Peter Burden

Max Clifford’s legal team, barrister Jeremy Reed, and solicitor Charlotte Harris (bright and sexy in six inch heels) on Wednesday gave the News of the World a good trouncing in the first skirmish of a High Court battle over the paper’s (one is supposed to say “alleged”) raid on the formidable publicist’s voicemail. This represents another step closer to the truth, which the paper has been desperately trying to hide, about the way their journalists have been systemically, and with the full knowledge of management, breaking the law to discover personal details of celebrities and thereby create invasive, damaging stories about them which are of no public interest. Significantly, so far, only the Guardian has chosen to report this result.
Clifford’s lawyers had asked for and were granted by Mr Justice Vos three specific orders for disclosure – despite the Screws’ peevish objections.
       First, they required Glenn Mulcaire, the investigator responsible for accessing Clifford’s voicemails, to disclose which individual or individuals (editor at the time: slippery spinner, Andy Coulson) asked/ suggested/ ordered him to perform this illegal act, which was included in his conviciton after he pleaded guilty 3 years ago to hacking into the Royal Household phones.
       Mulcaire, second defendant, has also already admitted Max Clifford’s claim, but, as his counsel explained, the father of five children under 16 is out of work (having made known his intention not to return to the snooping game) and living on job-seekers’ allowance. Even taking that with a hefty helping of sodium chloride, the judge might well have asked who was paying his legal bills, and how he would pay any damages awarded against him. But then, it’s not inconceivable that the paper is picking up these tabs – especially if it was they who got him into trouble in the first place by pressurising him to do what he did. If this is so, though, it would undoubtedly make some people think that the way he frames his responses might be influenced by News Group’s support. The paper’s bosses would probably like him to say that he was on a fishing expedition on his own account, and luckily stumbled across messages left by (and the mobile nos. of) several of Mr C’s hapless, high profile clients, and passed them to the lucky hacks without saying where or how he found them.
       He’s also been asked to reveal to whom he passed the contents of any voicemails acquired by him from this source, and to name anyone whom he might have instructed on how to access the voicemails themselves. The judge accepted the absolute necessity of this, and ordered that this information be made available to the claimants within 14 days.

Clifford’s counsel also requested that the News of the World release details of the secret settlement they reached out of court with Professional Footballers’ Association boss, Gordon Taylor for invading his privacy by accessing his voicemails (to which Mulcaire had also pleaded guilty).  And the court was treated to the strange sight of Taylors’ brief, Manual Barker standing alongside counsel for the Screws, who only last year had to pay Taylor £700k+ for their crimes. Now both parties were intent – for their differing reasons – on not letting the public see what they had agreed. The judge sensibly granted that while private details of Gordon Taylor’s messages which the paper had illegally acquired should remain secret, the terms and conditions and, significantly – the sums paid by the paper in recompense should be released to the claimant’s lawyers under strict terms of confidentiality.
Thirdly he ordered that the Information Commissioner’s Office should be allowed to release (which they have asserted they are happy to do) all data, files and documents accumulated during their investigation into illicit information  gathering which resulted in the 2006 report, What Price Privacy, specifically those relating to News of the World journalists. The Screws claimed this was irrelevant, because it contained no information on phone hacking; Clifford’s lawyers said it would help to establish that there was an endemic culture of illegal information gathering at the newspaper, and how phone hacking was a natural extension of the activities in which they’d been engaged for years.
 
Next time….
Clifford asks the Metropolitan Police to release the stack of documents they took from Mulcaire’s office when they arrested him in August 2006.

Popularity: 60% [?]

