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Leveson inquiry: Martin Clarke, Russell Middleton, Brendan Gilmour – live Leveson inquiry: Martin Clarke, Russell Middleton, Brendan Gilmour appear
(40 minutes later)
3.53pm: Sherborne says it is "not good enough" for journalists and editors to say that private investigators were mainly used to obtain contact information quickly. Please note that comments are switched off for legal reasons.
He alleges that the information laid bare by Operation Motorman could not wholly have been obtained legitimately. 9.52am: Welcome to the Leveson inquiry live blog.
Sherborne does not believe this illicit trade of information by newspapers is historic. Newspapers continued to use the private investigator Steve Whittamore even after his office was raided and he was convicted, he says. Today the inquiry will hear from Martin Clarke, publisher of the Daily Mail's website, Mail Online.
3.51pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims at the inquiry, is back on his feet to make an application with reference to evidence heard earlier today by police detective Brendan Gilmour. Clarke joined the Daily Mail in 1987 before editing the Scotsman, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail. He took over MailOnline in 2006, when the website barely existed, and made it the most popular English-language newspaper website in the world by 2011.
He is talking about Operation Motorman and the illicit trade in private information by newspapers. He has a reputation for terrifying his subordinates – described as a composite of Kelvin MacKenzie, Piers Morgan and his editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre – but also known for his news judgement.
He tells the inquiry that this was widespread in Fleet Street and is a "similarly dark art to hacking". The inquiry will also hear from DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on the Scotland Yard's Operation Glade investigation into police corruption, and Russell Middleton, temporary assistant chief constable of Devon & Cornwall police. Gilmour will give evidence in private, but his voice will be broadcast on the inquiry website.
3.45pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims at the inquiry, is back on his feet to make an application with reference to evidence heard earlier today by police detective Brendan Gilmour. 10.04am: The inquiry has started.
3.45pm: Barr reads a number of witness statements into the inquiry, including evidence from the Guardian journalist Nick Davies, the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, the author JK Rowling and the MP Damian Green. Lord Justice Leveson begins by referring to the open letter sent to the inquiry yesterday by pressure groups including Full Fact, English PEN and Index on Censorship.
3.43pm: Kath Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian, has just tweeted: These groups have urged the inquiry to reverse its decision to allow several government ministers early access to confidential documents by core participants.
'You've been very indulgent,' Mail Online editor Martin Clarke says to Lord Justice Leveson. 'Not sure about that,' he replies #leveson Leveson is not happy that this letter was publicised before he was given the chance to deal with it.
— Katharine Viner (@KathViner) May 9, 2012 10.08am: Leveson says he expects those government ministers who have been granted core participant status will restrict their confidentiality circle to the "minimum number necessary".
3.43pm: Clarke has now completed his evidence. The Guardian's Lisa O'Carroll has just tweeted:
3.42pm: Barr asks Clarke about a Mail Online story published today about an actor in The Only Way is Essex. #leveson just paused in his delivery as Hugh Grant walked into court 73!
He says that photographs in the article were taken with consent. "I will stake a year's salary on it," he adds. — lisa o'carroll (@lisaocarroll) May 9, 2012
"There's nothing wrong with showbiz. It's not a dirty word," Clarke says. "The only journalism that is truly free is profitable journalism … and I do that by building a website that people are interested in, and that includes showbiz." 10.15am: Here is a link to the Guardian story from yesterday about pressure groups wanting to block government special advisers from seeing witness statements.
3.37pm: Barr asks Clarke about the Amanda Knox verdict when Mail Online published a full, false version of the story, along with other news websites. 10.18am: Leveson says the groups have "fundamentally misunderstood" the purpose of redaction within the Inquiries Act.
Clarke says the story was a combination of "human error and overzealousness". He adds that redactions sought by government ministers will be treated in the same way as redactions sought by other core participants.
"The thing that made me angriest was that there was no need for it," he adds, adding that Mail Online did not need to publish a story so soon. He says "firm advice" was issued and an internal inquiry undertaken. Leveson says he has not ruled out publicising attempts to make redactions, but he expects this to be extremely rare.
3.29pm: Martin Clarke's witness statement has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website. 10.21am: David Barr, counsel to the inquiry, is up. He introduces a witness statement from the Met police about the interception of Milly Dowler's voicemails.
3.27pm: Clarke says he does not believe the internet should be regulated any more than you need "a policeman in the corner of every pub". Leveson says that the circumstances surrounding the Dowler deletions is important background to the inquiry. He adds that the precise detail of "the extent that there was such interference is probably not going to inform my overall view of the culture, practices and ethics of the press".
He describes the internet as a "democratising agent, allowing everyone to have a voice". He is happy that this evidence be read because he says it is part of the overall picture, but its significance should not be misunderstood.
"People have a freedom of expression and we have to take the good with the bad," Clarke adds. 10.23am: Neil Garnham QC, counsel for the Met police, is reading a witness statement from DCI John MacDonald.
3.21pm: Clarke is asked about the PCC. Garnham says Scotland Yard has carried out an "hour by hour" reconstruction of events from the Dowler investigation.
He does not believe it is "as broken" as other witnesses to the inquiry have made out. Clarke goes on to tie the phone hacking issue to the PCC, before Leveson interjects. Garnham says there is evidence to support the fact that Dowler's voicemails were intercepted.
"Mr Clarke, you're becoming an advocate," he warns, before saying that phone hacking was the "straw that broke that particular camel's back" but the PCC was labouring under other issues. 10.29am: Garnham, for the Met police, is reading timings from Surrey police's family liaison officer's notes from the period.
3.18pm: How far is the state willing to go to curtail private individuals' freedom of speech, asks Clarke. He tells the inquiry there is no evidence to support the suggestion any journalist attempted to hack Dowler's phone before 26 March 2002.
He believes "the great harms" – of libel, of derailing a trial, etc – are catered for under current law. A mobile phone operator told the Met police that voicemails would automatically be purged from Dowler's phone if they were more than 72 hours old.
Clarke adds: "I'm just cautioning that there is a growing part of the media that isn't subject to that, and we should be seen in that context." 10.31am: Milly Dowler last called her own voicemail on 20 March just after 5pm, says Garnham.
3.15pm: Clarke says he is not arguing for looser regulation, but says it would be "very unpalatable" to be placed under "an even heavier" burden "when the rest of the internet is not placed under any regulation". He tells the inquiry that the Met police believes there was an automatic deletion of individual voicemails once 72 hours had been reached.
3.11pm: Clarke says he does not believe Twitter is "just people chattering in a pub". "There needs to be an awareness that this explanation is from detectives from Operation Weeting," he says.
He adds: "It's like giving everyone their own private radio station." A voicemail platform migration occurred on 26 March 2002 and would have had the effect of resetting Milly Dowler's voicemail to an automated generic message. However, this occurred after 24 March when Mrs Dowler was able to leave a message on Milly's phone.
