The police seized a reported 11,000 documents from Glenn Mulcaire’s office when they raided it in August 2006. There can be no question that the information held within these documents would have been known by journalists at the paper, as well as management, who paid Mulcaire. This information included details of the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.

News International have now “admitted” they have had this information for four years (at least five, in fact). I watched Andy Coulson (former editor) Colin Myler (current editor), Stuart Kuttner (managing editor/chief dirty tricks organiser for twenty years and at least 8 editors) and Tom Crone (head legal honcho) of the News of the World tell a parliamentary committee that there was absolutley no further evidence of phone hacking, and that Clive Goodman (jailed Royal claptrapper) was a lone rogue reporter. 

They were all lying…..

Here’s how I reported it at the time …

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The revelations about the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone will intensify demands for clear answers from the Metropolitan Police and News International.

In 2002, the News of the World illegally accessed the voicemail of missing schoolgirl, Milly Dowler after she had disappeared. The news, which broke on Monday , has shocked a public already deluged with revelations about the paper’s phone-hacking of celebrities, sportsmen and politicians in a quest for intimate details of their target’s private lives. This new disclosure involving a non-celebrity victim of abduction and murder shines a disturbing new light on the scandal.

The Dowler family’s lawyer, Mark Lewis has issued a statement describing the paper’s actions as ‘heinous and despicable’, causing the family ‘distress heaped upon tragedy’.

Having logged and recorded the messages he had retrieved, Glenn Mulcaire, the paper’s contracted private investigator, then deleted older messages in Milly Dowler’s inbox once it was full, in order to free up space for further messages from Milly’s distraught friends and family, which he also intercepted and passed back to News of the World reporters and editors.

The paper took particular interest in the Dowler case, they have claimed, as part of their high profile campaign against paedophile activity – a campaign launched and closely overseen by the paper’s then editor, Rebacca Wade (now Brooks), and her deputy, Andy Coulson, who has already resigned from the paper and the Prime Minister’s Press Office over his connection with previous phone hacking scandals.

By deleting messages illegally retrieved from Milly Dowler’s phone, the paper misled her family into believing she had emptied her inbox and was still alive – when she was not. This gave the family hope, which was exploited by the paper in publishing optimistic interviews with them.

In deleting the earlier messages, the paper had also removed information that would have had a direct impact on the police investigation of Milly’s disappearance.

This new development could turn out to be a major turning point in a scandal which has been rumbling like a volcano with growing volume for two years, since it was revealed in July 2009 that the paper had settled an alleged £700,000 with Professional Footballers’ Association president, Gordon Taylor, in recognition of their invasion of his privacy by phone-hacking, for a story that was never published.

It is significant that this is the first hard News of the World phone-hacking story to have emerged which relates to the editorship of Rebecca Brooks. Up until now, police inquiries, for reasons never adequately explained, have focused on the years 2005 and 2006, when the paper was under Andy Coulson’s editorship. In August 2006 Clive Goodman, the paper’s royal reporter and Glenn Mulcaire were arrested, pleaded guilty and subsequently imprisoned for hacking into the voicemails of Prince Charles’ staff at Clarence House. Under questioning, Andy Coulson has told a Scottish Court in the perjury trial of Tommy Sheridan, and a Commons Culture, Media, Sport Select Committee inquiry that he was completely unaware of any illegal phone hacking activity on the paper he ran. He claimed initially that Clive Goodman was a single ‘rogue’ reporter. Since then four News of the World journalists have been arrested on charges of phone hacking, and several more have been suspended or helped to move on from the paper.

Rebacca Brooks is now Chief Executive Officer of News International, which is very close to finalising negotiations with the Coalition Government over their acquisition of 100% of BSkyB, where currently they own only 39%.

It is likely that this latest story of the paper’s illegal activity will raise further substantive questions over News International’s suitability to be responsible for a near monopoly in some key areas of broadcasting in this country. This will also cause many to question more closely whether it is appropriate for the Prime Minister to maintain a close friendship with Rebecca Brooks with whom he attended a private dinner over Christmas and who was present at his exclusive birthday party at Chequers last year.

Mulcaire has claimed in the past that he was the last link in a chain of command in the paper, simply responding to the instructions he had received down the line from his de facto employers. Speculation about the length and composition of the chain is now bound to increase, with attention focussing on just how far up the chain knowledge and condonation of Muclaire’s activities stretched.

