Radio 4’s Today programme broadcast a short item this morning about the reverses suffered by the Metropolitan police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) over Operation Elveden.
(For new readers, that’s the investigation of journalists for making payments to public officials who leaked information to them).
Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s associate editor and columnist, was interviewed and said Elveden was in “total chaos” following two key events: the Lord Chief Justice’s quashing of the conviction of a former News of the World journalist whose identity we cannot yet reveal; and a jury’s acquittal of four Sun journalists.
The CPS has since decided it isn’t in the public interest to retry the NoW journalist and a co-defendant. But it does think it right to stage a retrial of the journalist’s source, a prison officer.
Meanwhile, other Elveden trials have been postponed while the CPS conducts a “global review” of all the cases. As reported on Media Guardian by Lisa O’Carroll, the CPS must make up its mind by 24 April.
No wonder Kavanagh told his Today interviewer that Elveden is a fiasco (which, incidentally, he first said more than three years ago).
It has also been a very expensive fiasco, with costs running at something approaching £15m reputedly.
The central point at issue here is whether the payments were or were not illegal. Was the law under which journalists and their sources have been charged - itself unknown to those journalists - explicit enough to warrant prosecutions?
The implication of the Lord Chief Justice’s ruling is that even an experienced judge made a hash of trying to explain it to jurors.
So I agree with Kavanagh. It is a fiasco. But it is one with profound press freedom implications. We need a clear, simple, comprehensive law on this matter. And any such a law crucially requires, as do many other laws, a public interest defence.
NB: The 8 o’clock news bulletin on Today made a slip, which went uncorrected despite my phone calls to the BBC, by saying that journalists are in jail for Elveden offences. They are not, but many of their sources are.
