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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 As if we needed any more proof that we now live in a MURDOCHRACY, the metropolitan guardians of our democratic law last week showed clearly where their loyalties lie. They chose to believe Andy Coulson’s preposterous contention that he just didn’t know his hacks were breaking the law all around him when he was editor of the nation’s leading Sunday Arse-Wiper.

Anyone with a brain who has followed the progress of investigations into and civil actions against the illegal activities of what Max Mosley has pithily described as “a criminal organisation” is aware that the cocky, grey-suited little fellow who now occupies an office by the PM’s in Downing Street (acting as a high-speed link between his current boss and his former bosses) could not possibly have been unaware of the methods used by his hacks to get many of their exclusive stories about the private peccadilloes of s’lebs and other public figures, and that he was – putting it bluntly – lying his arse off when he made this claim to Parliament and subsequently to the police and anyone else who has asked (including the regrettable Tommy Sheridan in a Glasgow court this week).

      Of course, it isn’t only the Met who are guilty of sucking up to Rupert Rumplechops by believing and protecting his man, it is also – and this is more than just regrettable – our wholesome and otherwise right-minded new Prime Minster. After the last election, a majority of voters weren’t too dismayed at the idea of the coalition; as it becomes clearer that this has turned out to be a NewsCorp/Tory/Liberal coalition we are rapidly becoming less happy about it.

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The Sun  “Newspaper”, best-selling of Britain’s shameful Shag-rags, has been advised by ex-SAS ghosted “novelist” Steve Mitchel (aka Andy McNab) that waterboarding is an efficient way of extracting the facts from reluctant informants.

In July last year, I suggested this treament for the former editor of the Sun’s  sister paper, the Screws’, Andy “Notso” Coulson after he failed comprehensively to tell the truth to the Commons Culture Select Committee.

Under the heading “A Case for Waterboarding?“, I blogged……..

The MPs on the Culture, Media, Sport Committee must have been asking themselves yesterday, what on earth a reasonable person could do when confronted with three hardened, well-rehearsed liars, all desperate to avoid having their collars felt?

Experienced interpreters of body-language can enjoy a revealing session by tuning into the video-archive of yesterday’s oral evidence in front of the CMS Committee in Portcullis House.

Andy Coulson – bullish, assertive, knowing his best defence is attack, with a dash of cheeky chappy charm.

Tom Crone – for once not so sure of his ground, nervously cutting in a little too quickly when little Colin Myler gets it wrong, with a giveaway sheen of sweat on the strong, ruddy features.

Stuart Kuttner – eau de nil, haunted, shaking like an aspen, fiddling, fiddling, picking up his water, putting it down undrunk, rearranging files and pens, moving his large spectacles from side to side – meaning, for those who speak body language, that he is shitting himself; that after an ignominious dismissal by … who? Which Mr Murdoch? … his long, wicked career at the Screws is well and truly on the skids.

Little Colin Myler doesn’t need to lie. He wasn’t there when events at the centre of this enquiry took place. [When he’d arrived, he did arrange a few training sessions in act-cleaning-up for his newsroom hacks. But did Mazhher Mahmood and Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck attend? From the continuing and relentless shoddiness of their output, it seems they were excused – or just weren’t paying attention.]   

When Crone, legal boss of News Group is asked about the terms of a pay-off to Glenn Mulcaire, a former investigations contractor who has been imprisoned for carrying out tasks from which his company profited, and he claims he doesn’t know what those terms were (although he’s very sure that Mulcaire did not sign any non-disclosure agreement), you have to conclude either that he is suffering from severe amnesia and should instantly be relieved of his post, or that he is not telling the truth.

He directed the MPs to ask Stuart Kuttner.

When Kuttner told the MPs, confirming that an arrangement had been made with Glenn Mulciare, he too was utterly unfamiliar with the terms, conditions and size of the pay-off, and that he didn’t know who in an organisation of which he has been Managing Editor for 22 years was responsible for making such arrangements, you have to conclude that he has become insane – for imagining that any rational person would believe him.

When Andy Coulson tells his questioners that he has no recollection whatever of a story, flagged on the front page of an issue of the paper that he’d edited, occupying the whole of Page 7, depicting a verbatim transcript of a message left by one prince on another prince’s voicemail, knowing that not a single person in the Wilson Room in Portcullis House, or viewing the session on Parliament TV, or in the evening news broadcasts would believe him, you a have to conclude that here is a youngish man who sees his whole future in jeopardy if he breaks and admits to a scintilla of knowledge of the phone-hacking that was involved in acquiring the story.

It was very clear that before the three men came in to answer the awkward questions that would be put to them, they had agreed between themselves that they would simply declare either that they didn’t know the answers or that they couldn’t remember the events

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 Rupert Murdoch’s bid for the 61% of BSkyB his News Corp doesn’t already own offers us our first clear chance to witness and assess Murdoch influence over Downing Street.

The fact that Murdoch has a placeman in No.10, in the shape of Andy Coulson is a source of deep concern to anyone who values democracy. Those of us who voted for the coalition did not vote for Rupert Murdoch, and it is persistently alarming to know that News Corp has a direct feed into the ear of the Prime Minister. Andy Coulson, who clearly did not tell the truth to the Commons CMS Committee when he appeared before them in their inquiry into the still rumbling Screws phone hacking scandal, is deeply tainted  by his role in the whole seedy business. David Cameron’s continuing loyalty to him looks increasingly like poor judgment and lack of control over Coulson’s chief supporter, George Osborne.

 It’s a big relief that Business Secretary Vince Cable has today referred News Corps’ declared bid for BSkyB to OFCOM. But Downing Street will be very closely watched for any political pressure to favour the interests of News Corps.

If they want to be taken seriously in this, we should expect to see a marked decline in contact with Coulson’s former boss (and continuing friend) Rebekah “TestaRossa” Brooks, CEO of News Corps’ British interests. We shoul also expect to see Couslon shown the door – back or front.

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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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