Your executives Myler, Crone, Kuttner, Coulson, Hinton all told the CMS committee in 2009 that there had only been one rogue reporter, Clive Goodman – the Royal editor – and continued asserting this, as did you, right up until 2010.

Are you telling us that you and your executives believed that the extensive phone hacking of Gordon Taylor and his assistants by Mulcaire was ordered by Clive Goodman, the one rogue reporter?

And did they (and you) believe that Goodman also instructed Mulcaire to hack into the phones of Skylet Andrew (a footballers’ agent), Simon Hughes, and Max Clifford, all of whom were named as victims of Mulcaire’s hacking when he was convicted in January 2007?

If they didn’t believe this (and they could not possibly have believed it), they all lied to Parliament when they re-asserted their claim that Goodman was the only guilty reporter.

The obfuscation, the hesitation, the avoidance of direct answers, the high pitched protesting whine, as well as the inconsistency of fact when James Murdoch appeared before the committee on Tuesday were all convincing indicators that he too has now lied to parliament.

The PCC also omitted in their summary of evidence given to the CMS committee by Gordon Taylor’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, to pursue further his statement [quoted from CMS Com website]:
Detective Sergeant Mark Maberly said to me, “You are not having everything but we will give you enough on Taylor to hang them.” …… He also mentioned the number of people whose phones had been hacked….. they had found there were something like 6,000 people who were involved. It was not clear to me whether that was 6,000 phones which had been hacked, or 6,000 people including the people who had left messages.
The PCC didn’t contact or question DS Maberly. That the PCC in their attempt to discredit the Guardian’s report have chosen to ignore such clear evidence demonstrates once again their unfitness – or simple unwillingness – to carry out the function of press self-regulation for which they were set up.
They also showed an alarming lack of determination in failing to question Andy Coulson who was editor while all the royal phone hacking was going on – either now, or (because he had “left the industry”) after the conviction of Goodman. Given his extraordinary denial to the CMS committee last July that he knew anything about the story which had been flagged on the front page and filled page 7 of an edition that he had edited, it seems imprudent, to say the least, to have overlooked any part he might have played.

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.

Although this made them look utterly ridiculous, and Tom Crone, as a senior media lawyer, a disgrace to his profession, they knew, if they toughed it out, there was little the MPs could do, for, naturally, there was never a paper trail to confirm the involvement of any of them in the Goodman/Mulcaire case – and short of getting them to submit to US Intelligence gathering techniques on the waterboard, there was nothing more the committee could do to extract the verité.

It was a sad day for British justice and the state of British popular journalism.

These are people who have been at the very heart of the Screws, Crone and Kuttner for over 20 years each, and yet, to the great disappointment of their questioners and most of the crowd of assembled media hacks, they both produced nothing more then a display of advanced dementia. Neither of them could remember anything of some of their major decisions of the last few years – like who was responsible for paying off disgraced royal editor Clive Goodman and contract PI Glenn Mulcaire.

They had clearly decided that their tactic for the day was simply to say, “I can’t remember”, and stonewall until the committee got bored with asking the same questions. Its was an outrageous display of blatant mendacity, relieved only by one chink of truth when Stuart Kuttner, stood down two weeks ago, for, the paper had claimed, unrelated events, admitted, rather crestfallen, that his departure had “not been his choice”.

i.e.:  He was sacked.

As I said last week.

Stay tuned…

More tomorrow, folks.

The Tabloids, Red Tops and Shag Rags were represented by little Colin Myler, Scouser and former editor of the Liverpool Catholic Pictorial (I mention this only to demonstrate how far the man’s standards have fallen) who is now editor of the News of the Screws, the nadir of British journalism. At his side was the legal artful dodger, Tom Crone who as the paper’s busy in-house lawyer for a quarter of a century has been ducking writs issued by members of the public whose lives it has set out to destroy. Myler thinks that the public has no fundamental right to privacy. The News of the World had a string of successful actions brought against it last year for invasion of privacy – and not a word of remorse did Myler express for the damage they caused the victims.

