My first thought on reading this is "Professor Jones, (updated)

you're a damned liar." We're supposed to believe that neither he nor anybody else in the project had copies? No backups of any of the 'lost' data? And that(assuming the 'lost' is true), instead of saying it outright he defied FOIA requests and played games for all these years, just waiting for it to blow up in his face?

Uh huh.
And now?
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
...
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.
So his claim now is that the MWP was 'localized', not worldwide, etc. The piece ends with this:
Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.
Please note: 'Collate your own data' is damn well not the same as 'sharing the raw data and methods'; and Jones knows it.
Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.
"We ignore the MWP and the Little Ice Age, hide and/or lose data, cherry-pick data, but there's NO fundamental flaw in our view." Uh huh. And as to the 'no fundamental flaws', how 'bout this? And this? And this?
But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.
Which would indicate Jones is a damned liar making excuses.
He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

This mess is just effing disgraceful; for a whole effing group of scientists to play these games is bad enough; when they're playing a game and using the result to try to help control our lives, it ought to be a- what's the equivalent of 'disbarment'? offense.