Barr asks whether Clarke believes that only online publishers that make money should be regulated. 10.35am: Garnham, for the Met police, refers to a voicemail saved on 26 March 2002, meaning someone may have listened to that message after she had disappeared.
Clarke says no "because then the Guardian wouldn't be regulated because they make no money". 10.38am: On 26 March there was an "unsuccessful" attempt to record Milly's voicemails, according to One2One [now T-Mobile, a part of Everything Everywhere], Garnham says.
Leveson interjects: "No, no, no, no, no, Mr Clarke." He says Milly Dowler's voicemails were migrated to a new platform by the mobile operator on 26 March. The Met police does not believe Surrey police were aware of the voicemail platform migration.
3.07pm: The inquiry has resumed. Clarke says newspapers are just one news source publishing stories, including bloggers and Facebook. The phone provider said the reason old messages were not available to listen to on 17 April was because that function was removed 21 days after platform migration.
He adds that there are problems getting bloggers to comply with any regulatory regime. Milly's mail box was migrated on 26 March, so the option to listen to old messages (on the old platform) would have been removed on 16 April.
3.00pm: The inquiry is now taking a short break. 10.40am: Garnham says the Met police cannot rule out that someone unlawfully intercepted Milly Dowler's voicemails on 26 March 2002, after saying that "someone had accessed Milly's voicemail and listened to it" on that day.
3.00pm: Clarke and Barr debate EU law. He adds that the call data is not complete for various technical reasons, meaning that Scotland Yard still cannot have a clear picture of the issue.
Clarke concludes: "I'm explaining how difficult it is already, and if the bar was raised any higher it would cause problems for businesses like Mail Online." The Met police says that "full clarity is unlikely to be provided" because of the technical issues.
2.56pm: Barr tells the inquiry that Mail Online has been subject to 205 legal complaints in the past three years, 35 of which were for privacy issues and three led to compensation payments in European courts. Mail Online has had six privacy complaints via the PCC. 10.42am: The Met police cannot conclusively say whether any voicemails were or were not manually deleted, Garnham tells the inquiry.
He complains about French privacy law, which allows foreign nationals to sue over content published on a website based elsewhere in Europe. He says that two voicemail messages were missing on 17 April when they should have shown up in the police searches.
Clarke says an unnamed French celebrity is trying to sue Mail Online for breach of privacy because of pictures "legitimately" taken in the US. "It's not known why that happened," he says.
2.50pm: Clarke says one of the benefits of the internet is that stories are iterative, and can be updated. 10.45am: Garnham says that reaching a definitive conclusion is not and may never be possible on the issue of manual deletions.
"Quite often we will correct content as we go along," Clarke says. He says that the Guardian story in July 2011 and the Dowler's voicemails were not the only occasions when the issue was raised.
He adds that 99% of the time, complaints just want a story corrected rather than a published apology. Garnham says manual deletions being the source of the Dowlers' "false hope" moment was speculated on in meetings between the family and the police in 2011.
"It's an evolving animal of a product," he says. 10.49am: The Met police did not examine the manual deletions issue any further or seek to dissuade the Dowlers from their view, Garnham tells the inquiry. The force did not tell the Dowlers there was evidence that Milly's voicemails had been deleted.
2.47pm: Briefly on phone hacking, Clarke says "abuses and criminality" on Fleet Street largely happened "at one newspaper group". Concluding, Garnham says that the Dowlers "false hope" moment occurred on 24 March 2002.
He adds that the Daily Mail is an "ethical, decent" newspaper run by good people. He says it is not possible to state with any certainty that Dowler's voicemails were deleted.
2.45pm: Clarke says if the goalposts were shifted in relation to privacy then that would put Mail Online at a "competitive disadvantage against all sorts of people". Garnham tells the inquiry that one missing voicemail may have been subject to an illegal intercept in that 72-minute period between when it was read and saved, and when the Met police listened to it.
He refers to the Huffington Post, which he says would have an advantage over Mail Online if privacy laws changed in the UK. Garnham has completed DCI MacDonald's statement.
Clarke complains that the Leveson inquiry has only heard from someone "very junior" from the Huffington Post. "You haven't called anyone senior," he says, before Barr moves on. 10.54am: Gill Phillips, the head of legal for the Guardian, refers to the evidence read moments ago by Neil Garnham QC for the Metropolitan police.
2.43pm: Clarke warns again that if regulation was "significantly tightened" then that could harm the business of Mail Online. She says:
He says: "We don't find the current regulatory environment too disabling [but there] are occasions when it can be frustrating or irritating." The Guardian welcomes the fact that the Metropolitan Police has modified its statement from last December. The Guardian has prepared its own timeline for the Inquiry which reflects its understanding of the relevant events, which it believes to be accurate.
Barr asks about standards. The Guardian has no wish to cause any distress to the Dowler family. We also recognise the continuing need for care in reporting this matter given the on-going criminal investigation.
Clarke describes standards as a "loaded term" and says that Mail Online will strive for accuracy, the most important standard. What DCI MacDonald's statement makes clear is that the following facts are now not in dispute:
/>(para7) The News of the World hacked into the voice messages of Milly Dowler after she disappeared in March 2002.
/>(para 27) The police have found evidence to suggest that somebody was manually deleting some of Milly's messages but they have been unable to identify the person responsible. They have also found evidence which suggests automatic deletion.
/>(par 31) In April 2002 Surrey police made a connection between the apparent deletion of Milly's messages and the News of the World.
/>(para 32) The manual deletion of the messages was discussed by Sally and Bob Dowler and the police during meetings in 2011. The Dowlers speculated to the police that their "false hope moment" was due to such manual deletion. Surrey Police continued to regard this link as "completely reasonable and absolutely possible" (par 34) and the Metropolitan police did not seek to dissuade Mr and Mrs Dowler from this belief. (par 33)
/>The Guardian's story of 4 July 2011 was based on multiple sources and their state of knowledge at the time. Our error – as we acknowledged and corrected last December – was to have written about the cause of the deletions as a fact rather than as the belief of several people involved in the case. We regret that. After five more months of intensive inquiry, the police have found that the passage of time and the loss of evidence means that "reaching a definitive conclusion is not and may never be possible" (par 39)
2.39pm: Clarke says this is a commercial disadvantage Mail Online is "happy to accept". 10.58am: Counsel for News International Anthony White repeats the publisher's apology to the Dowler family.
He adds: "It does put us at a competitive disadvantage … and it would be very difficult for us going forward if that regulatory environment became even stricter." White notes that the Metropolitan police have turned up no evidence that News International journalists deleted messages prior to the "false hope" moment.
He warns that injunctions in the UK could put British newspaper websites at a further disadvantage. 10.59am: David Sherborne, counsel for the Dowler family and several other victims of press intrusion, is making a short statement.