The Broadsheets (i.e. organs of real news and considered views) were represented by Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger. Rusbridger’s paper suffered great expense when sued by Tesco for getting the figures wrong in what was essentially a genuine story about their tax accounting. He felt the current practices and costs in libel law were making it impossible to take the risk of pursuing complex investigative stories. Asked of his experience of privacy invasion actions, he said his paper had not  faced any such actions – because his paper is in the business of pursuing truth through legal means, not by making it up over a few pints in the Old Rose at Wapping.

The functions of these very disparate branches of the printed media are so different that their choosing to band together to resist any perceived restrictions on free speech is truly puzzling – especially when any transgressions against personal privacy in pursuit of a story can always be mitigated by the Public Interest value of the story.

The Shag Rags do not, on the whole, pursue stories of public interest. Their target is trivial, titillating prurience, for which there is no defence – legal or moral.

To see the whole Committee session click here.

Tom Crone is head legal honcho at News International where he’s worked for more than 25 years, as he proudly told the CMS Committee at an oral evidence session today. Crone is one of the country’s top media lawyers, quick on his toes, slippery as an eel and very hard to catch. He’d come along to hold the hand of Screws editor, little Colin Myler, former editor of the Catholic Pictorial in Liverpool and of the Sunday Mirror (from which he was forced to resign after derailing the trial of two Leeds United footballers).

Crone opened by telling the committee that they couldn’t talk about the most significant privacy case of the year, since Max Mosley has now followed up his successful suit for invasion of privacy by issuing a libel writ on the News of the Screws. That didn’t stop Crone referring back to it when it suited him in an attempt to justify his paper’s behaviour.

Once again, to defend their illegal filming of Mosley’s private life (and parts), he beat the tired old, slack-headed drum of Mosley’s ‘elected’ status as president of an international organisation which represents a 125 million people. He implied that this meant members of the AA and RAC had a right to know how he spent his private leisure time.

Colin Myler said that Mosley, as a public figure, had a duty to behave in a manner commensurate with his position; he was accountable for his behaviour and there were elements in Formula 1 who took exception to it.

No one on the committee pointed out that Mosley has since been re-elected as president for a fourth term, and what fallout there was centred on the publicity rather than the sexual activity.

Colin Myler ‘fundamentally disagreed’ with Mr Justice Eady’s description of Mosley’s behaviour as “unconventional”; it was much worse than that, he said  – it was immoral and depraved. But where, one wanted to ask, as self-appointed guardians of public morals, did the News of the World draw the line?

In Mosley’s case the other participants were adult, consenting and acting legally in private.

AHOY WAPPING! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

Mr Myler is a member of the Catholic Church which holds that it is immoral to commit adultery or indulge in anal sex. Would he consider these activities worth reporting if committed by a ‘public’ figure – say, a prominent journalist?

He declared that any employee of the News of the World found having extra-marital sex on the premises would be dismissed. It’s lucky he wasn’t around in the Screws’ Bouverie Steet days where staff of both sexes regularly swapped experiences in the Animal Room.

Rather surprisingly –incredibly, even – he went on to tell the committee that he had only published an account of Mosley’s party and the video (for which he had agreed to pay £25,000) because it was a damned good story, although of no commercial benefit to the newspaper. And he thought it was a suitable story for a family newspaper which children could read over their breakfast cereal on a Sunday morning.

He accepted that stories like this could have catastrophic effects on the subjects, but contrary to an often quoted view, he said, the paper does not set out to destroy people’s lives. It was, he implied, the subject’s fault for dropping his trousers with insufficient discretion.

Besides, he went on with clunky logic, if the paper couldn’t publish stories like that, people wouldn’t buy it, the paper would run out of money and cease to exist. This was puzzling, given that he’d just told the committee there’d been no financial gain to the Screws in publishing the Mosley story. Perhaps he meant – after taking into account the £960,000 Mosley’s case eventually cost them.

It sounded like just more of the usual, hypocritical Wapping Shite that fills the pages of his Shag Rag every week.

