Rebekah ‘Testarossa’ Brooks will have to think hard before she allows Screws editor, little Colin Myler to sack Neville ‘Onan the Barbarian’ Thurlbeck for his clear involvement in criminal activity. He has been part of the evil cabal at the centre of Britain’s most evil newspaper for a long time – a lot longer than recently fired Ian Edmondson. And he knows an awful lot about the illicit information gathering techniques of the paper’s hacks, which of them have done it and when. He has committed other crimes too.…. He told Mr Justice Eady in the High Court that he had no idea where the story about Prince William leaving a jokey message on Prince Harry’s voicemail had come from. It could only have been acquired by illegal hacking; he knew this – his by-line headed the story.

Telling lies to judges in court is an imprisonable offence.

If Rebekah decides he has to go, he’s going to cost Master James an awful lot in ‘be discreet’ money. We’ve never heard how much his former dodgy colleague, managing editor for 25 years, Stuart Kuttner was awarded when he was sacked (to get this arch-organizer of illicit practices out of the way before the dung hit the windmill).

Have the MET raided his gaffe yet, I wonder? Not too late, DAC Sue Akers.

What next?

If Ian Edmondson was involved, so was Andy Coulson

If Andy Coulson was involved, so was Rebekah Brooks.

If Rebekah Brooks was involved, so was Master James.

And if they were, it’s very likely that Les Hinton, CEO of The Wall Street Journal (the brightest bird in Rupert Murdoch’s bush), was involved, too, becasue he was Executive Chairman of News International at the time.

 And then there’s the Fake Sheikh, the nation’s most mendacious hack……

Watch my next blog….

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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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 Yet again, one of Rupert Murdoch’s properties has been exposed for publishing faulty material, riddled with errors and typos, due to excessively slapdash editing, though, naturally, it’s trying to put the blame on an outside contractor.

The News of the World!  – I hear you cry.

No, not this time – although all these failings are common enough in the Screws, especially when Mazhher Mahmood, ‘Investigaitons’ Editor is on the loose on the front page – as they were, too, in the heady days of Rebekah Wade’s editorship.

No, this time it’s one of Rupert’s more serious players, Harper Collins/4^th Estate. 4^th Estate purports to be the posh arm of Harper Collins and successfully negotiated to publish the UK edition of the latest rare work by American wunder(notsucha)kind  Jonathan Franzen.  An early draft of the book, presumably sent to Harper Collins at an early stage in negotiations, was sent off to the typesetters by one of the pea-brained editors there – withtout anyone checking it was the right one!

We all know that the average attention span of an HC fiction editor is about as far as I can pee (and that’s a lot less far than it used to be), and it seems this also applies to the editors at their prestige literary imprint.

Franzen, with absolute justification, is furious; he has spent nine years writing the book; it isn’t asking much for his publisher to publish his final draft.

The British publishing industry is made a laughing stock on the other side of the Atlantic and Harper Collins, shamelessly, are blaming the typesetters. 

They have the bare-faced, Andy Coulsonesque cheek to deny responsibility for sending the wrong file to the Scottish typesetters, Palimpsest. But this file would be the only one that Palimpsest would have seen because there’s no reason on earth for HC to have ever sent them an early draft. And the typesetters would, in any case, have sent proofs back to the editor to ‘check’. It seems this checking was done by HC in the same way their sister organisation, the News of the World check their facts/text. 

Start looking for more typos and errors of fact in Murdoch’s  other prestige organ, the Wall Street Journal, whose CEO, Les Hinton is a former boss of the Screws in London. Of course, the way the Coulson story is playing out here in London, he may not be there for long.

See ‘Dispatches’ Channel 4, Monday 4th October.

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The News of the Screws, in their campaign to insert former editor, Andy Coulson into the press office at Downing Street, last Sunday ran page after page of noisy headlines and knocking copy on Mr Brown and Nick ‘Wunderkind’ Clegg. They put the boot into leading LibDem, St Vince Cable, too, the only MP to predict the crash of ’08.
No expense was spared in their search for documents that might damage him. They’d gathered a pile of detail about Vince’s bills from power, water and phone service providers. In a fatuous attempt to show Cable’s incompetence, they listed details of late payment charges and final demands for bills which had all been paid.
They suggest that all this information is visible in his parliamentary expenses claims, but it isn’t. They must have acquired it by some other underhand means, using, perhaps, old fashioned binologists – investigators who rummage through dustbins for discarded letters; or blaggers who get the information directly from the companies’ own data records, which is a crime that may soon be punishable by a custodial sentence.

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At last, it’s been announced that the Justice Minister, Michael Wills, will activate a clause originally passed by Parliament in last year’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. Shamefully, it was then effectively neutered by three press heavies leaning hard on Gordon Brown to have it removed.
One of them was Les Hinton, former CEO of News International, who displayed such strong symptoms of convenient, chronic News International Amnesia when interviewed over a satellite link by the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee last month – like the senior management of the News of the World, who had already sat in front of the committee outrageously claiming they couldn’t remember/didn’t know how much and on what terms they’d paid off miscreant reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Even Stuart Kuttner, wily old managing editor and architect of many of the distasteful journalistic scams that the paper has pulled off, didn’t know who would know – which was a bit of a surprise. [And former Screws editor Andy Coulson couldn't remember publishing a verbatim transcript of a message left on Prince Harry's private voicemail by Prince William and illegally accessed by two of his staff who went to prison for it. He'd have gone too, if he'd admitted being party to it. But he said he wasn't - at least, he couldn't remember anything about it..... not.]
Also present at what was reported to be a dinner with the Prime Minster, was Paul Dacre, the man who employs Richard Littlejohn (in itself a crime against human decency). Muckraker Dacre then described the provision to make Data Theft an imprisonable offence as “a truly frightening amendment.” Truly frightening, for sure, to the editor of a newspaper which was found by the Information Commissioner a few years before to have routinely engaged in wholesale illegal information gathering (and got away with it).
Gordon Brown, as lily-livered as any politician confronted by press bosses who might have nasty things written about him and his government, agreed to “suspend” the clause, which the former Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas had fought so hard to have put in place.
The current Commissioner, Christopher Graham last month accused MPs of chucking out the clause, when, in fact Parliament had passed it. It was the Government, not Parliament who changed their mind.
Now, after the Guardian’s valiant disclosure that the Screws had been hacking into the voicemails of Gordon Taylor and two other people involved in the Professional Footballers’ Association, the government has accepted [as I have advocated many times on this blogspace] that it has no choice but to enact the clause. That they should now qualify this with a public interest defence is quite right and proper – no one wants to see responsible journalists impeded from exposing crime and corruption.
But the core fact is that medical records, bank account details, tax records, phone-call traffic information, or even journey details obtainable from registered Oyster cards, of individuals who have committed no offence greater than being of interest to those who read the Shag Rags can easily be passed on by an employee of the many companies and agencies that keep these records, using a USB stick with little risk of being caught and for a sizable cash fee. A serious penal deterrent is the only way this kind of traffic can be contained.
The press will circle to cut off this development, and it should be made clear to the government that public concern over personal privacy will not tolerate any more back-tracking, however many seductive dinners Dacre and Co buy the Prime Minister.

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