BBC apologises to Queen for revealing private conversation about Abu Hamza

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Category: Law & Justice

Created on Tuesday, 25 September 2012 00:00

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BBC apologises to Queen for revealing private conversation about Abu Hamza

Security correspondent told how Queen lobbied home secretary to secure arrest of Islamist cleric

Peter Walker and Caroline Davies

{sidebar id=11 align=right}The BBC has apologised to the Queen after its security correspondent recounted a private conversation in which the monarch told him she had lobbied a home secretary to secure the arrest of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical Islamist cleric.

Frank Gardner said the monarch personally told him she was aghast that Abu Hamza, who faces imminent extradition to the US, could not be arrested during the period when he regularly aired vehemently anti-British views as imam of Finsbury Park mosque in north London.

The Queen never expresses overtly political views herself, and the convention for people conversing with her, for example at palace receptions or other meetings, is that whatever is said remains off the record.

{sidebar id=10 align=right}During an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme about the wider issue of the 54-year-old's newly approved extradition to the US, Gardner said of Abu Hamza's former activities that there was a sense MI5 had been too slow to realise how dangerous he was in radicalising other people.

Gardner continued: "Actually, I can tell you that the Queen was pretty upset that there was no way to arrest him. She couldn't understand – surely there had been some law that he had broken? In the end, sure enough, there was. He was eventually convicted and sentenced for seven years for soliciting murder and racial hatred."

A clearly surprised James Naughtie, interviewing Gardner, described this revelation as "a corker". Gardner said: "Yes, I thought I'd drop that in. She told me."

Gardner said: "She spoke to the home secretary at the time and said, surely this man must have broken some laws. Why is he still at large? He was conducting these radical activities and he called Britain a toilet. He was incredibly anti-British and yet he was sucking up money from this country for a long time. He was a huge embarrassment to Muslims, who condemned him."

The BBC reported that the corporation had written to Buckingham Palace to express their regret and that the conversation should have stayed private. Gardner's comments were "wholly inappropriate", the letter said, adding that the BBC correspondent was personally very sorry.

A Buckingham Palace spokeswoman said she had no comment on Gardner's interview.

Gardner did not specify which home secretary was lobbied, but it appears most likely to be David Blunkett, who held the post from 2001 to 2004, at the peak of Abu Hamza's infamy before he was arrested. Following his initial arrest in August 2004, Abu Hamza was convicted in 2006 of 11 charges connected to soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred.

There was no immediate comment from Blunkett's office. A spokesman for the republican pressure group Republic said the comments, if true, showed the monarch had needlessly "waded into the debate". He said: "It is up to parliament and the courts to deal with these complex issues, not the Queen. Monarchists argue the Queen always remains above politics. Clearly that is not the case."

The government has battled for eight years to secure Hamza's extradition to the US, where he is wanted in connection with alleged plans to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon, as well as claims he provided material support to the Taliban. He is also wanted in connection with allegations that he was involved in hostage-taking in Yemen in 1998.

Abu Hamza's fight against extradition ended on Monday when the European court of human rights rejected his appeal, as well as those of four other terrorism suspects, and agreed an earlier ruling that their human rights would not be violated by the prospect of life sentences and solitary confinement in a US prison.

The Queen's political views

Gardner's first-hand account of the Queen's specific views on a politically charged subject is notable for two reasons: firstly, the idea of the monarch directly lobbying a home secretary on so specific a subject, but also the sheer rarity of hearing her opinions at all.

Unlike Prince Charles and, to a lesser if more indiscreet extent, Prince Philip, the Queen more or less never expresses an overtly political view, barring perhaps her support for the 1982 Falklands war, in which the involvement of her own son, Prince Andrew, added a personal element.

This is not because she is not interested in such affairs, or informed: David Cameron is now the 12th prime minister with whom she has discussed the issues of the day in weekly chats. Yet such is the perceived importance of the political neutrality of her constitutional role, and the iron-clad convention that conversations with her remain unreported, that virtually no royal opinions leak out.