2.35pm: Clarke says that the internet offers new chances to reach a global market: He rebukes Surrey police for the force's "utter failure" to investigate the News of the World's activities in 2002.
This is Fleet Street's Big Bang – our chance to compete with the rest of the world. Sherborne says there was a "lethal cocktail" of three ingredients in this matter: a failure by Surrey police; the Met police decision to close the original hacking investigation, and News of the World concealment of hacking.
He adds that he believes his main competition is AOL, Yahoo, and People magazine, not newspapers in the UK.
2.32pm: Clarke says that Mail Online will not use pictures of Pippa Middleton going about her private daily activities because there is a voluntary ban among British news organisations.
However, this ban does not apply in the US and American websites use pictures of Middleton every day, he adds.
"That's a commercial disadvantage that I just have to live with," Clarke tells the inquiry.
"If we publish a story in this country it's visible all over the world," he adds.
2.30pm: Leveson interjects to ask Clarke about Mail Online's readership in the US: does Mail Online comply with US law as it does with English law?
Clarke says that the site's American content is produced in compliance with US law and will be legally checked to those standards.
He adds that it becomes more difficult when content relates to both markets, and that is a problem the inquiry must grapple with.
2.27pm: Clarke says the "vast majority" of Mail Online stories come from its own journalists or reputable agencies for a fee.
Mail Online journalists will also "monitor the Twittersphere," says Clarke. "Quite often the tweet will be the story," he adds, pointing out that journalists will check first if the tweet is genuinely from the person it purports to be from.
Clarke says Mail Online does not follow analytics of its most popular stories "slavishly".
The right-hand showbiz bar generates about a third of Mail Online traffic, Barr says, reading from Clarke's witness statement.
2.22pm: Clarke says Mail Online is happy to report what other reputable news organisations are reporting, although its journalists will attempt to stand the story up themselves.
He adds that this what any other 24-hour news channel would do, and that Mail Online would not publish something that did not come from a reputable source.
2.19pm: Mail Online has about 70 journalists a day, based in London, Los Angeles and New York.
Barr asks whether these journalists follow the same procedure as the Daily Mail newspaper.
Clarke says Mail Online journalists are subject to the same contracts and HR procedures as the Daily Mail.
2.16pm: Clarke says that mobile traffic to Mail Online is growing faster than its web traffic.
Editorially, Clarke reports to the editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, and commercially, to the managing editor of Associated Newspapers, Kevin Beatty.
He says he speaks to Dacre on a daily basis, but will never seek to persuade him to follow a particular editorial line on Mail Online.
2.14pm: Clarke says he is responsible for both the editorial output of Mail Online and its commercial success.
"If we're not the biggest, we're very nearly the biggest – it depends which month you choose," says Clarke, of Mail Online's claim to being one of the most popular newspaper websites in the world.
Clarke does not believe a paywall is workable for general news, because of the proliferation of other news sources online.
2.11pm: Clarke has taken the stand.
He is being questioned by David Barr, counsel to the inquiry.
2.08pm: Martin Clarke, publisher of the Daily Mail's website Mail Online, will be the next witness.
Here is a profile of Clarke and of Mail Online from November 2010.
Briefing his colleagues on the success of Mai lOnline in November 2010, Clarke apparently said: "This shows that, firstly, I am a fucking genius, and secondly, that you are all doing really well."
12.46pm: Here is a short lunchtime summary of this morning's evidence to the Leveson inquiry:
• The Metropolitan police: reaching a definitive finding on Milly Dowler voicemail deletions may never be possible.
• Sally Dowler's "false hope" moment was on 24 March 2002, according to Scotland Yard, when she was able to hear her daughter's voice on her voicemail inbox.
• Dowler family and Met police discussed suspicion of voicemail deletions last year.
• Guardian welcomes modified Met police statement on Dowler voicemails.
12.37pm: The inquiry is now taking a break for lunch. It will resume at 2pm with evidence from Martin Clarke, publisher of MailOnline.
12.36pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims of press intrusion, is to make a statement following the evidence of police detective Brendan Gilmour earlier this morning.
Leveson and Sherborne agree that this submission should be heard in full this afternoon.
12.34pm: Middleton has now completed his evidence.
His witness statement has been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
12.29pm: Middleton reiterates that his force was "open minded" as to the prosecution of journalists, but did not have anything that "directly or indirectly" linked members of the media to the illicit information.
He confirms that two senior politicians were named in the information.
Jay asks whether this led Middleton to believe the press may be interested.
Middleton says it may have done, repeating that the investigation had not ruled out any specific avenue.
12.25pm: Here is a background story on Operation Reproof from July 2011 by the Guardian's Nick Davies and David Leigh.
12.24pm: Middleton says that journalists were not "out of scope" in this police investigation.
The flow of information was from a police officer to a private investigator to other companies, but the police never found evidence of direct requests from journalists, he adds.
12.23pm: Middleton says that the private investigator was passing confidential information to "three or four links up the chain", including insurance companies.
Jay tells the inquiry there was a link between the information and a company called Data Research in Surrey.
Middleton says the premises of Data Research were searched by the police and the Information Commissioner's Office on 8 March 2003.
12.22pm: Middleton was the deputy senior investigating officer of Operation Reproof, a police investigation into corruption at Devon & Cornwall police.
Devon & Cornwall detectives investigated 37 people as part of the nationwide operation. Six men – two serving police officers, two former officers and two private investigators – were charged in 2004 after a two-year investigation, according to the Western Morning News.
12.15pm: Russell Middleton, temporary assistant chief constable of Devon & Cornwall police, takes the stand.
12.03pm: Gilmour has now completed his evidence.
His witness statement has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
The inquiry is taking a short break.
12.01pm: In March 2004, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised that there was insufficient evidence to charge any of the journalists.
Gilmour says he was "disappointed" that the police had not gathered sufficient evidence to prove guilty knowledge on behalf of the journalists.
His force interviewed seven journalists: two freelancers, one News of the World reporter, one News of the World reporter in Scotland, one Daily Mirror reporter, one Sunday Mirror reporter and one Mail on Sunday reporter.
Gilmour says he was disappointed at the verdicts in court cases involving Whittamore and three associates.
11.57am: The Guardian's timeline on Milly Dowler voicemail interceptions has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
11.57am: The police interviewed Whittamore under caution, Gilmour says. He denied ever using an intermediary to access the police national computer.
Gilmour says this "didn't wear". "They were professional information gatherers, who would have recognised that you wouldn't have got this fast turnaround from a court … We didn't believe what they were saying."
11.56am: Gilmour says the police could not discount that journalists would have been "forearmed" with responses to police questions.
"Generally speaking, it was along the same lines," he adds, of the answers given by journalists.
Jay says: "I suppose there are at least two inferences that can be drawn from that."
11.54am: Jay refers to Gilmour's statement, which includes a meeting in November 2003 that he thought the journalists should have been arrested. He asks if Gilmour was overruled or if he changed his mind.
