Ex-Murdoch editor was lent police horse As a British judicial investigation examined the "inappropriate" relationship between the police and News International, it emerged on Tuesday that Scotland Yard lent Rebekah Brooks, a former tabloid editor, a retired service horse for two years. Ms Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World and The Sun and former chief executive of NI, received the loan of a retired horse, which she kept at her home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, between 2008 and 2010. The arrangement began a year after two men were jailed for hacking mobile phones on behalf of the News of the World, but before it was alleged in 2009 that the illicit technique was widespread at the paper. The phone-hacking scandal, which led to the closure of the Sunday tabloid, was dormant at the time of the loan by the mounted branch of Scotland Yard, which a police spokesman said on Tuesday was not unusual. "When a police horse reaches the end of its working life, Mounted Branch officers find it a suitable retirement home," the spokesman said. Whilst responsibility for feeding the animal and paying vet bills passes to the person entrusted to its care at its new home, the horse remains the property of the Metropolitan Police Service. Retired police horses are not sold on and can be returned to the care of the MPS at any time. In 2008 a retired MPS horse was loaned to Rebekah Brooks. The horse was subsequently rehoused with a police officer in 2010. At the inquiry into media practices led by Lord Justice Leveson, Simon Hughes, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats party, said the police failure to investigate properly in 2006, when they restricted inquiries to a single, rogue reporter, was "completely unacceptable." He revealed that he had asked Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, to press for parliamentary time in 2013 so that the Leveson inquiry recommendations could be enacted if appropriate. Mr Hughes, a victim of the phone hacking, explained that the police had failed to tell him that Glenn Mulcaire, the private detective jailed for hacking on behalf of the paper, had put him and friends who had nothing to do with any scandal surrounding his family life under surveillance. He also pointed to the failure of the police during the trial at which Mulcaire and Clive Goodman, the royal editor of the News of the World, were convicted in 2006, to reveal the scale of payments to the private detective. Mulcaire was jailed on the basis that he received £12,500. In fact, NI paid him at least £469,000 over five years and probably more than £1m, said Mr Hughes. Jacqui Hames, a retired police officer who presented the Crimewatch programme on BBC1, came close to tears as she described the surveillance under which she and her husband, then a senior serving detective, were put by the News of the World. The paper had claimed the two were having an affair, despite the fact they were married at the time, said Ms Hames. She believed it was because her husband was investigating a murder case and that the newspaper was acting in a way that might intimidate him. She believed that those under suspicion of murdering Daniel Morgan, a south London private detective, in 1987, had been working with someone at the newspaper. Ms Hames said: "Any reasonable person would find it difficult not to put [the pieces of information held by Glenn Mulcaire] together and feel that in some way there was some collusion between the people at the News of the World and the people who were suspected of committing the murder of Daniel Morgan."