Despite Amelia Hill, his crime reporter, being investigated over her rather inappropriate relationship with a police officer, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thought it fit to have an undisclosed meeting with Hogan Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner yesterday. We’re making this public today because the Guardian was very tight-lipped about it when Guido put it to them yesterday and refused to confirm or deny the meeting happened. We have now double confirmed it via our unofficial and official sources in the Metropolitan Police.

Alan Rusbridger and deputy editor Ian Katz were both at the meeting. Given that it was at 11 a.m. yesterday, alcohol wasn’t a problem, but Guido hopes that in view of the recently issued official advice to coppers on dealing with journalists, that there wasn’t any flirting. The Guardian have had twenty-four hours, but are still not commenting. Just imagine their front page splash if they had discovered that the Sun’s editor Dominic Mohan had met secretly with Hogan Howe…

See also: Ethical Issues Arising From The Relationship Between Police and Media

In his sworn statement the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, tells Lord Justice Leveson that to the best of his knowledge he has never used or commissioned anyone who had used “computer hacking”. Here is the extract from Rusbridger’s witness statement:

Except Patrick Foster on the Guardian media pages. He has twice been caught hacking computers. The latest incident was the disgraceful hacking of the police blogger NightJack’s Hotmail account. The Orwell Prize winning blogger was outed by Patrick Foster when he was on media correspondent of The Times. This was up there with his Oxford undergraduate days when the student rag had to be pulped after he identified the victim of a gay rape. Foster was subsequently fired from The Times on an unrelated matter and now freelances for the Guardian. It is an open secret that Patrick Foster was Guardian Media editor Dan Sabbagh’s nark source at The Times for many “inside Wapping” stories and that The Times’ management eventually figured this out and fired him under another pretext.

Rusbridger really ought to correct his sworn statement to reflect the truth.

Guido is happy to welcome Jacking Ashley into the Don’t Unseat Ed Miliband Association, but he’s not sure she’s doing the cause any favours with this morning’s hysterical hyperbole. While discussing Ed’s critics she compares their behaviour to US Marines urinating on dead Afghans:

“It’s a game that the Westminster village has always enjoyed. Nick Clegg was last year’s victim, now it’s Ed’s turn. If enough pundits treat him as the US marines treated the Afghan dead, and if the public notices and reflects this contempt back through opinion polls, then somehow or other he might collapse.”

They even link back to the Guardian’s own coverage of the incident, just in case you missed this gloriously unsubtle point. Guido is still trying to work out whether the comparison with holding the Leader of the Opposition to account was done with a straight face. He has a feeling it was…

Up in front of the Leveson Inquiry today the Daily Mirror editor Richard Wallace showed a fundamental lack of understanding about how the web worked by suggesting that if Guido signed up to some sort of kite-mark code our traffic would increase. He went on to refer to “out and out cowboys” of the blogosphere who the Inquiry has “had some problems with already“. Guido didn’t break the law publishing Campbell’s testimony, unlike Richard Wallace during his showbiz editor career period…

Leveson has already heard that as Piers Morgan’s showbiz editor, Wallace was up to his neck in phone-hacking. He’s been at the newspaper for twenty years, at a time when they have published mocked-up torture photos and the Trinity Mirror Group used the services of Steve Wittamore more than any other media organisation. During Wallace’s evidence giving Counsel for the Inquiry pointed to 681 invoices from Whittamore to the Mirror, hundreds of those illegal invoices would have been approved by Wallace himself. He admitted today that he has not sacked anyone for illegal activity, like aiding, abetting or procuring illegally blagged information, despite the Information Commissioner making the names available. He clearly doesn’t want another former employee speaking their mind… 

Our story about how the Daily Mirror came to have the Ulrika/Sven story – which was undoubtedly phone hacked – has just been referred to at the Inquiry during Wallace’s evidence (covered here). It was, as he himself admits, Wallace himself who presented it to the then editor Piers Morgan. He has just admitted to the Inquiry counsel that if, as he now claims, he “can’t remember the circumstances” of how the story was obtained, he can’t therefore rule out it was hacked. Even those who quibble about the provenance of the story merely quibble about from whom it was hacked.

More recently the Daily Mirror, under Wallace’s seemingly spotless editorial lead, destroyed the life of Chris Jefferies and paid a heavy financial price in doing so. Without any foundation whatsoever they painted an innocent neighbour of a murder victim out to be the perpetrator. They were also fined £50,000 for contempt of court over their atrociously slapdash reporting of the Joanna Yeates murder case.

Who is the real cowboy Mr Wallace?