What does emerge is generally the personal: the official Downing Street website, for example, notes her warmer relations with some prime ministers, such as James Callaghan, than others, like Ted Heath.

Anything more political generally emerges, at best, via second-hand sources. Last year the former partner of Denis MacShane, Europe minister in the last Labour government, recounted the Queen saying at a Buckingham Palace drinks party that she opposed Turkey's EU membership. A 1996 book by the historian Ben Pimlott, based on interviews with royal courtiers and friends, portrayed her as almost left-leaning, supposedly questioning the wisdom of the Suez intervention and Margaret Thatcher's policies towards poor people.

Source: The Guardian UK

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Woman jailed for taking drugs to abort baby within week of expected birth

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Category: Law & Justice

Created on Monday, 17 September 2012 00:00

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Woman jailed for taking drugs to abort baby within week of expected birth

Mother of two, who believed child was result of affair, convicted of administering poison with intent to cause miscarriage

Martin Wainwright

{sidebar id=11 align=right}A woman who bought drugs on the internet in order to abort her own baby within a week of his expected birth has been jailed for eight years for administering poison with intent to cause a miscarriage.

Sarah Catt, 35, and a married mother of two, believed the child was the result of a seven-year affair and had kept her pregnancy secret from her "highly supportive" husband.

She carried on with an outwardly normal life, including a holiday in France, while secretly buying drugs from India, having a stillborn child and disposing of his body. She was told by a judge at Leeds crown court that she had "robbed an apparently healthy child, vulnerable and defenceless, of the life which he was about to commence".

The court heard Catt had failed to arrange an abortion before the legal limit of 24 weeks, and so scoured the internet with search terms such as "where can I get an illegal abortion?" and "inducing an abortion at 30 weeks". Mr Justice Cooke told her that her crime, which saw the drugs flown from Mumbai and delivered to her home at Sherburn-in-Elmet, ranked between manslaughter and murder on the criminal scale.

{sidebar id=10 align=right}He said: "The child in the womb was so near to birth that in my judgment all right-thinking people would think this offence more serious than unintentional manslaughter. What you did was end the life of a child that was capable of being born alive, by inducing birth or miscarriage."

Had Catt delayed only a few days more and killed the baby after birth, the charge would have been murder.

The court was told by Frances Oldham QC in mitigation that Catt had been a "supportive and loving mother" to the two children she has with her husband and would never forgive herself for the pain she had inflicted on her family. But she had a troubled history of conception and childbirth, giving a child up for adoption in 1999, having an earlier termination with her husband's agreement, trying to terminate a further pregnancy but missing the legal limit, and concealing another pregnancy from her husband before the child's birth.

She became pregnant again in 2009 and told the man she was having an affair with, before breaking things off with him and then re-starting the liaison. She is believed to have taken the drugs from India towards the end of May when she was nearly 40 weeks pregnant.

Following suspicions about the pregnancy, she was arrested in September 2010 and told police at several interviews over the next year that she had secured a legal abortion at a clinic. She finally admitted the truth earlier this year, telling a psychiatrist that she had delivered the stillborn baby herself while her husband was away, and buried it. She would not say where, and no trace of the child has been found.

The judge told her at the hour-long hearing: "The critical element of your offending is the deliberate choice made by you, in full knowledge of the due date of your child, to terminate the pregnancy at somewhere close to term, if not actually at term, with the full knowledge that termination after week 24 was unlawful and in full knowledge your child's birth was imminent."

Oldham said Catt had asked her to tell her husband and children that she was sorry and was aware that the crime was "a burden that she will bear for the rest of her life". But Catt showed no outward emotion during the hearing and she was described by police afterwards as "cold and calculating".

Chief inspector Kerrin Smith said: "One of the difficulties faced by the investigation team was convincing other parties in the criminal justice system that a woman could conceal a full-term pregnancy from all around her, even her husband, and that she could give birth and then carry on everyday activities. Catt's previous history with regard to her pregnancies, and in her admissions to the police, show that she is more than capable of being extremely deceitful in her actions.