"I wasn't overruled," says Gilmour. "The evidence was being updated on a daily basis, as that assessment went on over a period of weeks or months I realised we had significant evidence to show that connection between the journalists and Whittamore.
"I then reconsidered the need to have to arrest the journalists and conduct any searches because I already had significant evidence ... the need to arrest diminished."
11.52am: The witness statement of the Met's DCI John MacDonald on the Milly Dowler voicemail interceptions, has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
11.51am: Jay says that Gilmour said in a note at the time that "careful consideration" should be given to the journalists involved.
"This isn't my entry, I believe it's DS Tony Fuller," says Gilmour.
Asked what it means, Gilmour says: "I'm not in a position to answer that. I can give a view. I think it's because of the significance of what we were dealing with and recognising that significance, giving it due consideration and the fallout from what we were doing."
Jay says the note suggests the issue would generate "huge press interest". Was there? "I don't think so," says Gilmour.
11.46am: Gilmour says the police did not fear a backlash from the press about investigating journalists, but they did "expect a reaction".
We were aware it would cause a reaction and knew it would attract a lot of attention. We needed a system in place to manage the questions that would come in.
11.44am: Gilmour says that journalists were paying £200 or £300 per request.
Jay asks if it was put to the journalists that previous conviction details must have been obtained illegally.
Gilmour replies: "They pleaded ignorance. They said they would not have used Whittamore had they known the information was being obtained illegally."
He adds that the police could not prove guilty knowledge on behalf of the journalists.
Some of the journalists told the police that colleagues in the newsroom may have filed requests to Whittamore using one journalist's name, so attributing each of the requests would have been difficult.
11.41am: The journalists interviewed by the police said they believed the police information was coming from the courts, Gilmour tells the inquiry.
He says that these checks were being turned around in a matter of hours, and so it defied logic to believe the information was coming from the courts.
"They stuck with that line and all of them stated they would not have used Whittamore or any other agency if they knew that information was being obtained illegally," he adds.
Jay asks how quickly Whittamore could obtain the information.
Gilmour says:
Fast. We put that to the journalists ... quite a few of them said they thought the information was coming from the courts. We put it to them they couldn't possibly accept or assume that information would get turned around so quickly, in two or three hours in some cases. Without exception from memory they said that was genuinely where they thought it was from.
11.39am: The private investigator Steve Whittamore kept very detailed ledgers of his business, Gilmour says, from which the police drew their evidence.
"We had the invoice and the PNC audit trail which showed the checks had been done, and the invoices had gone to the newspapers … and the link to the journalists did exist, evidentially."
He adds: "Everything indicated [the journalists] were requesting the information."
11.36am: Robert Jay, counsel to the inquiry, questions Gilmour about the prosecution of journalists.
Gilmour says the police set up a covert investigation against Marshall. They discovered that another former officer, named Alan King, had made contact with Marshall and was arrested as a suspect in the investigation.
Jay asks whether charges of conspiracy were under consideration. "Yes," says Gilmour. "Conspiracy to commit misconduct, in the end."
Jay asks why journalists were not arrested in the same way.
Gilmour says that he secured the attendance of journalists through their newspapers' legal departments, which he could not do with King. The police interviewed seven journalists named on the ledgers kept by Steve Whittamore, the private investigator who was the focus of the information commissioner's Operation Motorman probe.
11.32am: Gilmour says during the information commissioner's Operation Motorman investigation in 2003 the Met police discovered that a civilian employee, named Paul Marshall, was providing information from the police national computer to private detectives, which later ended up in newspapers.
He adds: "I recall reviewing Marshall's position ... it was relatively low risk, there wasn't a risk to life, there was more benefit in leaving him where he was in order to obtain the information."
Gilmour says that the Met police was "alive to the sensitivities of investigating journalists" but that there "wasn't any fear involved at all".
He adds that there was no trepidation about investigating journalists, but the force was alive to the attention it would attract.
11.24am: Gilmour is asked about Operation Glade, the Met police's 2003-05 investigation into police corruption.
He refers to "isolated and sporadic" incidents involving the police national computer.
11.20am: The inquiry has now resumed.
DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on Scotland Yard's Operation Glade investigation into police corruption, is the next witness.
His is appearing in camera, with only his voice being transmitted through the inquiry live feeds.
11.16am: Here is the statement from the Dowler family, read by Sherborne to the inquiry:
If Surrey police had prosecuted this activity in 2002 then the position would have been very different and perhaps countless others might also have been avoided having their private messages hacked into by the News of the World.
Police neglect and deference meant that it took the relentless efforts of one journalist to uncover what the police knew had gone on, and whilst we would never have wished to have been thrust into the middle of this extraordinary scandal on top of what we have already had to deal with as a family, we continue to have faith that his efforts and the efforts of the inquiry and Operation Weeting will have a lasting positive impact.
11.13am: Sherborne says that a newspaper would without any compunction access the messages of a missing teenager showed the depths to which certain sections of the press were prepared to go.
"No one can possibly argue this inquiry was not entirely justified," says Sherborne.
Sherborne praises "the work of an investigative journalist prepared to get to the truth", a reference to the Guardian's Nick Davies.
He dismisses as wild suggestions that the News of the World should not have been shut down because it was not responsible for the false hope moment:
One should remember the industrial scale that such hacking took place and spread like a cancer through the newsroom and other floors of the News of the World … this newspaper was rotten to the core, that is why Mr Murdoch cut it out and we heard him say last week he wished he had done so sooner.
11.10am: The inquiry is taking a short break.
11.03am: Sherborne argues that the Leveson inquiry would still have happened even if the Guardian's story of July 2011 had never appeared.11.03am: Sherborne argues that the Leveson inquiry would still have happened even if the Guardian's story of July 2011 had never appeared.
He says:He says:
While some questions stay and may always remain unanswered there are some to which we do know the answer. The News of the World did hack into Milly Dowler's phone searching for a scoop at a time when she had already been murdered. That fact alone is horrifying enough.While some questions stay and may always remain unanswered there are some to which we do know the answer. The News of the World did hack into Milly Dowler's phone searching for a scoop at a time when she had already been murdered. That fact alone is horrifying enough.
We also know that the newspaper interfered seriously with the police investigation trying to use the information they had illegally obtained to get an exclusive on Milly's movements.We also know that the newspaper interfered seriously with the police investigation trying to use the information they had illegally obtained to get an exclusive on Milly's movements.
Thirdly this inquiry investigating as it has done the practices, culture and ethics of the press would have happened regardless of the question which arose at the start of the evidence that Sally Dowler's false hope moment may have been the result of activity of someone at or working for the newspaper.Thirdly this inquiry investigating as it has done the practices, culture and ethics of the press would have happened regardless of the question which arose at the start of the evidence that Sally Dowler's false hope moment may have been the result of activity of someone at or working for the newspaper.
