Max Clifford’s legal team, barrister Jeremy Reed, and solicitor Charlotte Harris (bright and sexy in six inch heels) on Wednesday gave the News of the World a good trouncing in the first skirmish of a High Court battle over the paper’s (one is supposed to say “alleged”) raid on the formidable publicist’s voicemail. This represents another step closer to the truth, which the paper has been desperately trying to hide, about the way their journalists have been systemically, and with the full knowledge of management, breaking the law to discover personal details of celebrities and thereby create invasive, damaging stories about them which are of no public interest. Significantly, so far, only the Guardian has chosen to report this result.
Clifford’s lawyers had asked for and were granted by Mr Justice Vos three specific orders for disclosure – despite the Screws’ peevish objections.
       First, they required Glenn Mulcaire, the investigator responsible for accessing Clifford’s voicemails, to disclose which individual or individuals (editor at the time: slippery spinner, Andy Coulson) asked/ suggested/ ordered him to perform this illegal act, which was included in his conviciton after he pleaded guilty 3 years ago to hacking into the Royal Household phones.
       Mulcaire, second defendant, has also already admitted Max Clifford’s claim, but, as his counsel explained, the father of five children under 16 is out of work (having made known his intention not to return to the snooping game) and living on job-seekers’ allowance. Even taking that with a hefty helping of sodium chloride, the judge might well have asked who was paying his legal bills, and how he would pay any damages awarded against him. But then, it’s not inconceivable that the paper is picking up these tabs – especially if it was they who got him into trouble in the first place by pressurising him to do what he did. If this is so, though, it would undoubtedly make some people think that the way he frames his responses might be influenced by News Group’s support. The paper’s bosses would probably like him to say that he was on a fishing expedition on his own account, and luckily stumbled across messages left by (and the mobile nos. of) several of Mr C’s hapless, high profile clients, and passed them to the lucky hacks without saying where or how he found them.
       He’s also been asked to reveal to whom he passed the contents of any voicemails acquired by him from this source, and to name anyone whom he might have instructed on how to access the voicemails themselves. The judge accepted the absolute necessity of this, and ordered that this information be made available to the claimants within 14 days.

Clifford’s counsel also requested that the News of the World release details of the secret settlement they reached out of court with Professional Footballers’ Association boss, Gordon Taylor for invading his privacy by accessing his voicemails (to which Mulcaire had also pleaded guilty).  And the court was treated to the strange sight of Taylors’ brief, Manual Barker standing alongside counsel for the Screws, who only last year had to pay Taylor £700k+ for their crimes. Now both parties were intent – for their differing reasons – on not letting the public see what they had agreed. The judge sensibly granted that while private details of Gordon Taylor’s messages which the paper had illegally acquired should remain secret, the terms and conditions and, significantly – the sums paid by the paper in recompense should be released to the claimant’s lawyers under strict terms of confidentiality.
Thirdly he ordered that the Information Commissioner’s Office should be allowed to release (which they have asserted they are happy to do) all data, files and documents accumulated during their investigation into illicit information  gathering which resulted in the 2006 report, What Price Privacy, specifically those relating to News of the World journalists. The Screws claimed this was irrelevant, because it contained no information on phone hacking; Clifford’s lawyers said it would help to establish that there was an endemic culture of illegal information gathering at the newspaper, and how phone hacking was a natural extension of the activities in which they’d been engaged for years.
 
Next time….
Clifford asks the Metropolitan Police to release the stack of documents they took from Mulcaire’s office when they arrested him in August 2006.

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The Commons Culture, Media, Sport Select Committee would like to talk to Rebekah Brooks, the titian-tressed scrapper who has been suprema of News International since last September. If she complies with their request to see them – and she will try very hard to wriggle out of it – it is to be hoped that she’ll shed more light on criminal activities at the News of the World than did Senior executives Tom Crone (Head of Legals), Stuart Kuttner (ex-Managing Editor), and former editor Andy Coulson, when they were called to give evidence over their phone-hacking to the Committee last summer. She may also remember more than Les Hinton, who was in her current chair when the raiding of the Royal voicemails came to light in August 2006. In September he spoke to the Committee by video link from New York, where he is now boss of the Murdochs’ Wall Street Journal. He had no recollection about key decisions, such as were the hackers paid off after being sacked for their criminal activity.

