Phone-hacking scandal: Friday 22 July 2011
• Tom Watson refers James Murdoch to police over testimony
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Norway attacks rolling coverage – Friday 22 July 2011
• Seven killed by bomb in Oslo
• “Several” killed by gunman at youth conference in Utøya
• Gunman arrested in Utøya
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James Murdoch could be imprisoned or fined if the House of Commons finds he told lies to the culture select committee this week, writes Owen Bowcott, the Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent.
Imprisonment or a substantial fine could theoretically be imposed as a punishment by parliament on anyone who told lies in evidence to a select committee.
Misleading MPs is deemed to amount to a “contempt of the house” in the same way that refusing to answer a summons to appear before a committee is reported to the Commons. The offender could then be summoned to the bar of the House.
The problem is that the sanctions – involving fine or imprisonment – to enforce any punishment are constitutionally somewhat rusty. Vernon Bogdanor, the former professor of government at Oxford University, has suggested they may have fallen into “desuetude” (disuse).
The House of Commons is not believed to have fined anybody since 1666 and has not “committed anyone to custody”, apart from temporarily detaining them, since the 19th century.
11.39am: Paul Owen writes: Here is the key part of James Murdoch’s testimony to the culture committee on Tuesday, when he said he was not aware of the so-called “for Neville” email that would have blown a hole in News International’s defence that hacking was limited to one “rogue reporter”.
Tom Watson: James—sorry, if I may call you James, to differentiate—when you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the full Neville e-mail, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?
James Murdoch: No, I was not aware of that at the time.
Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World until it shut two weeks ago, and Tom Crone, the paper’s former head of legal affairs, said in their statement last night that “we did inform him of the ‘for Neville’ email” – accusing Murdoch of misleading the select committee.
John Whittingdale, the chairman of the culture committee, said yesterday that the “for Neville” email “was seen as one of the few available pieces of evidence showing that this activity was not confined just to Clive Goodman”, the only journalist prosecuted (and jailed) so far for phone hacking at the News of the World. The email contained a voicemail transcript marked “for Neville”, assumed to be Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World’s chief reporter.
The email is believed to have been critical in News International’s decision to pay Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, so large a sum as £700,000 in out-of-court settlement after he threatened to sue the paper.
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