Phone hacking: Met police fail in attempt to halt solicitor's libel action Scotland Yard could face embarrassing trial in case launched by lawyer who claims email accused him of lying to Parliament
Share4 James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Thursday 31 March 2011 17.15 BST Article history
The high court ruling means Scotland Yard could face an embarrassing trial. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA
A high court judge has rejected an attempt by the Metropolitan police to halt a libel action brought by a solicitor who acts for several alleged victims of phone hacking by the News of the World.
The ruling by Mr Justice Tugendhat means Scotland Yard could face a potentially embarrassing trial.
Mark Lewis, a consultant to Taylor Hampton solicitors, is suing the Met over an email it sent to the Press Complaints Commission in November 2009.
The email, sent by a lawyer at Scotland Yard in response to a request from the PCC, said that Lewis had "wrongly quoted" a police officer, Mark Maberly, in evidence given by Lewis to a committee of MPs. Lewis alleges that the email in effect accuses him of lying to Parliament.
Lewis had previously told the Commons culture, media & sport select committee in September 2009 that a police officer, Mark Maberly, had told him that "there was evidence about ... something like 6,000 people were involved [in phone hacking]".
The disputed conversation between Lewis and Maberly took place at the time of a court case involving Gordon Taylor, one of Lewis's clients, who successfully took legal action against the News of the World after it admitted Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator working on its behalf, hacked into his mobile phone.
The legal battle goes to the heart of the phone-hacking affair because it suggests that the Metropolitan police held evidence which suggested thousands of public figures had been targeted by Mulcaire but failed to act on it.
A 2006 investigation into phone hacking resulted in the convictions of Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, a former royal editor at the News of the World, but senior Scotland Yard figures insisted there was nothing to suggest more than a small number of people had their phones hacked.
Lewis's action also threatens to further embarrass the PCC chair, Baroness Buscombe, who has made a statement in open court and paid £20,000 in damages to settle his libel claim.
Lewis began action against the Met, the PCC and Buscombe in April 2010, five months after the PCC chair delivered a speech in which she alluded to the email from the Met, telling an audience of newspaper editors Scotland Yard had confirmed to the PCC that Maberly had been "wrongly quoted".
Rejecting the Met's application for the case to be struck out, Tugendhat said in his ruling that, although the email didn't mention Lewis by name, "The words complained of as against the MPS are capable of bearing the meaning attributed to them [by Lewis]."
Tugendhat also said in his ruling he would allow Lewis to amend his claim to include comments Buscombe made in an Radio 4 interview in February in which she said: "I made a statement which I thought was absolutely the right thing to do at the time ... we don't know yet whether it's wrong. We have no idea."
Lewis said today: "Buscombe was calling me a liar. I think now people are starting to think I might have been the one who is telling the truth."
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