The media became quite excitable last week when the News of the World announced that they’d suspended news editor, Ian Edmondsonfor sacntioning the phone-hacking of Sienna Miller and her friends/family. It was reported that he was the first senior journalist at the Screws to have been chastised – albeit provisionally – for misbehaviour (or you could say criminal activity) over the now unstoppable phone-hacking saga.

Not true:

On July 8^th 2009, the paper announced that their managing editor of 22 years, Stuart Kuttner was being retired. It is a fact that mayhem had prevailed that day at Fortress Wapping because the Guardian had rung to tell them they were about to run a story concerning a secret pay-off to PFA Chairman Gordon Taylor in settlement of an invasion of privacy claim over the illegal accessing of his voicemail by Private Investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was contracted to the paper ‘to carry out routine investigation’.

A furore broke out – at least among those papers with a clean conscience – and shortly afterwards, the Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media & Sport ordered the senior executives of the paper, including Kuttner, ex-editor Andy Coulson and legal boss, Tom Crone to come and explain themselves.

Under questioning from the committee Stuart Kuttner, looking unwell and frankly rattled, confirmed that he had indeed been removed from his old job against his will. In other words, yes, he was sacked, and he has not been heard from since.

Astonishingly, not a single commentator (apart from me) has remarked on this telling concatenation of events. Some did detect signs of nervousness in the tele-link evidence subsequently given to the Committee by former News International executive chairman, Les Hinton (now boss of Rupert Murdoch’s much prized Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal.) No doubt this, as much as the millions that NI has subsequently settled with others suing for phone-hacking (although they claim it was done for only one, “rogue” reporter), is what most worries Ol’ Rumplechops.  To have the jewel in his crown headed up by a man found to have been party to a sordid criminal mode of ‘news gathering’ would be deeply shameful, and play straight into the hands of his competitors and many detractors.

It isn’t surprising that he’s been prepared to sanction a string of huge pay-outs simply to avoid making disclosures ordered by the High Court. Max Clifford, reported to have been paid £1m to go away, would have been lucky to be awarded £50k by the court. One can see why he took the wonga.

 There is also something more than coincidental in the circumstances surrounding the sidelining of Ian Edmondson’s predecessor as Screws news editor, Greg Miskiw. He was helped to go (and set up his own agency) shortly after attempts to piece together the Gordon Taylor story (which never hit the presses) had back-fired.

Nick Davies who broke the story in the Guardian, was subsequently given by/obtained from the Met an email sent by Screws hack, Ross Hall to Glenn Muclaire, stating “these are the transcripts for Neville”, referring without any doubt to Neville Thurlbeck, the paper’s top Shag’n’Brag and general muck specialist. These were transcripts of many messages left on the  voicemails of Taylor and his associates. A draft contract to pay Mulcaire a bonus of £7,500 for doing the job, drawn up by Miskiw was also found among Mulcaire’s papers.

As soon as Taylor realised his voice-mail had been raided and made it clear he was going to make a fuss, Miskiw was sent packing.

Neville “Onan the Barbarian” (qv past blogs) Thurlbeck, on the other hand was never even interviewed by the Met who were supposed to be investigating the case (but that’s another, murky, mucky story.)

Two more archetypal ex-Screws hacks, Sean Hoare and Paul McMullan have also come forward to say that they have openly discussed phone-hacking with Andy Coulson – who claims he knew nothing.

Four years after Clive Goodman (former ‘Royal Editor and now low grade hack on the Daily Star Sunday) and Mulcaire carried the can for their seniors, the paper’s claim that there was only “one rogue reporter” is manifestly complete bullshit.

 Now directly implicated in these criminal activities for which, if charged, tried and found guilty, they could face a helping of porridge are:

Ian Edmondson

Stuart Kuttner

Neville Thurlbeck,

Greg Miskiw

Ross Hall

And by extension,

Andy Coulson.

And by further extension,

Les Hinton

Tomorrow:

Mazher Mahmood.

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The suspension of Ian Edmondson is massively significant in the unravelling of the News of the World phone hacking scandal. Remember that the day after it was announced that former Screws managing editor Stuart Kuttner had been sacked on July 8^th 2009, the story was broken by the Guardian’s Nick Davies that the Screws had paid Gordon Taylor (CEO of the Professional Footballers’ Association) a large sum of money to keep quiet about their invading his and his minions’ voicemails.

Since then, a thick, turd-shaped cloud has hung over the editor in charge at the time, Smoothy Dave’s chief spinner, Andy Coulson.

Dave has shown great loyalty to a man who does not merit his trust. From today, the whole house of dodgy cards will start unravelling. There are dozens of people queuing up to sue the Screws for their criminal activities. It is not going to go away.

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So Andy Coulson has trotted round to administer a little white-wash to his deeply soiled public image. The report that he was interviewed by police at an unnamed solicitors’ office means precisely nothing.

Coulson, after all,  is a man who in the full glare of a Commons Select Committee hearing was quite relaxed telling the members (+assembled hacks and anyone watching Parliament TV) that he had absolutely no memory of how the News of the World , which he then edited, had run a story – a big royal story with a front page strap – that could only have been acquired by breaking the law.

I don’t imagine, in the privacy of his nominated solicitor’s office, he was put under any greater pressure to remember.

