Boris deputy ‘pressured Met to limit phone hack inquiry’

Britain's most senior female police officer said today that Boris Johnson’s deputy mayor put repeated pressure on her to limit the phone hacking investigation.

Met Assistant Commissioner Cressida Dick told the Leveson inquiry that Kit Malthouse asked her three times to cut the number of detectives assigned to Operation Weeting, which is probing alleged criminality inside the Murdoch media empire.

Ms Dick, head of the Met’s counter-terror operations and Olympic security, claimed she had to ask him to stop on the third occasion. She said: “On a couple of occasions, Mr Malthouse, I thought jokingly, said, ‘I hope you are not putting too many resources into this.’ On the third occasion when he said it again I said, ‘That is my decision, not yours, and that is why I’m operationally independent.’

“I felt that I wanted to put down a marker... mainly because I did not want him to compromise himself.” She said she had to respond as Mr Malthouse was from “a particular political party” and appeared to be intervening in “such a charged investigation”.

Her evidence to the inquiry, which is examining the relationship between the Press and police, is likely to heap pressure on Mr Malthouse, who is deputy mayor for crime and policing.

Their exchange was around July last year, when he chaired the now-defunct Metropolitan Police Authority. It followed the disclosure that the News of the World hacked the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

A spokesman for Mr Malthouse said: “The job of the chair of the MPA, and now the deputy mayor for policing, is to question and probe the resource allocation decisions of senior police.

“It was entirely proper for Kit Malthouse to probe the reasoning behind allocation of resources into the phone hacking inquiry. [Mr Malthouse’s] job is to hold the Met police to account.”

Ms Dick criticised her one-time colleague, former assistant commissioner John Yates, for failing to disclose his friendship with ex-News of the World executive Neil Wallis. Mr Yates has faced criticism for failing to reopen the Met’s phone-hacking probe after the Guardian revealed the NoW targeted thousands of peoples’ voicemails.

Ms Dick said she was “totally unaware” of Mr Yates’s relationship with Mr Wallis, who has since been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking. She added: “If you do think you have any conflict [of interest] you have to discuss it with the boss.”