The false hope moment and the News of the World's potential responsibility was not part of the decision to set up this inquiry in the first place.The false hope moment and the News of the World's potential responsibility was not part of the decision to set up this inquiry in the first place.
10.59am: David Sherborne, counsel for the Dowler family and several other victims of press intrusion, is making a short statement. 11.10am: The inquiry is taking a short break.
He rebukes Surrey police for the force's "utter failure" to investigate the News of the World's activities in 2002. 11.13am: Sherborne says that a newspaper would without any compunction access the messages of a missing teenager showed the depths to which certain sections of the press were prepared to go.
Sherborne says there was a "lethal cocktail" of three ingredients in this matter: a failure by Surrey police; the Met police decision to close the original hacking investigation, and News of the World concealment of hacking. "No one can possibly argue this inquiry was not entirely justified," says Sherborne.
10.58am: Counsel for News International Anthony White repeats the publisher's apology to the Dowler family. Sherborne praises "the work of an investigative journalist prepared to get to the truth", a reference to the Guardian's Nick Davies.
White notes that the Metropolitan police have turned up no evidence that News International journalists deleted messages prior to the "false hope" moment. He dismisses as wild suggestions that the News of the World should not have been shut down because it was not responsible for the false hope moment:
10.54am: Gill Phillips, the head of legal for the Guardian, refers to the evidence read moments ago by Neil Garnham QC for the Metropolitan police. One should remember the industrial scale that such hacking took place and spread like a cancer through the newsroom and other floors of the News of the World … this newspaper was rotten to the core, that is why Mr Murdoch cut it out and we heard him say last week he wished he had done so sooner.
She says: 11.16am: Here is the statement from the Dowler family, read by Sherborne to the inquiry:
The Guardian welcomes the fact that the Metropolitan Police has modified its statement from last December. The Guardian has prepared its own timeline for the Inquiry which reflects its understanding of the relevant events, which it believes to be accurate. If Surrey police had prosecuted this activity in 2002 then the position would have been very different and perhaps countless others might also have been avoided having their private messages hacked into by the News of the World.
The Guardian has no wish to cause any distress to the Dowler family. We also recognise the continuing need for care in reporting this matter given the on-going criminal investigation. Police neglect and deference meant that it took the relentless efforts of one journalist to uncover what the police knew had gone on, and whilst we would never have wished to have been thrust into the middle of this extraordinary scandal on top of what we have already had to deal with as a family, we continue to have faith that his efforts and the efforts of the inquiry and Operation Weeting will have a lasting positive impact.
What DCI MacDonald's statement makes clear is that the following facts are now not in dispute:
/>(para7) The News of the World hacked into the voice messages of Milly Dowler after she disappeared in March 2002.
/>(para 27) The police have found evidence to suggest that somebody was manually deleting some of Milly's messages but they have been unable to identify the person responsible. They have also found evidence which suggests automatic deletion.
/>(par 31) In April 2002 Surrey police made a connection between the apparent deletion of Milly's messages and the News of the World.
/>(para 32) The manual deletion of the messages was discussed by Sally and Bob Dowler and the police during meetings in 2011. The Dowlers speculated to the police that their "false hope moment" was due to such manual deletion. Surrey Police continued to regard this link as "completely reasonable and absolutely possible" (par 34) and the Metropolitan police did not seek to dissuade Mr and Mrs Dowler from this belief. (par 33)
/>The Guardian's story of 4 July 2011 was based on multiple sources and their state of knowledge at the time. Our error – as we acknowledged and corrected last December – was to have written about the cause of the deletions as a fact rather than as the belief of several people involved in the case. We regret that. After five more months of intensive inquiry, the police have found that the passage of time and the loss of evidence means that "reaching a definitive conclusion is not and may never be possible" (par 39) 		11.20am: The inquiry has now resumed.
10.49am: The Met police did not examine the manual deletions issue any further or seek to dissuade the Dowlers from their view, Garnham tells the inquiry. The force did not tell the Dowlers there was evidence that Milly's voicemails had been deleted. DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on Scotland Yard's Operation Glade investigation into police corruption, is the next witness.
Concluding, Garnham says that the Dowlers "false hope" moment occurred on 24 March 2002. His is appearing in camera, with only his voice being transmitted through the inquiry live feeds.
He says it is not possible to state with any certainty that Dowler's voicemails were deleted. 11.24am: Gilmour is asked about Operation Glade, the Met police's 2003-05 investigation into police corruption.
Garnham tells the inquiry that one missing voicemail may have been subject to an illegal intercept in that 72-minute period between when it was read and saved, and when the Met police listened to it. He refers to "isolated and sporadic" incidents involving the police national computer.
Garnham has completed DCI MacDonald's statement. 11.32am: Gilmour says during the information commissioner's Operation Motorman investigation in 2003 the Met police discovered that a civilian employee, named Paul Marshall, was providing information from the police national computer to private detectives, which later ended up in newspapers.
10.45am: Garnham says that reaching a definitive conclusion is not and may never be possible on the issue of manual deletions. He adds: "I recall reviewing Marshall's position ... it was relatively low risk, there wasn't a risk to life, there was more benefit in leaving him where he was in order to obtain the information."
He says that the Guardian story in July 2011 and the Dowler's voicemails were not the only occasions when the issue was raised. Gilmour says that the Met police was "alive to the sensitivities of investigating journalists" but that there "wasn't any fear involved at all".
Garnham says manual deletions being the source of the Dowlers' "false hope" moment was speculated on in meetings between the family and the police in 2011. He adds that there was no trepidation about investigating journalists, but the force was alive to the attention it would attract.
10.42am: The Met police cannot conclusively say whether any voicemails were or were not manually deleted, Garnham tells the inquiry. 11.36am: Robert Jay, counsel to the inquiry, questions Gilmour about the prosecution of journalists.
He says that two voicemail messages were missing on 17 April when they should have shown up in the police searches. Gilmour says the police set up a covert investigation against Marshall. They discovered that another former officer, named Alan King, had made contact with Marshall and was arrested as a suspect in the investigation.
"It's not known why that happened," he says. Jay asks whether charges of conspiracy were under consideration. "Yes," says Gilmour. "Conspiracy to commit misconduct, in the end."
10.40am: Garnham says the Met police cannot rule out that someone unlawfully intercepted Milly Dowler's voicemails on 26 March 2002, after saying that "someone had accessed Milly's voicemail and listened to it" on that day. Jay asks why journalists were not arrested in the same way.
He adds that the call data is not complete for various technical reasons, meaning that Scotland Yard still cannot have a clear picture of the issue. Gilmour says that he secured the attendance of journalists through their newspapers' legal departments, which he could not do with King. The police interviewed seven journalists named on the ledgers kept by Steve Whittamore, the private investigator who was the focus of the information commissioner's Operation Motorman probe.
