#Hackgate: Chris Bryant . Questions that need answers.

Rebekah Brooks's resignation has failed to answer critical questions about News Corp under the Murdochs. Photograph: Barry Batchelor/PA

 

Nobody can seriously doubt that Rebekah Brooks was right to resign. Indeed she should have done so some time ago, if only because Milly Dowler's phone was hacked on behalf of the News of the World when she was its editor. Her line last week that it was "inconceivable" that she would know about this simply doesn't wash. Her paper actually referred to one of the messages on Milly Dowler's phone in a story they ran at the time, which makes all the News of the World's noble campaigns against child abuse seem like so much cynical hypocrisy.

It is also "inconceivable" that she didn't know what was going on in her paper. Large sums of money were being paid to the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. What did she think they were getting in return? And how did she think the scoops she was running had been sourced? Many of them were potentially actionable. Surely she checked? If she did know, she's been lying all this time – and if she didn't she's been culpably negligent.

It is also "inconceivable" that she had no inkling of the payment of police officers. In 2003 she actually admitted that the newspaper had paid them for information, which is straightforward bribery. This April, though, she wrote to the home affairs committee that she had never meant to suggest she actually knew of any specific examples. And yet now we learn she has handed over information to Operation Weeting that suggests another senior executive did indeed know about such payments. Frankly, I think she briefly told the truth in 2003.

That's not the only pernicious aspect of Brooks's influence. With the news yesterday that Neil Wallis walked out of News International and into the Met and Andy Hayman walked out of the Met into News International it is difficult not to conclude that NI under Brooks had managed to get its tentacles into every nook and cranny of the British state and turned the Met into a partly owned subsidiary.

In all this the Murdochs, James and Rupert, have yet again shown their arrogance. First they tried a hush-money strategy, paying the best part of £1m apiece to Max Clifford and Gordon Taylor in exchange for confidentiality clauses, in the hope that none of what had gone on at the paper would come out. Next, once the Met had been forced to reopen the investigation in January this year, came the plimsoll line strategy, drawing a line round the ship and chucking people overboard as the water rose. First it was a few junior journalists. Then it was Coulson and finally the News of the World itself, all so as to make sure the water didn't gather round the ankles of Brooks and James Murdoch. That meant the people working in the boiler room, many of them thoroughly decent journalists, carried the can for those at the helm. But still protecting Brooks remained Rupert's sole "priority".

So many questions remain. Was the News Corporation board notified of the payments to Clifford and Taylor? When did Brooks and James Murdoch know that the argument that this was not the work of a sole rogue reporter was completely untenable? And most importantly, has News Corporation, in its complete managerial ineptitude and moral turpitude, not proven itself wholly unsuitable to own any share of a British media company?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/15/rebekah-brooks-resigned-chris-bryant?CMP=twt_gu