The NYT is unequivocal in its conclusion that Coulson knew about, and was therefore complicit in an offence which saw two people working for him go to jail.

It was in any case very clear from Coulson’s evidence to the Common’s Culture Media & Sport Committee last year that he wasn’t telling the truth when he denied any knowledge of one specicfic high-profile royal story about which he could not possibly have been unaware, and which had been illegally obtained.

The Government should not under any circumstances be harbouring people of this moral calibre; it maybe that Coulson will soon be charged as a party to a proven crime and rehoused at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Much better to get shot of him first – as I have consistently advocated since he was appointed by the Conservatives in 2007.

Who else knew, besides Coulson? Managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, who was sacked for his ineptness in covering up, and former News Internationl CEO, Les Hinton, who blathered like a school kid denying he’d eaten the sweets when  questioned by the CMS Committee?

I predict that no hard evidence will ever be found against these players, while Mazher Mahmood will still be allowed to roam the country, creating scams and destroying other people’s lives – as is the spoken aim of the news room in the Wapping HQ of Murdoch’s Old Yellow Rag.

      This appetite exists partly because it is regularly, cheaply and easily satisfied by papers like the News of the World and the Daily Mail, who campaign vigorously with self-righteous and spurious claims for the inalienable right of the British public to know such things.

       But the naked truth of Miskiw’s statement is clearly demonstrated in last Sunday’s Observer, where Polly Vernon, despite her own breathy tabloid delivery, offers the reality of French fashion model, Vanessa Perroncel’s treatment earlier this year by a pack of baying shag-hounds scenting a vulnerable prey.

      It is outside the comprehension of the average tabloid journalist that a man – especially a footballer – could be alone with an attractive woman for any length of time without her underwear coming off. Thus, for them there was no question that when Vanessa was visited by John Terry (former England footer skipper, and best friend of Wayne Bridge, her former long-term boyfriend and father of her son) there was no question that sex had been had. The Screws hack, Guy Basnett decided to embellish this fallacious if fairly pedestrian story with claims of subsequent pregnancy, abortion and a £20,000 pay-off.

And with no interest in what these entirely unfactual claims would do to the parties involved, the story was splashed across the front and several pages of the paper and succeeded in inflicting profound damage on Ms Perroncel, on John Terry, his wife and their marriage, and potentially on Jaydon, Vanessa’s son by Wayne Bridge.

While the rubbish press all speculated vigorously on how much Max Clifford would acquire for her for a major Shag’n’Brag piece, she kept dignified and quiet. She didn’t want Max to sell her side of the story but he  couldn’t do much to stop the Screws running their version either, as he was at that point suing them himself (and won £1m for having his phone hacked by them.)

Vanessa since then has consistently denied that there was any truth in the story, while she was preoccupied with coming out of a six year relationship with Bridge and sorting out parental arrangements for their child.

But there was no let up in the papers’ blood-letting. Vanessa was consistently portrayed as a scheming, self-interested harlot and, on the web, the bone-headed, ignoramus that is Jo British Public laid into her viciously with their own nasty comments and misconceptions.

This witch-hunt by a section of the British public of an entirely innocent woman, also a foreign visitor to Britain, was hugely distressing to her and seeing the apparently unmonitored online comments frequently left her weeping in bewilderment.

But that’s what the News of the World is best at – destroying other people’s lives, to the extent of several suicides over the last thirty years.

Now Vanessa Perroncel is seeking redress, on behalf of herself, her son and, indirectly, the thousands of others who have been callously damaged by the paper’s lies or gratuitous invasion of privacy.

This evil old harridan of a rag has for years consistently broken laws with the full connivance of its management and must by now be a serious embarrassment to its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. But, as I have strongly urged in my book and in this blog over the last few years, it is clear that a statutory Law of Privacy must be created, to clarify for newspapers exactly how far they can go, and the criteria by which revelations of an individual’s private life can be deemed in the public interest.

Now, at last, blindingly obvious as this is, politicians (and even some members of the press, if not the Mail or the Screws) are beginning to see the logic and necessity of such legislation.

May they not this time be deterred from curbing the excesses of the red-top hacks by intensive lobbying and covert threats, as the last government was when they tried to introduce custodial sentences for journalists breaching the Data Protection Act. It had to leave the clause strangled and dangling uselessly to avert the wrath of Ken High and Wapping.

In the meantime, it is to be hoped that the British courts will give the News of the World the serious kicking it deserves for its nasty, callous attempt to destroy yet another life, and that Ms Perroncel’s dignity and innocence are vindicated.

Gary Lineker takes Rupert’s Shilling to join the Queen of Shag-Rags

For a man perceived as being unusually wholesome in the tawdry milieu of professional football and possessing limitless goodwill towards his fellow men, it’s more than disappointing to learn that, to compound his already questionable championing (for a big sack of loot) the thoroughly unwholesome foodstuff that is Walkers Crisps, he has now agreed to “write” for the News of the World, the nation’s most insidious Sunday rag and a publication that attacks privacy, promotes voyeurism with tacky sex and drug stories, that lies, breaks the law and is devoid of any visible standards of journalistic integrity.
     And if you don’t like what Gary “writes”, blame the ghost. It emerged in a libel suit against him in 2005 that his column in the Telegraph hadn’t been written by him; he’d simply chatted to a hack on the phone and his by-line had gone at the top. Is that how Charlie Brooks (Mr Rebekah Wade) does it?

Rory Stewart is undoubtedly a bit of an eccentric smarty-pants – and thank God for that in a time when this is too rare. I suspect he is also more knowledgeable, more dedicated, braver, more resourceful and immeasurably more entertaining than the mediocre, cliché-scribbling pip-squeak who interviewed him. But, of course, it gave the hack a chance to have a dig at the British upper-middle classes that Rupert Murdoch has despised since he was shunned by a few of them when he was at Oxford back in  the ‘50s. A vain old man scorned can be dangerously single-minded.

Who will follow?
Among those who are having difficulty keeping their breaklfast down since an unexpected visitor at Wapping from New York last month are Tom Crone, Les Hinton and, most significant of all, Andy Coulson.

Disgracefully, there is no voting, no obligation on the part of planning hearings to take any notice of the views and wishes of the people who live in a town – who own their landscape. So I find myself now working in a library which is a cavernous, noisy space, which seems to function as a meet and chat venue, where large quantities of higher space are unused, and commercial activity occupies a proportion of the charmless lump of a bulding. The planners also bequeathed the town an ugly, useless little open space in front of the hulk, “perceived” by the County Council, “to attract people, thus benefitting nearby traders.” It is nearly always empty, occupied by discarded chewing gum and lager bottles.
    There are countless towns and cities throughout Britain that have been ruined in this way, and there have been many occasions when the public have yearned for someone of sufficient influence to raise a voice in support of their objections.
      The almost compete vandalization of the once lovely city of Gloucester, of which only the sublime cathedral and its immediate close remain, wouldn’t have happened if there had been a Prince Charles to suggest to the culprits that they should consider not just the wishes of their rate payers, but also the longer lasting qualities of traditional, vernacular and less aggressively modernistic building design.