"With hindsight" were the watchwords of the afternoon at the Home Affairs Select Committee, as they grilled the outgoing Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, outgoing Assistant Commissioner John Yates, and current head of public affairs (for now, at least), Dick Fedorcio.
With hindsight all three of the police witnesses would have done things differently. With hindsight Neil Wallis - a former journalist who'd worked under Andy Coulson - shouldn't have been hired by the police as a PR consultant. With hindsight the first investigation into phone hacking was clearly flawed and inadequate.
But with hindsight perhaps the MPs would have been better-off seeing all their witnesses at once. Because interviewed separately as they were, they managed somehow to leave us little the wiser about the checks carried out by the Met before Neil Wallis was hired by them.
We were left unclear exactly how close a friend Neil Wallis was to former Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who resigned yesterday. Yates said they weren’t "bosom buddies living in each others' houses", although the Met’s Public Affairs man Dick Fedorcio had earlier suggested suggested they had been close.
Sir Paul Stephenson was asked why he didn't question the decision by the Met to hire Wallis as a PR advisor, given Wallis' connections to News International. Sir Paul was reminded of a report by the Information Commissioner's Office, which suggested that the News of the World had been involved in more than 200 cases of phone hacking.
He said: "That report mentioned News of the World and other newspapers. When I became Commissioner I looked at the risks ... and I have to say, and of course it's regrettable with hindsight... there was no reason for that to be on my desk, even with that report."
Some things are clear, though. The Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Ed Llewellyn, was offered a briefing on the background to Neil Wallis’ employment at the Met, and that was offer was refused.
Outgoing Assistant Commissioner John Yates told MPs, “It was a very brief email exchange and Ed, for whatever reason, and I completely understand it, didn’t think it was appropriate for him, the prime minister or anyone else at Number 10 to discuss this issue… Very simple, I can understand it in some sense.”
We also know from Sir Paul Stephenson that a quarter of the press team at the Metropolitan Police had at some point in their careers worked for News International.
At the start of the hearing Keith Vaz highlighted Sir Paul's resignation statement, in which he said:
Unlike Mr Coulson, Mr Wallis had not resigned from News of the World or, to the best of my knowledge been in any way associated with the original phone hacking investigation.
Vaz suggested that this constituted as swipe at the prime minister. Sir Paul replied: "I was taking no such swipe at the prime minister. I do agree with the PM when he says this is entirely different."
When asked to clarify this, Sir Paul said: "When Mr Coulson resigned ... by definition he associated his name with hacking. That is simply and blindingly obvious. I had no reason to doubt Mr Wallis' integrity. That is the difference. I was just trying to give an example that Mr Wallis' name never came into hacking."
Sir Paul insisted at the time he took up the post of Commissioner that he saw no reason to doubt the original police investigation into phone hacking, a probe now known to have been deeply flawed. Sir Paul said it was "very regrettable" that the information now known about phone hacking wasn't discovered in the original investigation.
As far as the committee was concerned, the most unsatisfactory evidence came from Dick Fedoricio. He claimed that John Yates conducted ‘a form of due diligence’ before Neil Wallis was appointed, saying ‘Neil Wallis gave John Yates categorical assurance that there was nothing in the previous phone hacking matters that could embarrass him, John Yates, or the Metropolitan Police.’
Fedoricio suggested that John Yates’ inquires were enough for him, despite the existing convictions for hacking by News of the World staff. “I think Mr. Yates asking Mr. Waliis that on more than one occasion is more than enough times”, he said.
Much of the public affairs director’s evidence was hazy. When asked who suggested he should hire Neil Wallis, he said he couldn’t recall. He said he didn't believe it was anyone from News International and that it definitely wasn't Rebekah Brooks, which brought a few laughs from the audience but didn’t impress the MPs on the committee at all.
At the end of his evidence the committee chairman Keith Vaz said he was ‘"Not sure we're any clearer at the end of this hearing than when we started”, adding, "We may be writing to you again."
And that was before the committee had heard from John Yates, who played down claims that he’d carried out “due diligence” and suggested that precise job should have been done by Fedorcio.
If the committee had seen all three men at once, they might have hammered out who asked - or should have asked - the right questions and who was supposed to be in charge of ‘due diligence’. But as it stands two things are obvious: Dick Fedoricio, the only witness still in his job, can expect a lot more heat. And so can Ed Llewellyn at Number 10.