Tom Newton Dunn - Pants On Fire

The Sun’s non-bullying political editor Tom Newton Dunn is in combative form in today’s paper, as the headline proclaims “As court rules Met officers acted illegally in Plebgate probe … We share this victory with brave source”. The supporting articles are unequivocal: “METROPOLITAN Police detectives acted illegally by seizing a Sun journalist’s phone records in a bid to expose a confidential source, a court has ruled”. There was more.

That's right Tom, you LOST three out of your four challenges

“In a landmark legal ruling, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal today found reporter Craig Woodhouse’s phone bills should not have been demanded during the investigation to find out who leaked the Plebgate row … It also ruled that the force violated the human rights of two other Sun journalists - Anthony France and Tom Newton Dunn - as well as The Sun Newspaper by using anti-terror laws to seize their mobile and landline bills too”.

Readers are told “They … seized GPRS location data that allowed our previous movements to be carefully tracked … In other words, they had free rein to pore over secret conversations we had with highly confidential sources, as well as where we may have met them, on all manner of sensitive and embarrassing stories, not just Plebgate”. Newton Dunn talks of “the Met’s own phone hacking”. And that is where he sells the pass.

The applications by the Met under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) were for phone records, not actual calls or voice messages. The ones who hacked phones, and on an industrial scale, were Newton Dunn’s fellow Murdoch hacks at the now-defunct Screws. And that was definitely illegal - as several of them went to jail.

It gets worse: the Sun, the paper that has spent years slagging off the Human Rights Act (HRA), scored its only unequivocal victory in this case by citing … the same HRA it had so stridently campaigned to abolish. You really couldn’t make it up.

And worst of all, the judgment handed down in this case does not support the Sun’s headlines. For starters, there were four Authorisations made under RIPA. So while paragraph 128 of the judgment tells “The Third Authorisation was not, under s 22 of RIPA, necessary nor proportionate to the legitimate aim which it pursued. There was thus an infringement of the Convention rights of the Fourth Complainant [Woodhouse], in that the interference with Article 10 rights was not in accordance with the law”, that is not all.

Paragraph 130 of the judgment states “Applying s 6 of the HRA we decide that the Respondent [Met Police] did not act unlawfully in making the First, Second and Fourth Authorisations under s 22 of RIPA”. The other three Authorisations were not illegal.

And here is paragraph 131: “The Metropolitan Police cannot be criticised for its decision to use the power granted under s 22 of RIPA in aid of the investigation into a serious criminal offence affecting public confidence in the police. The discovery of serious misconduct by a number of police officers in the DPG shows that it was entirely right to pursue the Operation Alice investigation very thoroughly. We have held that the use of the s 22 power in this investigation was indeed both necessary and proportionate in respect of three out of the four authorisations challenged”.

So that’s a 25% success rate for the Sun, and it then had to rely on the Human Rights Act, which its brave and principled hacks want to scrap. What you will not read in the Sun.