News International boss, Rebekah Brooks has stamped her little foot, shaken her ginger curls and says she jolly well won’t go to the Houses of Parliament to tell the Culture, Media & Sport Committee that everyone in Wapping knew who was engaged in illegal “news” gathering. Pity, because she could also have told them why managing editor and senior spell-binder at the Screws, Stuart Kuttner was sacked last summer, just when the Guardian broke the story of the Screws’ out of court settlement with Gordon Taylor for hacking into his voicemails.
She might have been able to explain why, without any of the management at the paper (they say) being aware of phone hacking by Glenn Mulcaire, they thought they were liable for what Mulcaire had done without their knowlegde or involvement. After all the paper’s head legal honcho, Tom Crone suggested to the Committee last July that Mulcaire was working for other papers. On that basis, he could have hacked Gordon’s phone on behalf of the Sunday Mirror or one of the Dirty Des rags. If they didn’t even know it was going on – and they categorically denied that they did – why should they have coughed up before Gordon Taylor even got them to court?
    But the police had an email which made it clear that a transcript of Mulcaire’s interceptions on Taylor’s phone had been made by Screws reporter, Ross Hindley (AKA: Ross Hall) for senior shag hack, Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck. (You might ask why the police didn’t pursue this prima facie evidence of law-breaking at the Screws by people other than fall guys Goodman and Mulcaire.)
Maybe Kuttner’s firing was a response by James Murdoch, his ultimate boss in the UK, to the increasing filthiness of the paper’s reputation under Kuttner’s regime and the vast sums of money gushing down the Screws loos, thanks to pay-offs to Max Mosley, Gordon Taylor, Barry George and even £800K to one of their own, maligned ex-employees, Matt Driscoll (to name a few of many, not to mention Goodman and Mulcaire). And shortly they may well have to dig deep for veteran media warrior, Max Clifford, whose case against the paper for invasion of privacy gets underway early next month (if the paper doesn’t settle before). It seems unlikely, though, that Max Clifford would be ready to sign a non-disclosure agreement, like the one Taylor did. So maybe the paper will be forced to take its chances in court, where Clifford’s lawyers (and the intelligent press) will have a field day. I can’t wait.
Who’s next?

Popularity: 86% [?]

The Commons Culture, Media, Sport Select Committee would like to talk to Rebekah Brooks, the titian-tressed scrapper who has been suprema of News International since last September. If she complies with their request to see them – and she will try very hard to wriggle out of it – it is to be hoped that she’ll shed more light on criminal activities at the News of the World than did Senior executives Tom Crone (Head of Legals), Stuart Kuttner (ex-Managing Editor), and former editor Andy Coulson, when they were called to give evidence over their phone-hacking to the Committee last summer. She may also remember more than Les Hinton, who was in her current chair when the raiding of the Royal voicemails came to light in August 2006. In September he spoke to the Committee by video link from New York, where he is now boss of the Murdochs’ Wall Street Journal. He had no recollection about key decisions, such as were the hackers paid off after being sacked for their criminal activity.

To the intense frustration of the committee and of those who care about the quality of British journalism, all the witnesses turned out to be suffering from an acute attack of contagious amnesia and truth frugalness. [See my blog] For these are people who have made their careers at Rupert’s Red Tops, delivering ‘journalism’ of such obfuscation and dishonesty, for so long, that it’s far too late to kick the habit.
   In a pitiful attempt to mislead the committee, they all ‘forgot’, or just ‘didn’t know’ any details relating to the events that culminated in the jailing of their Royal Editor, Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire, a Private Investigator contracted to the paper.
   In October, the Committee, determined not to be fobbed off with the persistent ducking and diving of the Screws bosses, formally posed a number of questions for them.
Among several anomalies that had arisen, they wished to know “the grounds on which advice was given to settle the claims [allegedly] made by Goodman and Mulcaire and the level of payments made”.
   Rebekah Brooks has now submitted her response. (This was viewable on the Committee’s page at www.parliament.uk up to 13th Jan.) Written in characteristic News of the World house style and buried in a miasma of obscured truth and elusive fact, it fails to answer either of these questions.
   With unexpected eagerness, she puts her hand up in conceding Goodman’s alleged claim for unfair dismissal. As they had “failed to meet minimum requirements” in relation to a dismissal, any affected employee would be entitled to bring a claim, “with a potential compensatory award of up to £60,600 (in addition to any contractual notice pay entitlement).”
But she also tells the Committee that the paper settled before a case was heard by any tribunal. The hypothetical sums and conditions she cites have no bearing on what they actually paid Goodman for signing “a standard-form News International compromise agreement,” – a euphemism for gagging agreement – and this despite the breach of his employment contract through his proven criminal activity. 
   The decoys and the irrelevant waffle in her answers were composed in order to put Rebekah Brooks’ pursuers off the scent; but, like much of the content of the News of the World, the result is ham-fisted, half-baked and easily seen through. There is an almost engaging naivety to her signing off. “… We trust that the answers given in this letter can now bring matters to a close.”
   Keep trusting, TestaRossa! Most observers will understand the subtext to her answer…..

