Prosecutors began an urgent review yesterday of case files relating to the tapping of telephones belonging to prominent politicians, sportsmen and celebrities.

Keir Starmer, QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, ordered a renewed examination of the successful case against a News of the World journalist and a private investigator. Clive Goodman, the newspaper’s former royal editor, and Glen Mulcaire, the investigator, were jailed in January 2007 for intercepting the voicemail messages of Clarence House aides.

The Guardian newspaper has claimed that thousands of people, including MPs, footballers, actors, models and other journalists, had their phone messages illegally hacked into.

It was further alleged that many of Goodman and Mulcaire’s “targets”, including the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, were not told by police about the threat to their privacy.

Mr Starmer said he had “no reason to consider that there was anything inappropriate in the prosecutions that were undertaken in this case”. Nevertheless, he had ordered prosecution lawyers to conduct an urgent examination of the material supplied by the police three years ago. He wanted to satisfy himself and assure the public that the appropriate actions were taken, Mr Starmer said.

The Metropolitan Police rejected calls for a new criminal inquiry into the affair and said that it had been comprehensively investigated by some of its most experienced detectives.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates said that Goodman and Mulcaire had engaged in a sophisticated and wideranging conspiracy to gather private and personal data, principally about prominent figures. “Their potential targets may have run into hundreds of people, but our inquiries showed that they only used the [tapping] tactic against a far smaller number.”

Mr Prescott had written to Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met Commissioner, to ask if he had been a target, but Mr Yates said: “This investigation has not uncovered any evidence to suggest that John Prescott’s phone had been tapped. No additional evidence has come to light since this case has concluded. I therefore consider that no further investigation is required.”

Where there had been clear evidence that people’s phones had been tapped, they had all been contacted by the police. Mr Yates added, however, that he would take further steps to ensure that those who suspected they might have been targets was given advice on protecting their privacy.

The investigation into Goodman and Mulcaire began in December 2005 when Scotland Yard received a complaint that the telephones of senior royal aides had been tapped. Suspicions arose after an item about Prince William suffering a knee injury appeared in the newspaper’s gossip column. Because of the Royal Family’s involvement, the case was taken on by Counter Terrorism Command, then led by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke.

Goodman’s relationship with Mulcaire was discovered and the two men put under surveillance. Detectives established that the pair had obtained the override passwords that mobile networks could use to access customers’ voicemails and were using them against a small group of people.

When Mulcaire’s office in Cheam, southwest London, was raided, detectives found “a war room” where he had compiled vast amounts of information about figures in public life. However, evidence of phone tapping applied to only a few of those in whom Mulcaire had taken an interest.

In his statement, Mr Yates said: “One was a private detective and one was a journalist. It is reasonable therefore to expect them to be in possession of data about such matters as it’s part and parcel of their job. Our inquiries were solely concerned with phone tapping. This, as far as we are aware, affected a much smaller pool of people.”

The investigation proceeded to prosecution in the cases where detectives had uncovered the strongest evidence of criminality. Goodman admitted conspiracy to intercept telephone communications. Mulcaire admitted the same charge and five similar counts.

The Old Bailey heard that they tapped into 609 messages left for the Clarence House staff. Mulcaire also admitted hacking into the phones of Elle Macpherson, the model, Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat MP, Max Clifford, the publicist, and Gordon Taylor, the chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association.

A media law firm said last night that it had a list of about 12 people who might join in a “class action” for damages if phones were tapped.

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