege, the story would be very different from the Murdochs' testimony. At issue was the Murdochs' insistence that in every case of malfeasance, they were relying on the advice of counsel -- among other things, on the defense that the hacking was confined to one rogue reporter and that nothing else, including police bribery, apparently, had gone down.

Along with Scotland Yard and its allegations against Cameron, I think Harbottle will be the source of serious allegations against the Murdochs.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8651063/Phone-hacking-News-International-lifts-gagging-order-imposed-on-its-lawyers.html

I'm hoping this is the beginning of the holy shit story.

One front of phone hacking fallout is the prime minister's having hired one of the alleged NotW hackers as communications director, first for the Conservative Party and then as the news director for the Prime Minister.

The opposition leader Miliband and others are trying to make something out of this, which is a serious error of judgment on the part of Cameron, who has stubbornly defended both Coulson, the editor in question, and his decision to hire him.

What is emerging is that Cameron's enemies -- now, most formidably, Scotland Yard itself -- are trying to make stick is the fury of the Scotland Yard executives, who, using a defense similar to Murdoch and Brooks -- we're not the only dirty dogs in this fiasco -- are disclosing details of their relation with the prime minister in their testimony before Parliament.

Their explicitly expressed anger is that if their two senior officers, Stephenson and Yates, the two senior police officers in Britain, had to resign because they hired an NotW executive (Wallis), why should the Prime Minister, who hired an even skankier NotW executive (Coulson), not resign also?

What both Stephenson, who resigned on Sunday, and Yates, ditto, told Parliament on Monday is that they both warned the prime minister's chief of staff about phone hacking matters, and the chief of staff asked them explicitly not to contaminate the prime minister with such information.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/19/neil-wallis-tories-crisis-cameron?INTCMP=SRCH

The prime minister -- and this is the very nice thing about making a cop your enemy -- was forced to release the text of emails between Yates and the chief of staff indicating the sort of menacing euphemisms these people used with each other.
( Cut for the quote )

Cameron is also accused of innappropriate discussion of the BSkyB satellite TV takeover with the Murdochs.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/20/bskyb-david-cameron-news-international

And, quite murkily, but potentially most damaging, in Parliament today, an MP has alleged that a government official was hacked during Coulson's tenure as director of the Cameron government media service.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/20/mandarin-phone-hacked-coulson-downing

Finally, I forgot who, is trying to make something out of the fact that Coulson, while government news media director, consulted with his former NotW colleague, Wallis, who was also on retainer at Scotland Yard. If Wallis' two jobs overlapped, and/or if Scotland Yard info was tendered by Wallis, or vice versa 10 Downing Street info by Coulson, this would be potentially serious.

I think if Cameron's got Scotland Yard pissed off, and its well-liked former assistant commissioner Yates is encouraging his former colleagues to release confidential information after his abrupt resignation from the force, that the prime minister is in big trouble. Leaks from Scotland Yard will bring him down; I suspect the Mandarin's phone hacked story brought to bear in Parliament today is a leak from Scotland Yard.

Do they always get their man?

Jonathan May-Bowles talks to the BBC:

These are the lawyers who sat on the incriminating stash of NotW e-mails (I believe) for four years. Rupe and James frequently testified today that they relied on the advice of counsel to assert that the investigation was over and there was no further "emerging evidence". Harbottle and Lewis quickly issued this denial:

Harbottle & Lewis said in a statement issued this evening:

News International representatives referred to our advice in their statements today before the Parliamentary Select Committee, both as a result of questioning and on their own account.

We asked News International to release us from our professional duties of confidentiality in order that we could respond to any inaccurate statements or contentions and to explain events in 2007.

News International declined that request, and so we are still unable to respond in any detail as to our advice or the scope of our instructions in 2007, which is a matter of great regret.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/jul/19/rebekah-brooks-mps

Rebekah Brooks, the flame-haired editrix, basically said she was shocked, shocked to discover her managing editor was paying detectives to hack phones.

I didn't catch her testimony, only the parting shot, in which she asked the committee to invite her back when the charges against her have been settled. This sounds like extortion to me.
Brooks is asked if she has anything to add.

She wants to make a request to the committee that, when she is free from the legal constraints that she says she is under today, they will invite her back to answer "in a more fulsome way".

The answer from committee chairman John Whittingdale is yes. Her appearance in front of the committee is over now.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/19/rebekah-brooks-phone-hacking-payments

Again, why would a reponsible executive promote to the highest reaches of the company someone who claims not to know what the managing editor of her paper was doing, and threatens to expose others the minute she has stopped defending herself against hacking and police bribery charges, implying she is singing like a bird to the police?

I only caught the last and most xciting part of ITN's live stream of the Murdoch hearings in the House of Commons. It much amuses me as you will have guessed, to have the freedom to pit my nose for news against the others, and so, before I go and read the extensive live blog transcripts at the Guardian, I am going to lay down my impressions.

I was impressed by James' demeanor. He acts forthright very well. His stepping in to clarify the bumptious and yet out-of-it remarks of the Wendinator's shar-pei, his honorable father, the artist formerly known as Rupert Murdoch, tells at least half of the tale. (You were wondering why News Corp. is looking into China as its next venue? Now you know.)

What I thought was monstrous was how James, who is clearly the only compos mentis person present, kept referring to a sewage of events as "emerging evidence", as if he were a cop investigating something far away for which he bore absolutely no responsibility. I do think it's the only way he could have played it. But it was bad.

Mr. and Mrs. Trix

The flame-haired editrix has a husband, her second.

(The first is an actor famous mainly for being punched out by the flame-haired editrix, when he is not acting a "hard man" in the long-running lowbrow Britsoap, East Enders).

Said husband #2, who sounds like a bookie, tried to claim a bag containing a computer, a telephone, and other papers which had been found in a garbage can in a parking lot near the Trixes' London house.

The security guard wouldn't turn it over and called the police.

Mr. Trix says the computer is his, and that by no stretch of the imagination did he bin the bag, he left the bag with a friend, who just dropped the bag off in the parking lot for Mr. Trix to pick up. Nuthin to do with nuthin, says Mr. Trix' own PR person.

This just gets better and better.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/18/mystery-bag-bin-rebekah-brooks

The officer in charge during the Menezes shooting will take the place of assistant commissioner Yates, who has resigned in the phone hacking scandal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/18/john-yates-met-police-resigns-quits