Hogan-Howe and Saunders should resign over ‘revolting, politically-motivated’ trials, says Sun royal editor

Cleared Sun royal editor Duncan Larcombe has called for the chief of Metropolitan Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions to resign.

Larcombe was speaking after the collapse on Friday of nearly all the Crown Prosecution Service’s Operation Elvdeen prosecutions against journalists.

Larcombe was himself found not guilty of conspiracy to pervert misconduct in a public office in March after a ten-week Old Bailey trial.

Reacting to the news on Friday that the CPS was dropping proceedings against nine journalists, he said: "It's bittersweet because I don't understand how anyone could justify that it could take three years – let alone all the taxpayers' money wasted – to bring cases to this point.

"The morning I was arrested and after nearly 14 hours of being in custody I went back to my local pub and told one of my best friends 'I don't understand how you can arrest journalists like this, it's ridiculous' and then it's taken three years down the line from that and finally that view that I expressed to my friend has sunk into the CPS.

"If it's wrong for a journalist to write about special treatment for Jon Venables, a child murderer and later exposed as a paedophile, if it's wrong for a Sun journalist to expose cover-ups within the MoD about faulty armour, inadequate vehicles – if that's wrong and if it's justified that, by writing stories like that, the CPS and police come after journalists then, to quote a front page, 'Will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights'.

"It's revolting. It's politically motivated and it's without justification."

Larcombe called for the Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to resign over Elveden – which he described as "an affront to a democratic country".

Scotland Yard said in a statement: "We acknowledge and accept the review of current Elveden matters, and we continue to work closely with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in respect of all outstanding cases under Weeting, Elveden and Tuleta."

Sun reporter Vince Soodin, who was told on Friday that his trial has been dropped, said: "I felt angry because I had been arrested in a dawn raid for doing my job.

"I felt angry that the CPS still pursued the case for another two and a half years after that arrest and I felt angry that they continue now to prosecute three more of my colleagues in the misguided witch-hunt against the popular press."

Soodin criticised the CPS for prosecuting him over a story about a fox attack on a child.

He said: "They had a precedent about the seriousness of this from the late 1970s. A police officer's conviction for misconduct in public office was quashed when he did not intervene in an attack upon a member of the public so how could they possibly think that a journalist receiving a story about a fox attacking a child at a school premises was above that bar. It's incredible."