I am delighted that Anthony France won his appeal against his conviction for aiding and abetting a police officer to commit misconduct in a public office.
It was something of a foregone conclusion, with all his colleagues having rightly been cleared. But the fact of it is a relief for him and a further blow to the credibility of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and the Metropolitan police.
Operation Elveden, the police investigation into payments to police and public officials, can now be seen as a very expensive failure, and it caused long-lasting hurt.
Several of the prosecuted Sun journalists suffered terribly during the years of police bail when they were unable to work and believed their careers were at an end, as happened in some cases.
France’s reaction to the appeal court decision, in which spoke of a “serious miscarriage of justice” and enduring “1,379 days of sheer hell”, was anything but an exaggeration. Plenty of his colleagues felt the same way.
France, the Sun’s crime reporter, should never have been convicted. When the jury found against him in July 2015, I detected that the judge, Timothy Pontius, may have been somewhat sympathetic.
When sentencing France to an 18-month suspended jail term, he described him as a journalist of “hitherto unblemished character” who was “essentially a decent man of solid integrity”.
But let us not forget that Elveden resulted in several people who acted as journalists’ sources being convicted and jailed.
The documentary evidence against them was provided to the police by News International (now News UK) on Rupert Murdoch’s orders.
Moreover, the publisher had sanctioned the system of payments by its journalists to those sources. Yet there was no corporate prosecution.
The poor bloody infantry went down to face the guns while the generals remained untouched in their Wapping (now London Bridge) command post.