Guardian editor: Phone hacking insults our democracy

The failure of the police and the Press Complaints Commission to properly investigate the phone hacking scandal was an affront to democracy, the editor of the Guardian said today.

Alan Rusbridger told the Leveson inquiry into press behaviour that the scandal had been "shocking and immensely damaging" for the way a dominant media company was able to operate illegally, seemingly beyond the control of the police and Parliament.

He said: "There was, in short, a failure of the normal checks and balances in society to hold power to account."

Mr Rusbridger told day three of the inquiry that he failed to understand why phone hacking at News International had largely been ignored for 18 months despite the Guardian's revelations. He said: "Why did senior officers make untruthful statements about what had happened? Were MPs intimidated or put under surveillance or intimidated? Why did the PCC fail so lamentably to get to the truth?"

The inquiry was set up by David Cameron in July after revelations that the News of the World hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler when she vanished in 2002.