Expect a police statement along the lines:

“Mr Coulson satisfied investigating officers that he was entirely unaware of the illegal phone-hacking activities of the journalists he employed.”

If, on the other hand, we are offered anything more damning, then at last we can believe that the police intend seriously to pursue Coulson with prosecution for a crime for which two of his people have already been jailed.

And the nasty smell that that has hung around the Downing Street press office since David Cameron arrived last May will finally be evicted.

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The real target of the New York Times in their reopening of the Coulson affair, if not Rupert Murdoch himself, is Les Hinton, an Englishman (now naturalised American) in New York, and currently CEO of Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal.

In January 2007,  two men working for the News of the World were jailed for illegal phone-hacking, while Hinton was Executive Chairman of Screws owners, News International in London.

He is a deeply experienced, hard-nosed, long-serving, loyal Murdoch henchman. When I was researching for my book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings, I was told by very well placed associates of the then NI chairman that knowledge of the illegal practices at the News of the World would certainly have stretched right up to Les Hinton, and nothing he has said since has convinced me otherwise. When the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee took evidence from him last autumn during their inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal, while denying any knowledge, his nervousness and body-language failed to convince anyone of the innocence he professed of any involvement in the paper’s illegal activities.

The NYT is famously involved in a pretty desperate circulation war with the Wall Street Journal, and to bring about its CEO’s disgrace would be a very useful feather in its cap in a nation which is even more anti-News Corp than this one.

If the police and the two parliamentary committees now involved do manage to make the truth (which is so obvious to all observers) stand up, Les Hinton’s head will be on the railing spikes alongside Andy Coulson’s and that of sacked former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner.

David Cameron is getting most of the stick for his lack of judgement in appointing a man so obviously tainted as Andy Coulson, but it should be remembered that he was reacting to the urging of his then Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne.

Osborne already had a relationship with Coulson, encompassing some apparently bizarre anomalies.  This friendship went back several years, to autumn 2005, just before the annual conference, when Coulson ran a front page splash in the Screws…
   TOP TORY, COKE AND THE HOOKER
   Illustrated with pictures of the then unflawed Shadow Chancellor, it claimed that eleven years before, while he was at Oxford, Osborne was said, without any convincing corroboration, to have looked on while ‘dominatrix’ hooker, Natalie Rowe, snorted a line of coke. Her boyfriend, an unnamed friend of Osborne’s had gone on to become an addict, the report alleged.
   It was, on closer inspection, an archetypal Screws non-story, devoid of any hard content, worded so as to avoid any come-back, but just salacious enough to justify its front page status, and, of course, devoid of any genuine revelations about the politician, beyond the fact that in his youth he’d had a friend who knew a prostitute and who’d become addicted to an unspecified drug.
   When the story appeared, I wasn’t the only one struck, not by the damage that might have been done to the young politician, but by how much good it had done him. After all, the story didn’t say George himself had done anything at all.
   He hadn’t snorted the coke, and he hadn’t taken advantage of the hooker’s professional skills, ‘dominatrix’ or otherwise. But it did make him look, by association, as if he’d lived a little and had a touch of grubby humanity to him, which went a long way to counter the unsexy image of a choir-boy-coiffed, goody-two-shoes, that must have been causing concern in the Party’s image department.
   In a well-constructed profile of Coulson in the Guardian, John Harris noted that Osborne and Coulson had ‘got on well’, even while discussing the Screws ‘exposé’, although, at the time the article was published, the people around Osborne told Harris that he was suffering severe tummy rumbles and telling everyone how upset he was.
   Well, he would, wouldn’t he?
   There’d be little point in constructing a subtle piece of well-spun double-bluff, then rushing around telling people how chuffed about it you were. For this astutely ironic act of spin, Andy established his credentials with Osborne and, at least covertly, made his political allegiance known.
George and Andy were still in touch after Andy’s resignation from the Screws for his role in the Royal phone hacking debacle, and it was then that Osborne persuaded his boss that Coulson was just the man to give the white-tie-and-tails Bullingdon folk some much-needed street cred among the elusive middle ground voters.

            No doubt it was Coulson’s skill in devising sophisticated reverse/negative spin that attracted Osborne and maybe convinced Cameron. A good example of this was evident this year when it was ‘leaked’ that Samantha Cameron had once voted Green as a student.

Pretending  that the leak was alarming to them, Cameron’s camp knew that it certainly hadn’t done any damage and it would do a great deal of positive good in suggesting David Cameron’s broadness of vision and sympathy with those beyond the standard Tory pale.

However, it’s likely that the government will soon have to manage without this gifted manipulator of information, and perhaps William Hague won’t be too sorry about that.

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“This is what we do, we go out and destroy other people’s lives,” was how former News of the World news editor, Greg Miskiw once characterised the ethos of his paper. As a strap-line for the cover of my book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings, it was irresistible in its pithy summary of the editorial priorities of Britain’s biggest selling Sunday paper. And this fact in itself is one of the most depressing comments on the sleazy, voyeuristic tastes of a significant section of the British public and their appetite for salacious personal and sexual details of figures in the public eye – sportspersons, politicians, royals and entertainers. Whether these details are real or made up makes no difference.  

      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.

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