To the intense frustration of the committee and of those who care about the quality of British journalism, all the witnesses turned out to be suffering from an acute attack of contagious amnesia and truth frugalness. [See my blog] For these are people who have made their careers at Rupert’s Red Tops, delivering ‘journalism’ of such obfuscation and dishonesty, for so long, that it’s far too late to kick the habit.
   In a pitiful attempt to mislead the committee, they all ‘forgot’, or just ‘didn’t know’ any details relating to the events that culminated in the jailing of their Royal Editor, Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire, a Private Investigator contracted to the paper.
   In October, the Committee, determined not to be fobbed off with the persistent ducking and diving of the Screws bosses, formally posed a number of questions for them.
Among several anomalies that had arisen, they wished to know “the grounds on which advice was given to settle the claims [allegedly] made by Goodman and Mulcaire and the level of payments made”.
   Rebekah Brooks has now submitted her response. (This was viewable on the Committee’s page at www.parliament.uk up to 13th Jan.) Written in characteristic News of the World house style and buried in a miasma of obscured truth and elusive fact, it fails to answer either of these questions.
   With unexpected eagerness, she puts her hand up in conceding Goodman’s alleged claim for unfair dismissal. As they had “failed to meet minimum requirements” in relation to a dismissal, any affected employee would be entitled to bring a claim, “with a potential compensatory award of up to £60,600 (in addition to any contractual notice pay entitlement).”
But she also tells the Committee that the paper settled before a case was heard by any tribunal. The hypothetical sums and conditions she cites have no bearing on what they actually paid Goodman for signing “a standard-form News International compromise agreement,” – a euphemism for gagging agreement – and this despite the breach of his employment contract through his proven criminal activity. 
   The decoys and the irrelevant waffle in her answers were composed in order to put Rebekah Brooks’ pursuers off the scent; but, like much of the content of the News of the World, the result is ham-fisted, half-baked and easily seen through. There is an almost engaging naivety to her signing off. “… We trust that the answers given in this letter can now bring matters to a close.”
   Keep trusting, TestaRossa! Most observers will understand the subtext to her answer…..

You might think we gave them lots of money to shut them up and stop them telling the rest of the media who within the Screws hierarchy knew they’d deliberately broken the law by hacking into voicemails to get cheapo front page splashes, but you can’t prove it – so there!

The simple fact is that Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed for what they did. It follows therefore, that any other members of the Screws staff who were party to it are also liable to criminal prosecution and a jail sentence, including Andy Coulson and Stuart Kuttner.
The committee have shown commendable resolve in their pursuit of the truth over these activities.

They have a clear right and a public duty to insist on clear, frank and truthful answers from Rebekah Brooks.

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You can’t blame Prince Charles’ press secretary, Paddy Harveson for advising the Royal Family to write, through their solicitors, to the editors of Britain’s national newspapers and magazines with a request that they respect the Law, the Press Complaints Commission Editors’ Code and the privacy of the Royal Family by not sending their own photographers to Sandringham (other than for the traditional Christmas Day church shots) and by refusing to buy speculative, free-lance paparazzi shots from the army of shameless, opportunistic wannabe snappers that will surround and trespass on the family’s private grounds at Sandringham over the Christmas holiday.
          There’s not much chance of the editors complying, though.
          They’ll justify their publishing of intrusive shots with the excuse that public have a ‘right to know’, and will buy their papers if they offer shots of the hapless Kate Middleton caught like a fawn in a pair of car headlamps.
          Prince William deserves some understanding for not wanting to see a repeat of what happened to his mother. It would be heartening if the public refused to be seduced by these low appeals to their prurience, and refused to buy the papers that try it on.
         Sadly, there’s not much chance of that either.