"She has proved to be cold and calculating and has shown no remorse or given an explanation for what she did, lying to the police, health professionals and her family throughout the investigation. I only hope that now she has been sentenced and has time to reflect on her actions, that she will reveal where the body of her baby is, so that we can ensure a compassionate conclusion to this very sad investigation."

Source: The Guardian UK

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Nick Clegg: I'm not sorry for apologising

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Category: Current Issues

Created on Saturday, 22 September 2012 10:03

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Nick Clegg: I'm not sorry for apologising

{sidebar id=1 align=right}Nick Clegg faces a difficult Lib Dem conference but the Deputy Prime Minister still manages to laugh at himself. "I just hope that reasonable people – whether they have heard it to music or not – will think OK, fair enough, he's come clean," he smiles, referring to the spoof video setting his apology to music.

Asked whether he has any regrets about his risky move, the Deputy Prime Minister quipped: "What, you want me to apologise for the apology? Of course not!" He thought long and hard about it. He was not surprised at the hostile reaction but is playing a much longer game.

"When you do something like this, you get one bunch of people saying 'that's not good enough'. But I hope there are a significant number of others who say it's unusual – politicians don't do this – but at least he has the decency to put his hands up and say he has made a mistake."

{sidebar id=10 align=right}Halfway through the five-year parliament, Mr Clegg sensed the time was right to get his long-planned apology off his chest. "Sometimes to focus on the good stuff you need to put your hand up where you made a mistake," he explained. "I don't want this [fees] to obscure the big things we are doing in government, which I am genuinely proud of and will stand the test of time. We will look back on with real pride as a party and say if it were not for the Libs Dems, we wouldn't have a Green Investment Bank, a guarantee that state pensions go up, fewer people paying income tax."

Mr Clegg knows the media will be scouring every inch of the Brighton conference centre and hotel bars to find Lib Dems who will call on him to stand down as leader, and probably succeed. But he will not entertain the prospect that he might one day have to consider the question an increasing number of people in his own party are asking: is he the right man to lead it into the 2015 election?

"We are halfway up a mountain on an incredibly difficult journey for the party and the country. I know that some people in the party want to stand still or turn back. The worse thing to do when are on a difficult political journey is to lose your nerve and bale out. This is why I am determined to lead the party through the journey – from the beginning, middle to end. That means leading the party through the election and beyond. If I didn't feel I was capable of doing that, if I didn't feel I had the fuel in the tank to do it, I wouldn't."

He finds the leadership speculation "totally unsurprising" given his and his party's opinion poll rating. "Bluntly, some people lose their nerve."

He added: "One of the signs of strong leadership is that you have people shouting at you from the sidelines. If everyone agreed in the party, I would be failing in my job. I have never been an insipid leader."

In Brighton, Mr Clegg will offer his party's activists some reassurance. Many fear another round of spending cuts. His message is that he will not roll over. In the short term, that means no blanket freeze in state benefits for two years from next April, as the Treasury wants. "We are not going to do an across-the-board, two-year freeze of all benefits during this parliament. I have seen that mooted. It is not on the cards," he said.

In the medium term, it means the Lib Dems will not sign up to cuts running well into the next parliament. They will do the bare minimum – a one-year extension to the existing spending plans which run to 2014-15. "What I will not allow to happen is for the Lib Dems to be bound hand and foot to Conservative spending plans over the whole of the next parliament," he said.

Mr Clegg will tell his party he will not sign up to any post-2015 cuts unless the Tories concede a wealth tax in return. "For me, it is very simple. You can't have more cuts without more wealth taxes. It has got to be a balanced process," he said. "You have got to ask people with the broadest shoulders to make the greatest contribution."

Mr Clegg is ready to allow some more welfare savings after 2015 – but not the £10bn sought by George Osborne. "It is absolutely vital that we do it as fairly as possible. That includes asking the wealthy to make a contribution to this national effort," he said.

"There is a big deal to be done [with the Tories]. Unearned wealth should be more fully reflected in the tax system. In return, you can lower taxes on initiative, enterprise and hard work, not least by raising the tax allowance in the way we have."

