The Good Old Days

The Leveson Inquiry has summoned all the Met's retired senior plod as his Lordship (left) ploughs into the relationship between police and media.
Step forward Sir Paul Condon (Commissioner 1993-2000), who came across as an avuncular, if slightly florid, Rotarian from the pre-digital age.
He evoked a slightly more innocent era and his evidence showed an emminently straightforward outlook to media relations. For example, he endeavoured, whenever possible, to hold briefings with the press at NSY or some other police premises always with a press officer present. He only had a handful outside and happily withstood the editors' constant griping about the quality of grub in the police canteen. He referred to accepting hospitality as part of a journalist's "grooming process." For all Sir Paul Stephenson's clamour about his own "integrity" Condon clearly has it, self evidently.
How this approach contrasted with John Yates and Andy Hayman who were cross examined last week about a succession of press dinners, lunches and drinks where the company credit card took a right hammering. Hayman wacked a bottle of champers on it in a wine bar in Chelsea during a meeting with a hack whose identity he couldn't even recall. But at least Hayman, was willing to accept mistakes and found that, by his actions, had risked the reputataion of the force "persuasive".
Not so Yates who was grilled for over three hours without barely accepting any error, however minor, had been made. All the coppers are castng the shadow of the terrorist threat as their let-off for not doing their jobs on phone hacking. But that does still could not permit what appears actual obfuscation with sharing information with known victims including the Deputy Prime Minister of the time.