TELEPHONE TAPPING

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28314, 27 June 1957, Page 13

TELEPHONE TAPPING

Party Leaders To Confer (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, June 25. The Prime Minister (Mr Macmillan) today offered to confer with Labour and Liberal leaders on how * certain aspects of official telephone tapping in Britain should be handled in future. The disclosure earlier this month that a transcript of a lawyer’s private telephone conversation had been handed by the police to an outside body of lawyers, the Bar Council, to aid a disciplinary inquiry, has caused a storm of protest inside and outside Parliament. Mr Macmillan said he would be glad, together with the Home Secretary (Mr R. A. Butler) to confer with Mr Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Opposition, and Mr Joseph Grimond, the Liberal leader “with a view -to considering how certain aspects of this matter could best be handled in future.” He was replying in the House of Commons to suggestions that a committee should be set up to examine the recent controversial incident and also to advise Secretaries of State in future. Earlier today the Home Secretary refused to say whether the telephone lines of British members of Parliament had been tapped during the last five years.