You might think we gave them lots of money to shut them up and stop them telling the rest of the media who within the Screws hierarchy knew they’d deliberately broken the law by hacking into voicemails to get cheapo front page splashes, but you can’t prove it – so there!

The simple fact is that Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed for what they did. It follows therefore, that any other members of the Screws staff who were party to it are also liable to criminal prosecution and a jail sentence, including Andy Coulson and Stuart Kuttner.
The committee have shown commendable resolve in their pursuit of the truth over these activities.

They have a clear right and a public duty to insist on clear, frank and truthful answers from Rebekah Brooks.

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Popularity: 75% [?]

The BBC are hinting that they may, at last, throw out Jezzer, his lads and their dreary boys’ toys show. TOP GEAR has been a boring, repetitive act of automotive onanism for years and Jeremy Clarkson’s a worn out old Pranker.
He’s been making the same jokes, prodding the same shibboleths, reiterating the same un-PC mantras for years. They were funny-ish ten years ago. Now they’re just a yawn.
James May, reluctantly to give him credit, has shown in other programmes that he can be a good, inquiring presenter.
But the little fella, Hammond is as thick as porker’s poo and dull as a bucket of skimmed milk, as the chat-show folk discovered when they had him on after his silly crash. Where on earth did the BBC find him?

Even more puzzling is the BBC’s discovery of the blubber-lipped, dimwitted, monotoned, unfunny, unattractive fatty that they have thrust on us – just to show who’s in  charge – in the form of Adrian Chiles -one of their most inexplicable recent discoveries. I guess it is – laudably, of course – to demonstrate their fairness in offering equal opportunities to blubber-lipped, montoned, unfunny, unattractive, overweight, dimwitted fatties.

Popularity: 82% [?]

It’s heartening to see the Commons Committee for Culture, Media & Sport displaying a set of strong, tenacious gnashers. They have delayed publishing a report on their long-running Inquiry into Press Standards, Privacy and Libel. It was due out this month, and after all the excitement of Nick Davies’ revelations in the Guardian last July about the News of the World being sued for phone-hacking, it has been awaited with much eagerness, not least by the ShagRags at the dodgier end of our national press, who could well do without too much further inquiry into their practices.
          But the Committee were so incensed at the dissembling, some say utter bullshit offered as evidence by the senior Screws staff, and former editor Andy Coulson, that they’ve decided to call in the Boss, Rupert Rumplechops’ favourite larrikin and former Sun editor, Rebekah “TestaRossa” Brooks, from whom, I imagine, they hope to extract some real answers, even the truth. It’s quite a hope.
          It will be fun to see if she’s as adept at not telling the truth as her employees, Tom Crone (legal) Stuart Kuttner (Managing Editor for 22 years – now sacked) and Tory spinster, Andy Coulson, when they were in front of the Committee last July.
          Titfers off to the committee chairman, Conservative John Whittingdale, who must be under some pressure from Central Office not to harass Coulson and young Dave C’s other new Wapping chums.
          James Robinson in MediaGuardian says Mrs Brooks has already submitted written evidence – but it’s not on the HoC website yet. Whatever it says, it will be a work of Spinners’ Art, and well worth a read.
          And, talking of the Sun, its feeble little editor, gossip-wallah Dominic Mohan must take credit for a classic, bad taste Sun front-page headline this morning:
          Darling just screwed more people than Tiger Woods.

          I wonder whose side they’re on?
          Will Darling sue? Will Tiger?
          Evan Davies’ coy delivery of it on Radio 4’s Today was pleasingly bizarre, too.     

Popularity: 86% [?]