The Met police says that "full clarity is unlikely to be provided" because of the technical issues. 11.39am: The private investigator Steve Whittamore kept very detailed ledgers of his business, Gilmour says, from which the police drew their evidence.
10.38am: On 26 March there was an "unsuccessful" attempt to record Milly's voicemails, according to One2One [now T-Mobile, a part of Everything Everywhere], Garnham says. "We had the invoice and the PNC audit trail which showed the checks had been done, and the invoices had gone to the newspapers … and the link to the journalists did exist, evidentially."
He says Milly Dowler's voicemails were migrated to a new platform by the mobile operator on 26 March. The Met police does not believe Surrey police were aware of the voicemail platform migration. He adds: "Everything indicated [the journalists] were requesting the information."
The phone provider said the reason old messages were not available to listen to on 17 April was because that function was removed 21 days after platform migration. 11.41am: The journalists interviewed by the police said they believed the police information was coming from the courts, Gilmour tells the inquiry.
Milly's mail box was migrated on 26 March, so the option to listen to old messages (on the old platform) would have been removed on 16 April. He says that these checks were being turned around in a matter of hours, and so it defied logic to believe the information was coming from the courts.
10.35am: Garnham, for the Met police, refers to a voicemail saved on 26 March 2002, meaning someone may have listened to that message after she had disappeared. "They stuck with that line and all of them stated they would not have used Whittamore or any other agency if they knew that information was being obtained illegally," he adds.
10.31am: Milly Dowler last called her own voicemail on 20 March just after 5pm, says Garnham. Jay asks how quickly Whittamore could obtain the information.
He tells the inquiry that the Met police believes there was an automatic deletion of individual voicemails once 72 hours had been reached. Gilmour says:
"There needs to be an awareness that this explanation is from detectives from Operation Weeting," he says. Fast. We put that to the journalists ... quite a few of them said they thought the information was coming from the courts. We put it to them they couldn't possibly accept or assume that information would get turned around so quickly, in two or three hours in some cases. Without exception from memory they said that was genuinely where they thought it was from.
A voicemail platform migration occurred on 26 March 2002 and would have had the effect of resetting Milly Dowler's voicemail to an automated generic message. However, this occurred after 24 March when Mrs Dowler was able to leave a message on Milly's phone. 11.44am: Gilmour says that journalists were paying £200 or £300 per request.
10.29am: Garnham, for the Met police, is reading timings from Surrey police's family liaison officer's notes from the period. Jay asks if it was put to the journalists that previous conviction details must have been obtained illegally.
He tells the inquiry there is no evidence to support the suggestion any journalist attempted to hack Dowler's phone before 26 March 2002. Gilmour replies: "They pleaded ignorance. They said they would not have used Whittamore had they known the information was being obtained illegally."
A mobile phone operator told the Met police that voicemails would automatically be purged from Dowler's phone if they were more than 72 hours old. He adds that the police could not prove guilty knowledge on behalf of the journalists.
10.23am: Neil Garnham QC, counsel for the Met police, is reading a witness statement from DCI John MacDonald. Some of the journalists told the police that colleagues in the newsroom may have filed requests to Whittamore using one journalist's name, so attributing each of the requests would have been difficult.
Garnham says Scotland Yard has carried out an "hour by hour" reconstruction of events from the Dowler investigation. 11.46am: Gilmour says the police did not fear a backlash from the press about investigating journalists, but they did "expect a reaction".
Garnham says there is evidence to support the fact that Dowler's voicemails were intercepted. We were aware it would cause a reaction and knew it would attract a lot of attention. We needed a system in place to manage the questions that would come in.
10.21am: David Barr, counsel to the inquiry, is up. He introduces a witness statement from the Met police about the interception of Milly Dowler's voicemails. 11.51am: Jay says that Gilmour said in a note at the time that "careful consideration" should be given to the journalists involved.
Leveson says that the circumstances surrounding the Dowler deletions is important background to the inquiry. He adds that the precise detail of "the extent that there was such interference is probably not going to inform my overall view of the culture, practices and ethics of the press". "This isn't my entry, I believe it's DS Tony Fuller," says Gilmour.
He is happy that this evidence be read because he says it is part of the overall picture, but its significance should not be misunderstood. Asked what it means, Gilmour says: "I'm not in a position to answer that. I can give a view. I think it's because of the significance of what we were dealing with and recognising that significance, giving it due consideration and the fallout from what we were doing."
10.18am: Leveson says the groups have "fundamentally misunderstood" the purpose of redaction within the Inquiries Act. Jay says the note suggests the issue would generate "huge press interest". Was there? "I don't think so," says Gilmour.
He adds that redactions sought by government ministers will be treated in the same way as redactions sought by other core participants. 11.52am: The witness statement of the Met's DCI John MacDonald on the Milly Dowler voicemail interceptions, has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
Leveson says he has not ruled out publicising attempts to make redactions, but he expects this to be extremely rare. 11.54am: Jay refers to Gilmour's statement, which includes a meeting in November 2003 that he thought the journalists should have been arrested. He asks if Gilmour was overruled or if he changed his mind.
10.15am: Here is a link to the Guardian story from yesterday about pressure groups wanting to block government special advisers from seeing witness statements. "I wasn't overruled," says Gilmour. "The evidence was being updated on a daily basis, as that assessment went on over a period of weeks or months I realised we had significant evidence to show that connection between the journalists and Whittamore.
10.08am: Leveson says he expects those government ministers who have been granted core participant status will restrict their confidentiality circle to the "minimum number necessary". "I then reconsidered the need to have to arrest the journalists and conduct any searches because I already had significant evidence ... the need to arrest diminished."
The Guardian's Lisa O'Carroll has just tweeted: 11.56am: Gilmour says the police could not discount that journalists would have been "forearmed" with responses to police questions.
#leveson just paused in his delivery as Hugh Grant walked into court 73! "Generally speaking, it was along the same lines," he adds, of the answers given by journalists.
— lisa o'carroll (@lisaocarroll) May 9, 2012 Jay says: "I suppose there are at least two inferences that can be drawn from that."
10.04am: The inquiry has started. 11.57am: The police interviewed Whittamore under caution, Gilmour says. He denied ever using an intermediary to access the police national computer.
Lord Justice Leveson begins by referring to the open letter sent to the inquiry yesterday by pressure groups including Full Fact, English PEN and Index on Censorship. Gilmour says this "didn't wear". "They were professional information gatherers, who would have recognised that you wouldn't have got this fast turnaround from a court … We didn't believe what they were saying."
These groups have urged the inquiry to reverse its decision to allow several government ministers early access to confidential documents by core participants. 11.57am: The Guardian's timeline on Milly Dowler voicemail interceptions has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
Leveson is not happy that this letter was publicised before he was given the chance to deal with it. 12.01pm: In March 2004, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) advised that there was insufficient evidence to charge any of the journalists.