Noises off apart, the Lib Dem conference will be dominated by the economy. Mr Clegg's message to his party will be that the Government's strategy is "pragmatic not dogmatic" and much more creative and flexible than the Coalition is given credit for. He described the approach as "Plan A plus, plus, plus", claiming the Coalition is sticking to Plan A to "keep the bond markets off our back" and avoid the fate of Eurozone countries, while boosting domestic demand. One example he gives is using the Government's balance sheet to give guarantees on £40bn of infrastructure spending.

Surprisingly, he even uses the K-word – Keynes – normally associated with Labour's approach even though the great economist himself was a Liberal. "We are seeing a traditional Keynesian outcome delivered through unconventional means," he said.

To critics saying the Coalition should "do an Obama" and stimulate the economy, he replies: "We are doing a lot of it. There is a completely false choice between a dogmatic, blinkered Plan A and the nirvana of Plan B," he said.

However, the conference will see a watershed moment when Danny Alexander, the Chief Treasury Secretary, proposes a motion critical of the obstruction of the green agenda by his boss, George Osborne.

"The idea that going green and going for growth is incompatible is just wrong," said Mr Clegg. "What investors want is long-term certainty. I think we have a duty across the Coalition to provide that certainty and not to inhibit the potential for further growth and further jobs by sending out mixed signals."

Mr Clegg ends on a note of hard-nosed realism. Life will not be perfect in 2015, he said, but he hopes to show the economy and country are moving in the right direction. "When I stand up in the [TV] leadership debates at the next election, I will be a different person to last time, when many voters had no idea who I was. We will be a battle-hardened party and I will bear the scars to show it. If we hold our nerve, I believe many fair-minded people in Britain will think 'we didn't like this decision or that decision, but on the big judgments they got it right.'"

By Andrew Grice

Source: From the Belfast Telegraph UK

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Topless Kate photos: royals sue Closer

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Category: DateLines

Created on Friday, 14 September 2012 10:03

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Topless Kate photos: royals sue Closer

St James's Palace confirms Kate and William are launching proceedings against Silvio Berlusconi-owned magazine

Lisa O'Carroll

{sidebar id=11 align=right}The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have launched legal proceedings in France against the Silvio Berlusconi-owned celebrity magazine which published photographs of the duchess sunbathing topless, in a bid to put a line in the sand and stop any future invasion of the royal couple's privacy.

The move comes hours after St James's Palace roundly condemned the move by Closer magazine, which is owned by the former Italian president Berlusconi's publishing empire Mondadori.

In a statement, a spokesman for the couple said: "St James's Palace confirms that legal proceedings for breach of privacy have been commenced today in France by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge against the editor and publishers of Closer magazine, France."

Earlier on Friday, in another strongly worded statement, the palace said the royal couple were hugely saddened by what it described as a "grotesque and totally unjustifiable" invasion of their privacy.

St James's Palace was unequivocal in its condemnation of Closer. "The incident is reminiscent of the worst excesses of the press and paparazzi during the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, and all the more upsetting to the duke and duchess for being so.

"Their royal highnesses had every expectation of privacy in the remote house. It is unthinkable that anyone should take such photographs, let alone publish them."

The magazine's publication of the intrusive pictures re-ignited memories of the pursuit of the duke's mother, Princess Diana, by paparazzi on the night of her death in a high-speed car accident in a Paris tunnel.

Legal action will be taken under French privacy law, considered the toughest in Europe, with potential for both civil and criminal cases.

French media lawyer Jean Frederic Gaultier of Olswangs said under French criminal law, the magazine could face a fine of up to €45,000 (£36,000) and the editor could be jailed for up to 12 months.

"There could be a case for criminal action, if the photographs are taken or a voice is recorded in a private place without the people knowing. They were in a private place, so in my view this was a breach of law," said Gaultier.

He said it was unheard of for an editor to be jailed and celebrity magazines in France are generally willing to risk fines if the benefits of boosting circulation and revenues outweigh any fines for breaching the law.

Over five pages, Closer published what it described as exclusive pictures of the duchesss topless under the headline: "Oh my God – sex and sun en Provence." The pictures were apparently taken on the terrace of a guest house during a brief holiday with the duke in France last week.

