PLEASE NOTE "THE ANDREW MARR SHOW" MUST BE CREDITED IF ANY PART OF THIS TRANSCRIPT IS USED Andrew Marr interviewed Yvette Cooper, shadow Home Secretary. ANDREW MARR We were discussing earlier on one group who have very serious questions to answer are the Metropolitan Police obviously whose investigations into phone hacking were so half-hearted for so long and whose officers seem to have been so closely connected to the Murdoch empire they were meant to be scrutinizing. Well I'm joined now from Leeds by the Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. Good morning and welcome. YVETTE COOPER: Good morning, Andrew. ANDREW MARR: You've seen yet more allegations - because they're only allegations at this stage - about police officers taking money and being very, very close to some of the Murdoch people as well. What's your assessment of the scale of the crisis for the Met this morning? YVETTE COOPER: Well I think you're right - we've got a drip-drip now of allegations, of information that does raise I think some very serious questions. I've been calling for some time for full disclose from the Met, for them to be completely open and transparent about all of the links with News of the World. I still think they should do that; they should have done so already. I think the drip-drip does mean that there is a cloud created over the Met as a result of this, and I do think both the Met leadership and also the Home Secretary need to take some action now to make sure that you can resolve this for the future. You can't have this sort of thing tarnishing the reputation of the Met. ANDREW MARR: Do you think Sir Paul Stephenson at the top of the Met is now fatally damaged? YVETTE COOPER: Well I think that he needs to act now to restore confidence in the leadership of the Met. That includes the full disclosure and it also includes recognising mistakes that have been made and also setting out action for the future. I hope that he can do that. But I also think the Home Secretary needs to do that too because this is partly her responsibility, what the confidence is in British policing. So you know she should be demanding full disclosure, she should be setting out what action the Met needs to take in order to restore that confidence, and at the moment she seems to be doing the opposite. She's saying all of this can wait until the judicial inquiry. It cannot possibly wait for what could be years for conclusions from the judicial inquiry. What we need is this to be resolved now, so that you know police officers across the capital and across the country can get on with their job without their reputation being affected. ANDREW MARR: Yuh. Because this is a difficult situation because the people running the Met are responsible for huge issues - the anti-terrorism affairs, the future of the policing of the Olympics, never mind the day to day running of the law and order around London. And we now have a group of people who are being got at day after day after day in the newspapers with some really serious allegations - Stephenson, Yates and all the rest of it. We both need them or we need people like them, and yet they're all in deep, deep trouble, aren't they? YVETTE COOPER: Well I think the important thing is you've got to have confidence in the way that policing is taking place. There's got to be public respect for policing as well. Now I've always said I think Sir Paul Stephenson has been doing a good job in fighting crime in London, but I think that he needs to act on this now but so too does the Home Secretary. Because you know she needs to demonstrate if she's got full disclosure, if she's got full answers to these questions which we haven't yet seen publicly and she has continued confidence in the Met, which you know I hope she'd be able to do that. But, if so, she needs to say so and not simply you know hide and wait for this to go away. The reason I think this is important is because you know, for example, the question about the Met taking on Neil Wallis, the Deputy Editor of the News of the World, that's a very questionable employment judgement, there are important questions need to be answered. But they are the same questions of course that go to Downing Street about their decision to employ the editor of the News of the World, and so I am concerned the Home Secretary's not pursuing this and not making sure this is resolved exactly because she is reticent because the same kind of cloud and the same kind of questions hang over Downing Street as well. ANDREW MARR: But surely the difference is that Neil Wallis's employment was generally not known either by politicians or by anybody else at the time, and we've got the Champneys allegations in the Sunday Times this morning again involving the same individual. What's your view about that? YVETTE COOPER: Well I think again you're right - that transparency is at the heart of that - but we don't actually still have transparency from the Prime Minister on things like you know what were the security and probity and propriety checks that he did on taking on Andy Coulson, just as we don't have those answers from the Met about the employment of Neil Wallis. ANDREW MARR: (over) But you … YVETTE COOPER: So I think you know … I think those questions … I do think there are still questions for Downing Street. On the issue of the stories on the front page of the Sunday Times, as you say we haven't yet had answers on that one. That looks like that's a separate issue from the questions about hacking, but again we don't know the answers yet. So what's important I think is you have the full disclosure, you have the full information. But you know I haven't seen the answers to those questions, but I think the Home Secretary should have made sure that she has seen the answers to the questions. She can't just leave this to the judicial inquiry. She needs to be pursuing this now. She needs to be making sure we can all of us have confidence in the work the Met is doing. ANDREW MARR: Labour's having you know a good campaign so far on all of this, and yet there was nobody who was closer and keener to kind of suck up to Rupert Murdoch and his editors in the old days than your former boss, Gordon Brown, your former leader Tony Blair. Any thoughts about Labour's real embarrassment at getting so close to people you are now castigating and excoriating? YVETTE COOPER: Well I think … I mean you know Ed Miliband has said you know there should have been stronger questioning in the past; that you know actually I think that relationship between the press and politics, as well as the questions about the relationship between the press and the police, is one that we should have exposed earlier. And I think that's why it's right that you know Ed has now been talking about the importance of addressing this cross media ownership issue that wasn't dealt with, wasn't talked about before. So he's right I think to say you know that we should have now stronger controls on cross media ownership. That's what we will be putting to the judicial inquiry because I think we shouldn't have those sorts of concentrations of media power and we've got to learn lessons from what's happened, not simply have two weeks of outrage where we don't then take action for the future. ANDREW MARR: Were you surprised that Andy Coulson was invited to Chequers after he'd left employment of No. 10? YVETTE COOPER: Very surprised. I think it does raise again further questions about the judgement of the Prime Minister that has really been in question throughout this. We know that the Prime Minister was warned against taking Andy Coulson on and taking him into Downing Street by a whole series of very senior people, including the Liberal Democrats, including the media and the newspapers. He chose to do so and he chose to continue that connection since, and it does raise questions about you know what they discussed just as it raises questions about you know what was discussed about BSkyB … ANDREW MARR: Sure. YVETTE COOPER: … and the continued contacts that he had with News International as well. ANDREW MARR: Any friendly advice for Gordon Brown whose intervention was scarcely helpful to your case today? I mean he's clearly very, very angry about all sorts of things and yet he seems to have been making allegations which are either impossible to substantiate or he hasn't been able to substantiate. YVETTE COOPER: Well I haven't seen the information that I know Gordon Brown has said he has on all of these things, so I haven't seen that. I do know though that you know for him and for the whole family it was very distressing to have to deal with the, you know the things that were being said and being written in the newspapers about the health of their son. I think you know that did cause great distress for them. And so you know he has you know talked about information that he has and I haven't seen that, but I think you know these are exactly the reasons why you need this judicial inquiry - to actually get to the bottom of all of that. ANDREW MARR: Alright. Yvette Cooper, thank you very much indeed for joining us this morning. YVETTE COOPER: (over) Thank you. INTERVIEW ENDS
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