9.52am: Welcome to the Leveson inquiry live blog. Gilmour says he was "disappointed" that the police had not gathered sufficient evidence to prove guilty knowledge on behalf of the journalists.
Today the inquiry will hear from Martin Clarke, publisher of the Daily Mail's website, MailOnline. His force interviewed seven journalists: two freelancers, one News of the World reporter, one News of the World reporter in Scotland, one Daily Mirror reporter, one Sunday Mirror reporter and one Mail on Sunday reporter.
Clarke joined the Daily Mail in 1987 before editing the Scotsman, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail. He took over MailOnline in 2006, when the website barely existed, and made it the most popular English-language newspaper website in the world by 2011. Gilmour says he was disappointed at the verdicts in court cases involving Whittamore and three associates.
He has a reputation for terrifying his subordinates – described as a composite of Kelvin MacKenzie, Piers Morgan and his editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre – but also known for his news judgement. 12.03pm: Gilmour has now completed his evidence.
The inquiry will also hear from DCI Brendan Gilmour, who worked on the Scotland Yard's Operation Glade investigation into police corruption, and Russell Middleton, temporary assistant chief constable of Devon & Cornwall police. Gilmour will give evidence in private, but his voice will be broadcast on the inquiry website. His witness statement has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
Please note that comments are switched off for legal reasons. The inquiry is taking a short break.
12.15pm: Russell Middleton, temporary assistant chief constable of Devon & Cornwall police, takes the stand.
12.22pm: Middleton was the deputy senior investigating officer of Operation Reproof, a police investigation into corruption at Devon & Cornwall police.
Devon & Cornwall detectives investigated 37 people as part of the nationwide operation. Six men – two serving police officers, two former officers and two private investigators – were charged in 2004 after a two-year investigation, according to the Western Morning News.
12.23pm: Middleton says that the private investigator was passing confidential information to "three or four links up the chain", including insurance companies.
Jay tells the inquiry there was a link between the information and a company called Data Research in Surrey.
Middleton says the premises of Data Research were searched by the police and the Information Commissioner's Office on 8 March 2003.
12.24pm: Middleton says that journalists were not "out of scope" in this police investigation.
The flow of information was from a police officer to a private investigator to other companies, but the police never found evidence of direct requests from journalists, he adds.
12.25pm: Here is a background story on Operation Reproof from July 2011 by the Guardian's Nick Davies and David Leigh.
12.29pm: Middleton reiterates that his force was "open minded" as to the prosecution of journalists, but did not have anything that "directly or indirectly" linked members of the media to the illicit information.
He confirms that two senior politicians were named in the information.
Jay asks whether this led Middleton to believe the press may be interested.
Middleton says it may have done, repeating that the investigation had not ruled out any specific avenue.
12.34pm: Middleton has now completed his evidence.
His witness statement has been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
12.36pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims of press intrusion, is to make a statement following the evidence of police detective Brendan Gilmour earlier this morning.
Leveson and Sherborne agree that this submission should be heard in full this afternoon.
12.37pm: The inquiry is now taking a break for lunch. It will resume at 2pm with evidence from Martin Clarke, publisher of Mail Online.
12.46pm: Here is a short lunchtime summary of this morning's evidence to the Leveson inquiry:
• The Metropolitan police: reaching a definitive finding on Milly Dowler voicemail deletions may never be possible.
• Sally Dowler's "false hope" moment was on 24 March 2002, according to Scotland Yard, when she was able to hear her daughter's voice on her voicemail inbox.
• Dowler family and Met police discussed suspicion of voicemail deletions last year.
• Guardian welcomes modified Met police statement on Dowler voicemails.
2.08pm: Martin Clarke, publisher of the Daily Mail's website Mail Online, will be the next witness.
Here is a profile of Clarke and of Mail Online from November 2010.
Briefing his colleagues on the success of Mail Online in November 2010, Clarke apparently said: "This shows that, firstly, I am a fucking genius, and secondly, that you are all doing really well."
2.11pm: Clarke has taken the stand.
He is being questioned by David Barr, counsel to the inquiry.
2.14pm: Clarke says he is responsible for both the editorial output of Mail Online and its commercial success.
"If we're not the biggest, we're very nearly the biggest – it depends which month you choose," says Clarke, of Mail Online's claim to being one of the most popular newspaper websites in the world.
Clarke does not believe a paywall is workable for general news, because of the proliferation of other news sources online.
2.16pm: Clarke says that mobile traffic to Mail Online is growing faster than its web traffic.
Editorially, Clarke reports to the editor-in-chief, Paul Dacre, and commercially, to the managing editor of Associated Newspapers, Kevin Beatty.
He says he speaks to Dacre on a daily basis, but will never seek to persuade him to follow a particular editorial line on Mail Online.
2.19pm: Mail Online has about 70 journalists a day, based in London, Los Angeles and New York.
Barr asks whether these journalists follow the same procedure as the Daily Mail newspaper.
Clarke says Mail Online journalists are subject to the same contracts and HR procedures as the Daily Mail.
2.22pm: Clarke says Mail Online is happy to report what other reputable news organisations are reporting, although its journalists will attempt to stand the story up themselves.
He adds that this what any other 24-hour news channel would do, and that Mail Online would not publish something that did not come from a reputable source.
2.27pm: Clarke says the "vast majority" of Mail Online stories come from its own journalists or reputable agencies for a fee.
Mail Online journalists will also "monitor the Twittersphere," says Clarke. "Quite often the tweet will be the story," he adds, pointing out that journalists will check first if the tweet is genuinely from the person it purports to be from.
Clarke says Mail Online does not follow analytics of its most popular stories "slavishly".
The right-hand showbiz bar generates about a third of Mail Online traffic, Barr says, reading from Clarke's witness statement.
2.30pm: Leveson interjects to ask Clarke about Mail Online's readership in the US: does Mail Online comply with US law as it does with English law?
Clarke says that the site's American content is produced in compliance with US law and will be legally checked to those standards.
He adds that it becomes more difficult when content relates to both markets, and that is a problem the inquiry must grapple with.
2.32pm: Clarke says that Mail Online will not use pictures of Pippa Middleton going about her private daily activities because there is a voluntary ban among British news organisations.
However, this ban does not apply in the US and American websites use pictures of Middleton every day, he adds.
"That's a commercial disadvantage that I just have to live with," Clarke tells the inquiry.
"If we publish a story in this country it's visible all over the world," he adds.
2.35pm: Clarke says that the internet offers new chances to reach a global market:
This is Fleet Street's Big Bang – our chance to compete with the rest of the world.
He adds that he believes his main competition is AOL, Yahoo, and People magazine, not newspapers in the UK.
2.39pm: Clarke says this is a commercial disadvantage Mail Online is "happy to accept".
He adds: "It does put us at a competitive disadvantage … and it would be very difficult for us going forward if that regulatory environment became even stricter."
