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.]  

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Alan Rusbridger had told the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee that he was going on holiday and couldn’t appear at yesterday’s hastily convened session to take evidence from the Guardian about their sources for last week’s News of the World blockbuster. But to the delight of all, he showed up with Nick Davies (who broke the story) and deputy Paul Johnson, not so much to answer the committee’s questions as to deliver what may turn out to be a defining polemic on the nature and pursuit of “Public Interest” journalism.

As an hors d’oeuvre we were given a delicate display of issue evasion by Tim Toulmin, director of the PCC.

We didn’t know what to expect from Davies, the star turn – perhaps a politely delivered apology for not being in a position to reveal anything, wrapped in an air of sanctimony.

But no.

There was an audible intake of breath in Committee Room 8 when it became clear he had beans to spill, beans with documentary evidence, and he was going to dish them up, complete with names that – in my case at least – would fall on delighted if unsurprised ears.

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The News of the World have just been ordered to pay massive compensation (with costs, over £1m) for tapping the phone of Gordon Taylor, Chief Executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association.

Former editor, now David Cameron’s spinner, Andy Coulson has claimed “This story relates to an alleged payment made after I left the News of the World two and a half years ago. I have no knowledge whatsoever of any settlement with Gordon Taylor.”

Coulson resigned on Jan 27^th 2007, the day a private investigator working for News International, Glenn Mulcaire was jailed for accessing the voicemails of Clarence House staff. During the course of his summing up, the Judge, Mr Justice Goss referred to police findings from Mulcaire’s records up to the previous August when he’d been arrested, which showed (not alleged) that Mulcaire had also intercepted voicemails left on Gordon Taylor’s mobile.

This was while Coulson was editor, and Mulciare was being paid by Stuart Kuttner to provide this kind of service (which is why Kuttner has now been dumped.)

Andy Coulson either has a very bad memory, or he is lying.

His tenure in Conservative Central Office now looks very  vulnerable.

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 Lucky for Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck, AKA the “Hanking Wack” and chief composer of smut and bollocks at the Screws of the World, no one got a shot of him on his little jolly in his ‘classic’ Mercedes sports car last summer. But he was spotted at the picturesque Hotel de France in Chinon, at the centre of the Loire wine growing region in France, indeed, even boasted to English punters of how he had set up the illegal to raid on Max Mosley’s private party last year, and tried to blackmail and bully the women involved into backing up false claims that Mosley had insisted on a Nazi theme.

          Why, I wonder, was his companion, a woman freezing in the passenger seat of his ‘rag-top’, not his long-suffering wife, Estelle, but a young British-Asian woman, who claimed she worked for the Crown Prosecution Service?

          What was her function? Is she on Onan’s extensive payroll of informers and tattle tellers?

          She can’t surely have come along to watch him manipulate himself, as he did a few years ago after begging the owners of a Dorset guest house to let him watch them having sex. He was trying to sting them into providing a couple of pages of smut for his rag, but got a bit carried away and was caught in flagrante on video – the stinger stung.

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