Almost four-and-a-half years and £21m later, police and CPS interest in Operation Weeting is over: phone hacking is history. It is, indeed, instructive history: of gallant reporters unearthing the dirt in their own trade, of stables sluiced, of huge judicial inquiries with uncertain outcomes. But, for a moment at least, let’s leave history to the historians.
There is “insufficient evidence” to go further, beyond the dead News of the World to the still-living Mirror papers, according to the CPS. Two clicks on a phone doesn’t prove enough. Reporters use each others’ phones anyway. And no one, up the chain at Murdoch Mansions, can link what Andy Coulson did to Rupert himself. It’s over in any criminal sense. Let it go.
And while you do, perhaps remember those journalists arrested or questioned under caution – say Richard Wallace, once editor of the Mirror, and Tina Weaver, his wife and editor at the Sunday Mirror. Many fine careers went down the tubes as Weeting ground on. Many journalists have lived under a pall of apprehension. There were victims of phone-hacking, of course. But this stretch of Fleet Street was also a two-way street.
