Metro’s political editor John Higginson has highlighted an article in The Guardian from 2006 in which the paper’s investigations executive editor David Leigh admitted to intercepting voicemails.

Leigh’s defence was that he used phone-hacking to expose ‘bribery and corruption’and not ‘witless tittle-tattle about the royal family”.

But unlike the Data Protection Act, there is no public interest defence against phone-hacking under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000. The offence is punishable by a fine or up to two years’ imprisonment.