The former deputy editor of the News of the World has denied having an “arm lock” on senior figures in the Metropolitan Police.Neil Wallis, who appeared before the Leveson Inquiry in December last year, was recalled today to answer further questions on the nature of his relationships with senior officers in the force.He added: “I have not put an arm lock on any of those people. I have built up relationships over a number of years, and I they feel that it is of use to them to have that relationship. To a certain extent, it’s not my call is it?”His evidence follows the resignation of the Met’s head of press, Dick Fedorcio, who faced disciplinary action over his hiring of Wallis’s PR firm Chamy Media in 2009.The former journalist denied making himself more “tantalising” to the Met, when offering his company to fill in for Fedorcio’s deputy, who was on an extended leave of absence. Wallis said he had a “good working relationship” with Fedorcio that spanned 15 years and denied any impropriety over the £24,000 contract with the Met, lasting from October 2009 to September 2010.Fedorcio denied the contract had been set up to ensure Chamy obtained it, after he told the inquiry PR firms Bell Pottinger and Hanover submitted rival bids. Lord Justice Leveson suggested at the time he knew they would enter higher bids than Wallis' company. Wallis denied contacting Fedorcio so News of the World journalists would receive preferential treatment.He added: “It was pretty much dealt with by the news desk, [crime reporter] Lucy Panton, they all had his phone number. They all knew Dick. He wasn’t some shrinking violet. I didn’t need to get involved in these things.“She’s known Dick longer than I have, I think, and she had a perfectly good relationship and it benefited Dick on occasion if he wanted to call us.”Wallis spoke of his relationships with several senior officers including former commissioners Lord Condon, Lord Blair and Sir Paul Stephenson, and assistant commissioners John Yates and Andy Hayman.In his written statement he described having the mobile phone numbers of Stevens, Stephenson, Yates, Hayman and Fedorcio as well as the home numbers of Stevens, Yates and Fedorcio.He said: “I would have a personal view and I would say to whoever I was talking to: ‘I think this’. If a hoofing great story came along that wasn’t convenient to that, first and foremost I’m a journalist and the hoofing great story went in the paper.”Lord Justice Leveson questioned his evidence, saying: “We know a lot more about your friendship with some senior police officers than transpired in the hospitality register, don't we?”Wallis said his relationship with Lord Condon, commissioner from 1993 to 2000, had grown out of meeting at functions and meals.He added: “I’d give him my views, and if he found them interesting or if he found them useful then I was glad. We talked on a number of issues.”He said the relationship was corporate and strategic, and beneficial to both the Met and the Sun, the paper he was then working at.Wallis described Lord Stevens, who headed the force from 2000 to 2005, as a commissioner who “cared about the Met a lot”. He said he “did the best he could” to advance Stevens’s application as he agreed with the officer’s view on press relationships with police, and gave him public relations advice.He said: “What I knew about John Stevens was that he had a view about how the police and press should interact... he had a view that I agreed with and was also convenient for him and was also good for newspapers. So if you like, the opposite of a perfect storm. A perfect sunburst.”Wallis denied having a preferential relationship with Stevens, and said the commissioner frequently spoke to journalists and editors, including editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre. He said he wanted to be taken seriously by senior officers as this allowed him to alert them to criminal activity his newspaper picked up on. Wallis was not questioned over the relationships with Condon or Stevens when giving evidence last year.On Stevens, he later added: “The suggestion is that this man of integrity, of experience, of immense crime fighting ability is going to be seduced by me taking him [for] steak and chips and a nice bottle of wine, I just can’t begin to see where this comes from.”He described Lord Blair, commissioner from 2005 to 2008, as a bad communicator and said he took a very different view from Stevens when dealing with the tabloid press.He added: “He was a very cerebral man. He saw himself very much as somebody who didn’t want to pursue those sorts of contacts, so, you know, didn’t.”Wallis told the inquiry Blair had visited the News of the World offices, and told journalists Stevens, whose column for the paper, ghostwritten by Wallis, was called ‘The Chief’: “I don’t know how you can call him the chief, he’s not the chief anymore - I am.”He said Blair had