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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

A new possible indication of the unhealthily cosy relationship between The Met and the News of the World emerged yesterday when John Yates appeared before the home affairs select committee and re-iterated the bizarre claim that cases of hacking into voicemails could only be prosecuted if the victim hadn’t played back the message and listened to it themselves.

Simon McKay, author of Covert Policing Law & Practice is quoted in the Guardian: “That is nonsense, and a recurring problem with this police position in this case. The police are getting confused about a number of things relating to the evidential status of a voicemail.”

Government guidelines on the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa), which deals with the interception of phone communications make clear the illegality of hacking into all voicemails.

“I don’t know where the police are getting this interpretation from,” a senior lawyer close to the case told the Guardian. “It’s well known that Ripa is not the clearest piece of legislation, but these guidelines seem pretty clear.”

It is likely that it was the News of the World who persuaded the police it was legal to hack voicemails which had already been listened to by their intended recipient, because this was precisely the argument used by Screws management to persuade private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire to start his hacking.  ”It’s like somone opening a letter they’ve been sent, reading it then discarding it in the street where anyone could pick it up,” was how they justified it, with quaint, twisted logic. They also promised Mulcaire that if he didn’t do as he was told,  he wouldn’t see his contract renewed – a threat which was further applied to make him subsequently hack into unlistened to voicemails.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Yesterday the New York Times Online put up a long piece, to be published as the cover of the NYT magazine this Sunday, which includes several attributed references to Andy Coulson’s involvement with illegal phone-hacking at the News of the World. Andy Coulson is still – despite many warnings – David Cameron’s head spinner and chief conduit to the Murdochs’ British media empire.

The NYT is unequivocal in its conclusion that Coulson knew about, and was therefore complicit in an offence which saw two people working for him go to jail.

It was in any case very clear from Coulson’s evidence to the Common’s Culture Media & Sport Committee last year that he wasn’t telling the truth when he denied any knowledge of one specicfic high-profile royal story about which he could not possibly have been unaware, and which had been illegally obtained.

The Government should not under any circumstances be harbouring people of this moral calibre; it maybe that Coulson will soon be charged as a party to a proven crime and rehoused at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Much better to get shot of him first – as I have consistently advocated since he was appointed by the Conservatives in 2007.

Who else knew, besides Coulson? Managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, who was sacked for his ineptness in covering up, and former News Internationl CEO, Les Hinton, who blathered like a school kid denying he’d eaten the sweets when  questioned by the CMS Committee?

Popularity: 2% [?]