If it were to reach up, through Rebecca Brooks and Andy Coulson, to their former Executive Chairman, Les Hinton, it is likely that Rupert Murdoch, already heartily sick of the whole mess surrounding his Sunday tabloid, would be forced to take action at his most prized possession, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, where Hinton is now CEO.

Over the past year it has emerged that a strong symbiotic relationship exists between News International and the Metropolitan Police. The question now troubling many seekers after truth is whether or not the Met have any real interest or motivation in bagging trophies of this magnitude.

This piece was first published at  thefirstpost.co.uk:   http://tinyurl.com/6f3z83s

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Here’s an odd story….

In the little Indie on 23^rd May 2011, under a spot on their gossip page 15, called “iquotes”, we read that actor Dominic West tells the Sunday Times how he and a friend reacted when the now  Samantha Cameron said she was to marry David, the future Prime Minister. West is quoted as saying ‘We were like: “Why do you want to marry that Tory boy?”.’

I wanted to check the story in the Sunday Times – presumably recent (although, maybe not, if the little ‘i’ is really scratching its arse for tattle) but couldn’t, because I cannot sign up to the News International PAYWALL. Given my current relationship with NI news harlot, the News of the Screws, whose lawyers Messrs Farrer & Co are threatening me with legal action if I don’t apologise to truth-molesting  Mazher Mahmood for damaging his reputation (which I’m not going to), and knowing their methods of information-gathering, I think it would be unfair to give them my  address, email address, mobile telephone number, landline number or bank account  details, because they might be tempted to plunder private data about me – not that they would find anything of interest to the public or even in the public interest, so squeaky clean has my life been.

So I looked elsewhere and I found a piece in the Guardian dated 17^th July, 2008 nearly three years ago…..

‘David Cameron was a couple of years ahead of (Dominic West) at Eton. “I didn’t know him then but I do now,” West said. “I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, ‘Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?’” West now lives just a stone’s throw from the Camerons in west London but claims not to have infiltrated the Notting Hill set. “I must try harder to ingratiate myself with them,” he laughs.’

Odd, don’t you think,  that the Sunday Times should have repeated the story almost verbatim, give or take a “fucking”, three years later, especially when you consider the relationship between the PM and News International’s boss, Rebekah Brooks, who has without any doubt instructed all the editors of newspapers under her control to be very Cameron-positive.

At first sight, most readers might see West’s assessment as a little negative. On the other hand, last year before the election, Andy ‘Soon-to-have-a-Felt-Collar’ Coulson, then (as a result of DC’s distressingly poor judgement) running the Conservative propaganda show, arranged for it to be ‘leaked’ that the lovely Sam Cam had once voted Green, not Tory, thereby immediately improving her profile as a modern independent woman (not the Sloane-Ranging, Tory-loving young Hooray Henrietta the public might have expected DC to marry), thereby giving her and him (as a broad-minded chap who understands that bright young females don’t always vote Tory [bet she does now though]) some useful street-cred. (Coulson performed a similar reverse spin for George Osborne in the Screws five years ago, when they became firm friends).

Andy Coulson may have gone, but his fingerprints linger on, with the help of his old mates at the Sunday Times.

And here’s a side note, Cameron’s claim that the reason he had dinner last Christmas with Rebekah Brooks, who is now clearly seen to have been in charge of what was effectively a criminal organisation in Wapping, was that he was an old school friend of  her husband, Charley Brooks, looks pretty thin.

Brooks was three years older than DC at Eton, and in a different house, thus very unlikely to have had any intercourse with him – other than of a rather beastly nature. And frankly, the ambitious Cameron’s interest in Charley Brooks the race-horse trainer manqué, not to say Ladies’ Underwear merchant ( also manqué), and novelist – most would agree, manqué – would have been non-existent.

But Bonker Brooks has made it to home base with Rebekah the Testarossa, and for DC being on good terms with Ole Rupe is a Number One PR priority – otherwise why would had have taken the absurd risk he did in taking the mendacious Coulson to Downing Street, just to keep Rupe happy?

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This is what Neville Thurlbeck – recently arrested for questioning by MET officers on the  phone-hacking investigation – does for a living. Actually, that’s not quite true – here he is, just about to enjoy one of the perks of the job – as News of the World Hacks have been doing for years while they  scour Britain for the muckiest rubbish they can think of.

I hope this doesn’t spoil your  breakfast, but it’s important we should know how diligently  this man goes about his work. – before we judge him too harshly.

Thurlbeck is  the hard-nosed  hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n'brag  stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was  caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.

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