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Baroness Peta Buscombe, the newish boss of the Press Complaints Commission, made an unfortunate choice over the timing of her first set-piece gig. Last April, after much searching, she was appointed to the PCC Chair after a string of rumpuses had been mismanaged by her predecessor, renowned downhill banana-skin skier, Sir Christopher Meyer, since when she has pragmatically maintained an almost undetectable profile. She must have told her colleagues and members of the commission that she’d like to take a little time to bed into the job and learn what it was about before delivering her mission statement.  
The occasion chosen for this formal spout was the annual conference of the Society of Editors last weekend, and it was bad luck for her that it happened so soon after the body she heads had loudly hammered in one of the last few nails needed to seal its own coffin.
Only a week before, she’d put her name to one of the most pusillanimous, cringe-making, Murdoch-arse-licking reports that the PCC has delivered to date, unequivocally supporting the cabal of evil, mendacious men who run – or, in the case of Stuart Kuttner, used to run – the News of the World, while at the same time trying desperately to rubbish the irrefutable and damning evidence of an investigative reporter on a paper that still has an interest in delivering the truth – evidence which, when offered to members of the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee, left them in no doubt that they were being lied to. 
(I’ve previously referred more than once to the spectacle of former Screws editor, Andy Coulson leafing through a copy of the paper, telling 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, a which point you had 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.)
   So, at this inauspicious moment in the PCC’s shameful career, the week after it had blatantly rallied round to uphold the obvious untruths of all the senior staff at the News of the World and ex-News International Chairman, Les Hinton, Baroness Buscombe chose to deliver a dog’s dinner. Her speech, empty of wit or erudtion was carefully – and irrelevantly – implanted with a “fuck”, ( “Peta Buscombe? Who the fuck is he?”), just to let the hard men know what a ballsy gal she is. She devoted a lot of it to party politics, MPs’ expenses, Lords’ reform and what it’s like being a woman in a man’s world. Her views on the function of her new body were expressed in a torrent of weasel words and Dacre-speak about the State ‘spying’ on citizens and ‘terrorising’ parking offenders, and the sanctity of press ‘freedom’, dutifully regurgitating the tabloid mantra that if papers weren’t able to tell stories about the private lives of famous people, the public would be deprived of a basic human right. She offered a little moan about PC gone mad, asking, ‘Whatever happened to common sense and a sense of proportion?’, and suggested that people were blind to put faith in laws and regulation – for, ‘as Gibbon pointed out, “Laws rarely prevent what they forbid”,’ an argument sometimes out forward for the dismantling of the whole penal code (though not usually by Conservatives).
   She told editors that Simon Cowell had successfully used the PCC to give him freedom from intrusive paparazzi, although he could have afforded to go to the courts if he’d wanted. She may have forgotten that only last month, Max Clifford was seen on clips from the documentary film, ‘Starsuckers’, saying that Cowell had been paying him a large retainer for several years, just to keep his name out of the papers. Or perhaps, as the film shows how easy it is to sell totally fictitious stories to most of the tabloids, her paymasters forbade her to see it.
   It was a feeble performance by a person who seems to have no clear concept of her function, which will only hasten the demise of this doomed organisation. MPs and even some serious-minded journalists are realistic enough and, in the case of MPs, brave enough to face down Murdoch and Dacre and accept at last that the concept of self-regulation by an industry that includes publications like the News of the World, the Sun, the Daily Star, the Express and the Daily Mail is not a feasible option. Next year should at last see moves towards establishing an independent, statutory body with quasi-legal powers to curb the excesses of the Shag Rags and their tawdry hacks, while making Britian a cleaner place to live.

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The most significant aspect of Carter Ruck’s attempt to impose a super-injunction on the reporting of a Parliamentary exchange is that it DIDN’T WORK. Politicans are getting their self-righteous underwear in a twist for nothing. They want lawyers to be prevented from seeking gagging orders, but it would be far more dangerous to attempt to stop them  trying to do what they can for their clients. In the end these things rely on laws passed by Parliament, and their intepretation by an independent judiciary. Although the Guardian reported Trafigura’s activities last May 14th, until two weeks ago, hardly anyone had heard of Trafigura or its dirty habits. Now the world does; that’s good and, with a pleasing irony, that wouldn’t have happened if C.Ruck hadn’t tried to gag Parliament.

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