damaged his reputation by referring the shooting of Jean Charles de Menenzes in 2005 by Met officers, as a “Houston, we have a problem” moment.Wallis said Lucy Panton and managing editor Stuart Kuttner had interviewed the commissioner following the 7/7 bombings, intended as a good public relations opportunity for the force.He added: “It was a wonderful example of his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. He had absolutely no work to do on this, but his arrogance and his views regarding that sort of phrase, of the killing of an innocent man – ‘Houston we have a problem’. You know, we’re journalists so we stuck that in as a headline and it didn’t go down too well.He referred to six dinners with Sir Paul Stephenson, during his tenure from 2009 to 2011.Wallis went on to describe former assistant commissioner John Yates as “an immensely impressive bloke”. In his previous evidence, Wallis had admitted to a personal friendship with Yates, who confirmed the relationship.The pair maintain they struck up a friendship over their mutual love of sports, particularly football, and attended two or three matches together outside of work. He said dinners with Yates and property developer Nick Candy, previously raised while the former assistant commissioner was giving evidence earlier this year, comprised of “chit-chat” around current events.Yates admitted last month the pair had discussed work but said their conversations had mainly been about family life and football. The inquiry went through his hospitality register, which showed several dinner meetings and drinks with Wallis during his time at the Met.He told the inquiry: “There was a life outside the Met, and I’m sure there’s a life outside of News international for him.”It has been suggested at the inquiry that Yates, who lead a review of the original phone hacking investigation in 2009, failed to reopen the case due to his friendship with Wallis. The former deputy editor was arrested last July under Operation Weeting.Wallis described obtaining footage of how a failed shoe bomb attack, attempted in 2005, could have impacted if successful, from Andy Hayman to publish on the News of the World website.In his written statement, Wallis said: “I was persistent in my advice to Hayman that this footage would have a profound effect if released into the public domain as a result of which he provided to the News of the World.He added: “It wouldn’t have been published in any way if it hadn’t have been my newspaper’s idea... This was an asset they didn’t know they had.”“The upshot of us publishing it was that video appeared in other newspapers, on television, and went around the world. It was a rather good idea.”He further defended his meals with senior officers to the inquiry, saying working lunches were a successful way of doing business and he nurtured contacts “because that’s what journalists do”.He said: “There seems to be almost a presumption that it’s somehow wrong, the idea that people like senior journalist should have access to senior opinion-formers... it’s actually quite important to a free press that a senior journalist can sit down and have off-the-record conversations with a whole variety of people.“Whether they be judges, whether they be police officers, whether they be politicians. I have done all of those things.”He became visibly angered when questioned over the hiring of his daughter, Amy Wallis, by the Met after he sent her CV to John Yates. He went on to claim that Met officers Catherine Crawford and Tim Godwin referred relatives and neighbours to him for work experience.He told Robert Jay QC, inquiry counsel: “You’re name checking her, she’s trying to build a career and her name is constantly being put into the public domain over something the IPCC [Independent Police Complaints Commission] have said she has done nothing wrong whatsoever – I did nothing wrong whatsoever. John Yates did nothing wrong whatsoever.”Yates told the inquiry last month: "As I've said before I completely equivocal about whether Amy got the job or not, and I had no influence on it at all. As has been confirmed."Wallis had also been recalled to answer questions on journalists interacting with the police during investigations, and said it was “fair game” for papers to report on raids they had been invited on by officers.He said former News of the World reporter Mazher Mahmood, otherwise known as the ‘Fake Sheikh’, had worked on several investigations with the police, including a case in which a drug-addicted woman had attempted to sell her baby. Wallis said in that particular case he had contacted Yates to provide information.He added: “Sometimes storms happen and they shouldn’t but they do. The McCanns: you’ve got this perfect storms of what the port police where saying to the press out there, they were feeding this all the time... there was a feeding frenzy. And that does happen occasionally.”