Royal photographer Harry Page told Sky News that from what he had seen, they were taken with long lenses and the couple would have had no idea they were being photographed.

Closer magazine defended its decision, with its editor-in-chief Laurence Pieau describing the photos as a beautiful series that showed a couple in love and saying they were in no way degrading.

She said the magazine had more intimate shots from the same series that it opted not to publish. "There's been an over-reaction to these photos. What we see is a young couple, who just got married, who are very much in love, who are splendid," Pieau told French TV news channel BFM.

"She's a real 21st Century princess," she added: "It's a young woman who is topless, the same as you can see on any beach in France or around the world."

Closer published a dozen shots of the duchess as she relaxed in Provence at a chateau owned by Lord Linley, the Queen's nephew, ahead of the couple's diamond jubilee tour of south-east Asia and the South Pacific on behalf of the Queen.

With a cover headline Oh my God!, the photos show the couple soaking up the sun on the balcony of a 19th-century hunting lodge, oblivious to lurking paparazzi.

They show her taking off her bikini top, sunbathing on a sun lounger and at one point pulled down the back of her bikini bottoms as Prince William applies sun cream.

Sources at St James's Palace said they had no advance warning about the photos before publication and by the time they learned of Closer's plans it was too late to try and get an injunction to prevent the magazine going on sale in France on Friday morning.

The publication of the pictures is a blow to Buckingham Palace as it tries to move on from a scandal over naked shots of Prince Harry that tarred the image of the royal family, which had been bolstered by the duke and duchess's wedding, the Queen's 2012 diamond jubilee and her surprise cameo in the London Olympics opening ceremony.

Newspapers in Britain were not offered the photographs publisher by Closer. They were offered a different set of long-lens shots last week, but turned them down.

Publication of the pictures was also condemned by Bauer, the owner of Closer magazine in the UK, which had licensed Berlusconi's company to publish the French version. The company demanded Closer remove the pictures from its website immediately and in a veiled threat to sever ties with the publisher, said it was "reviewing the terms of our licence agreement with Closer France".

"Like our readers, we are appalled and regret the pain the publication of these photographs has caused," said Paul Keenan, chief executive of Bauer media, who said the company "deplore the publication of these intrusive and offensive pictures".

Executives on two national tabloids said the set of photos being touted around last week were different. "They were also long lens, but you couldn't see anything. These pictures nobody has seen, as far I am aware," one picture editor said.

Page, a photographer who has worked with national newspapers for the past 30 years, said: "From what I have seen, these photos have been taken from a very long way. Kate and William would have had no idea they were being taken.

"They were on a 640-acre estate in the south of France. I think they would have expected a certain degree of privacy. They were on a private holiday.

"Remember the toe-sucking photos of Fergie [Sarah Ferguson], again in the south of France. That is exactly 20 years ago this month and there was a scramble for them. But now there is not a single newspaper in Britain who would publish these pictures."

The royal family only rarely and reluctantly resorts to legal action over media coverage, despite being constantly in the spotlight. The Duchess of Cambridge has taken action over invasion of privacy once before, receiving an apology, damages and legal costs from picture agency Rex in March 2010 after it distributed photos of her taken during a private holiday in Cornwall.

The Prince of Wales won a protracted legal battle over privacy with the Mail on Sunday in late 2006, when the court of appeal ruled that the paper had infringed his copyright and confidentiality by publishing extracts from his private diaries about the handover of Hong Kong in 1997.

Princess Diana sued the Sunday Mirror and Daily Mirror in 1993 over secretly-taken pictures of her exercising in a gym and won an injunction against the publishing preventing further publication. The Queen dropped legal action against the Daily Mirror after a reporter breached royal security to work as a palace footman in 2003.

The publication of the topless pictures of the duchess are also likely to be taken into account by Lord Justice Leveson, who is currently drafting his final report offering recommendations to the government on the future of press regulation. The latest controversy will underline the difficulties any future British regulator will have in controlling overseas internet publication of content that can be viewed online in the UK.

Source: The Guardian UK

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