He warns that injunctions in the UK could put British newspaper websites at a further disadvantage.
2.43pm: Clarke warns again that if regulation was "significantly tightened" then that could harm the business of Mail Online.
He says: "We don't find the current regulatory environment too disabling [but there] are occasions when it can be frustrating or irritating."
Barr asks about standards.
Clarke describes standards as a "loaded term" and says that Mail Online will strive for accuracy, the most important standard.
2.45pm: Clarke says if the goalposts were shifted in relation to privacy then that would put Mail Online at a "competitive disadvantage against all sorts of people".
He refers to the Huffington Post, which he says would have an advantage over Mail Online if privacy laws changed in the UK.
Clarke complains that the Leveson inquiry has only heard from someone "very junior" from the Huffington Post. "You haven't called anyone senior," he says, before Barr moves on.
2.47pm: Briefly on phone hacking, Clarke says "abuses and criminality" on Fleet Street largely happened "at one newspaper group".
He adds that the Daily Mail is an "ethical, decent" newspaper run by good people.
2.50pm: Clarke says one of the benefits of the internet is that stories are iterative, and can be updated.
"Quite often we will correct content as we go along," Clarke says.
He adds that 99% of the time, complainants just want a story corrected rather than a published apology.
"It's an evolving animal of a product," he says.
2.56pm: Barr tells the inquiry that Mail Online has been subject to 205 legal complaints in the past three years, 35 of which were for privacy issues and three led to compensation payments in European courts. Mail Online has had six privacy complaints via the PCC.
He complains about French privacy law, which allows foreign nationals to sue over content published on a website based elsewhere in Europe.
Clarke says an unnamed French celebrity is trying to sue Mail Online for breach of privacy because of pictures "legitimately" taken in the US.
3.00pm: Clarke and Barr debate EU law.
Clarke concludes: "I'm explaining how difficult it is already, and if the bar was raised any higher it would cause problems for businesses like Mail Online."
3.00pm: The inquiry is now taking a short break.
3.07pm: The inquiry has resumed. Clarke says newspapers are just one news source publishing stories, including bloggers and Facebook.
He adds that there are problems getting bloggers to comply with any regulatory regime.
3.11pm: Clarke says he does not believe Twitter is "just people chattering in a pub".
He adds: "It's like giving everyone their own private radio station."
Barr asks whether Clarke believes that only online publishers that make money should be regulated.
Clarke says no "because then the Guardian wouldn't be regulated because they make no money".
Leveson interjects: "No, no, no, no, no, Mr Clarke."
3.15pm: Clarke says he is not arguing for looser regulation, but says it would be "very unpalatable" to be placed under "an even heavier" burden "when the rest of the internet is not placed under any regulation".
3.18pm: How far is the state willing to go to curtail private individuals' freedom of speech, asks Clarke.
He believes "the great harms" – of libel, of derailing a trial, etc – are catered for under current law.
Clarke adds: "I'm just cautioning that there is a growing part of the media that isn't subject to that, and we should be seen in that context."
3.21pm: Clarke is asked about the PCC.
He does not believe it is "as broken" as other witnesses to the inquiry have made out. Clarke goes on to tie the phone hacking issue to the PCC, before Leveson interjects.
"Mr Clarke, you're becoming an advocate," he warns, before saying that phone hacking was the "straw that broke that particular camel's back" but the PCC was labouring under other issues.
3.27pm: Clarke says he does not believe the internet should be regulated any more than you need "a policeman in the corner of every pub".
He describes the internet as a "democratising agent, allowing everyone to have a voice".
"People have a freedom of expression and we have to take the good with the bad," Clarke adds.
3.29pm: Martin Clarke's witness statement has now been published on the Leveson inquiry website.
3.37pm: Barr asks Clarke about the Amanda Knox verdict when Mail Online published a full, false version of the story, along with other news websites.
Clarke says the story was a combination of "human error and overzealousness".
"The thing that made me angriest was that there was no need for it," he adds, adding that Mail Online did not need to publish a story so soon. He says "firm advice" was issued and an internal inquiry undertaken.
3.42pm: Barr asks Clarke about a Mail Online story published today about an actor in The Only Way is Essex.
He says that photographs in the article were taken with consent. "I will stake a year's salary on it," he adds.
"There's nothing wrong with showbiz. It's not a dirty word," Clarke says. "The only journalism that is truly free is profitable journalism … and I do that by building a website that people are interested in, and that includes showbiz."
3.43pm: Clarke has now completed his evidence.
3.43pm: Kath Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian, has just tweeted:
'You've been very indulgent,' Mail Online editor Martin Clarke says to Lord Justice Leveson. 'Not sure about that,' he replies #leveson
— Katharine Viner (@KathViner) May 9, 2012
3.45pm: Barr reads a number of witness statements into the inquiry, including evidence from the Guardian journalist Nick Davies, the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, the author JK Rowling and the MP Damian Green.
3.45pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims at the inquiry, is back on his feet to make an application with reference to evidence heard earlier today by police detective Brendan Gilmour.
3.51pm: David Sherborne, counsel for the victims at the inquiry, is back on his feet to make an application with reference to evidence heard earlier today by police detective Brendan Gilmour.
He is talking about Operation Motorman and the illicit trade in private information by newspapers.
He tells the inquiry that this was widespread in Fleet Street and is a "similarly dark art to hacking".
3.53pm: Sherborne says it is "not good enough" for journalists and editors to say that private investigators were mainly used to obtain contact information quickly.
He alleges that the information laid bare by Operation Motorman could not wholly have been obtained legitimately.
Sherborne does not believe this illicit trade of information by newspapers is historic. Newspapers continued to use the private investigator Steve Whittamore even after his office was raided and he was convicted, he says.
4.00pm: Sherborne says two questions need to be answered by newspapers over Operation Motorman.
1. What steps were taken in relation to those journalists who used Whittamore? Were they fired or promoted?
2. What happened to the private information obtained from Whittamore? Was it retained and reused?
4.03pm: Leveson says the factual framework of Sherborne's application does relate to the culture, practice and ethics of the press, but that the inquiry cannot delve into the detail of 10 years ago.
He says Sherborne's second question is of more significance than the first, because "that affects the here and now".
Sherborne says Operation Motorman is significant because of how newspapers reacted to the evidence: whether they accepted they had likely committed breaches of the Data Protection Act or not.
4.12pm: Sherborne says it boils down to this question: was it "cover-up or clean-up" for newspapers once Operation Motorman revealed what it did?
Leveson wonders whether it is possible to answer this question without delving into the facts in a way that would be outside the inquiry's terms of reference.
4.17pm: Jonathan Caplan, counsel for Associated Newspapers, rises briefly to say the publisher will respond "forcibly" to Sherborne's application tomorrow.
Leveson ends the hearing without making a ruling on Sherborne's application.