The cruel arrest and failed prosecution of former detective chief superintendent Dave Cook shows the extent to which those in power will go to ensure that Britain has secret police.

And it underlines again how News Corp allowed its Management and Standards Committee, set up at the height of the hacking scandal in 2011, to betray its own journalists and their confidential sources.

Cook was cleared by the Independent Police Complaints Commission yesterday nearly four years after his arrest in a dawn raid back in January 2012 on suspicion of misconduct in a public office.