Last week they had the Mail’s Paul Dacre and this week, Peter Hill from the Express, in fine displays of obfuscation, filibustering, disingenuousness and downright lying. (Did Dacre really not know that his paper was the first, cruelly, to reveal the whereabouts of much traumatised Elisabeth Fritzl? I don’t think so. Do you?)

Little Colin is not as muscular and perhaps a tad more troubled by his Catholic conscience than the hard-hearted Mail and Express men. Lucky for him, Tom Crone, leading in-house lawyer to the Wapping hackery is coming along to Westminster, too, to hold his hand, and no doubt, jump in to stifle him if he feels a sudden rush of truth coming on, or to protect him if things get too tough.

We can only hope that the committee do get tough – tougher than they were on Muckraker Dacre.

The trouble is – the doughtiest of MPs quail at the prospect of upsetting the Murdochs.

Otherwise, they might have asked to question Mr Stuart Kuttner, the Screws fixer-in-chief and eminence grease who’s been burying bodies in Wapping for 20 years. He knows where they all are – and how they got there.

But Mr Kuttner doesn’t do interviews.

On the basis of an unsubstantiated, selectively edited conversation, almost certainly driven by Mahmood’s skill in extracting the answers he wants, spineless Screws editor Colin “There Will Be Fewer Celebrity Stings In Future” Myler allowed the dangerous fantasist to spin and twist it into 5 pages of his ‘newspaper’.

One can only hope that the 3 million purchasers of the News of the World (one is reluctant to call them readers) are so accustomed to this kind of sensationalist twaddle from Mahmood and his colleagues that they will just laugh – as they so often do.

‘It’s a load of effing crap,’ as a wise London cabby described the paper to me. ‘But it’s a good laugh, innit.’

But it’s not – not if, like Rubina and her family, you’re at the receiving end of its malicious fictions.

Those who wonder why the Screws keep on the Fake Sheikh, now that he’s more of a liability than an asset, should understand that Mahmood (like Shag’n’Brag supremo, Neville ‘Onan the Barbarian’ Thurlbeck) knows where far too many bodies are buried for management ever to show him the door.

Only the total destruction of the Screws will put an end to the careers of these evil, sanctimonious hypocrites masquerading as journalists.

What is clear, though, is that Ms Nuwar didn’t read and inwardly digest the email which the Guardian’s Media Monkey tells us Ian Edmondson (Screws news desk boss) has recently circulated to all hacks.

“All interviews are carried out in the following way: 1. Tape the interview.

2. Transcribe word for word the interview. 3. Write the story from these words only.

If it is not on tape, do not file it unless expressly requested by myself (or deputies).”

As the paper has survived for so long by concocting its own version of interviews one wonders how they will ever fill their pages from now on.

During the Max Mosley case last summer, leading NoW smut-wallah Neville ‘Onan the Barbarian’ Thurlbeck admitted in court that he had added quotes to an ‘interview’ with the valiant Woman E (the Screws’ star witness who didn’t show up) after she had signed it off. It seems unlikely that Onan Thurlbeck will change his habits overnight.

But I’m wandering of the point, which is that it was Osborne who brought Andy into the Tory camp to front up their PR campaign– perhaps as a thank-you for helping out in humanizing his image a couple of years before.

Some think it was Andy who did so much for Young Cameron’s public persona last year. Others think it was Henry Macrory, or indeed DC himself, given his own natural charm and practical background in PR.

The question being asked now is: Will Andy be allowed to stay if the Tories win? Or is he too tainted by past errors and (at least by association) misdemeanours while at the helm of the Screws? There are still many media insiders (and I) who think he must have been aware of what was going on before Clive Goodman (his ‘Royal Editor’ at the Screws) and PI Glenn Mulcaire were dispatched for a sojourn at HM’s pleasure.

At the PR Week Awards last week, Coulson was named PR Professional of the Year. Luckily, he was too busy with Osborne’s Corfu faux-pas to pick up the award himself, and wasn’t there to hear the jeers that greeted the announcement.

What price Andy never gets an office in Downing Street?