Though he’s doing his best to avoid addressing the issue, it’s not just what Miliband would describe as the “right-wing press” that is gunning for him. If anything the lefties are even more vicious. The Indy’s cartoon has him relaunching in a coffin, while their report doesn’t hold back: “For all the good that his ‘relaunch’ will do him, Miliband might as well have spoken in Klingon… If politics is like sex, Ed will never find the national G-spot.”

After a week of gaffes, criticism of Ed’s leadership style has morphed into open mockery, even from those who should be allies. The Mail’s Quentin Letts points out:

“Miss Reeves, whose voice owes something to a Dogger Bank foghorn, said that ‘Ed has got the steely determination’ to succeed. This ignited chortles from certain Left-leaning broadsheet reporters”

It’s not just the Guardian editorials that will make Ed’s spinners wince, even the crossword setter is after him: “Miliband upset in cut vacillation (10).” – Indecision.

Despite Chris Blackhurst admitting that the paper’s reputation had suffered great damage at the hands of Johann Hari, the Indy editor also confirmed to Leveson, taking a sip of water and looking directly into the camera,  that the disgraced fraudster will be “returning as a columnist” in the next four or five weeks. He’s banned from conducting interviews though…

Apparently the fact Hari produced a doctor’s note saying he was mental was enough to satisfy the internal investigation, and subsequently the fearless inquiry into press ethics. No mention of late night racist, incest fantasy stories though..

Given that the system is already at breaking point, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing that the number of university applications is falling, but nearly all the papers this week have agreed that it is happening:

Mirror: “University applications fall 25,000″

Mail: “University applications down by 23,000″

Indy: “University applications down despite late surge”

Times: “Fewer British and European students apply to universities despite surge before deadline”

Telegraph: “University demand falls by 8%”

Guardian: “University applications slip by 8% as fees triple”

Only the FT bucked the trend with: “Students undeterred by higher University fees”

Guess which one of those pieces was written by a former adviser to David Willetts, the Minister responsible for universities?

Take a bow, spinner turned Education Correspondent and blog favourite, Chris Cook of the FT…

Only the most hysterical of haters are denying the role that the Mail played in the guilty verdict yesterday for Stephen Lawrence’s murderers. The role Paul Dacre and his journalists played is explained here, and even the Guardian have this morning described their 1997 front page as “without question, the Mail’s finest hour.” Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland goes on to give a powerful defence, all be it while wearing a plague doctor’s mask, of the tabloids:

“Tabloid editors don’t deny that they are in the business of entertaining as well as informing: broadsheet editors, if they are honest, will admit they do the same, albeit by different means (though sport and sex feature regularly in the Guardian’s “most viewed” stories online). But one senior executive told me he also believes it is his job to educate his readers, to explain the world in plain, accessible language. Even if that goal is rarely achieved, it is a noble one, one that any true democrat or egalitarian should support. For a true democracy cannot leave knowledge in the hands of the elite few; it has to be spread widely. So, yes, it has made the most gruesome mistakes and, yes, those will require severe remedy – but Britain needs its popular press, now more than ever.”

Given how the Guardian went about their campaign in the last year, many will feel this is either too little too late, or salt in a wound. You have to wonder how popular Freedland will be over at York Way this morning. The elephant in the article is a specific mention to the one tabloid that used to be the most effective of them all at informing, entertaining and holding those elites to account…

Loyal festive readers will recall that we ran a story just before Christmas about former Screws Chief Reporter Neville Thurlbeck. He was looking to rent out an apartment and was offering wedding chauffeur services. Given that the online adverts had his email address and mobile number in, we knew they were real. Mr Thurlbeck disputes some of the specifics on his new blog though, so, with due prominence:

“The “luxury Harrow-on-the-Hill apartment”, to which he refers, is not my home. It is a penthouse apartment and is one of 14 rental properties I own. The Mercedes S500 is not for sale. It is for hire as a wedding car and will be chauffeur driven by a retired taxi driver. The car for sale was actually a pristine Mercedes SL280 roadster but has been taken off the market as I quite like it. As for “Ned”, this is my nickname among very close friends and has been for 35 years… Thanks again and call me if you get married or need a roof over your head. I may even wear a peaked cap and drive you to church myself. “

No burying this one on Page 10 à la Rusbridger… 

Yesterday the Guardian published an article by former burlesque dancer Laurie Penny which claimed that

“Charlotte Church was 15 years old when Britain’s best-read daily newspaper began a public countdown to the day on which she could be legally f****d.”

The claim is totally false.

It was corrected after the Heresy Corner blog pointed out the false claim. This takes the number of corrections to stories published by the Guardian about News International tabloids to 38. All sense of proportion and indeed sense has gone out the window. The allegation was designed to deliberately characterise The Sun in the worst possible light.

UPDATE: They have managed in Grauniad style to cock-up the correction.