Mr Murdoch, you have conceded that Gordon Taylor had to be paid because his phone had been hacked by Muclaire on behalf of the News of the World.

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.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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% [?]

I’ve learned that News International CEO Rebekah Brooks will not now be appearing in front of the House of Commons Culture Media Sport Committee to answer direct questions about the News of the World’s widely reported criminal phone hacking activities.
          This is bad news, particularly when the committee has shown commendable determination in trying to extract the truth from the paper about who in that organisation – management and hacks – knew what had happened, who sanctioned it and whether or not, as many suspect, it was endemic.
          Some cynics may see a connection between the facts that committee chairman, John Whittingdale is a Conservative, and his party’s Central Office, through the Machiavellian activities of their chief press officer and former Screws editor, Andy Coulson, have come to an understanding with News International, by which the Sun newspaper has switched allegiance from Brown to Cameron (for all the help that will be), in return for who knows what?
          This may lead the cynics to think there has been encouragement not to put pressure on Brooks to come and see the committee.
          I don’t think so, but the committee really has the Screws on the run and it would be a disatrous waste of their efforts, having got this far, they gave up now. We most of us understand that a stage may be reached in circumstances like this when it is so troublesome and difficult to extract the truth, that crimes go uninvestigated and unpunished – like those of the perpetrators of the massive Lloyds scam 30 years ago, or the activities of some bankers just two years ago. But to let a major British media group get away with blatantly breaking the law would be unforgivable. Sadly, and for myserious reasons, the Met are very reluctant to pursue further investigations.  

Brooks, the “Testarossa” (like the motor, highly tuned and temperamental) – is the ultimate UK boss of the Times, the Sunday Times, the News of the Screws and the Sun, and she’s a busy woman.
          Perhaps she won’t come, not because they haven’t asked her quite firmly enough, but because she’s too frightened of what she might say. Even her slipperiest, hardest-nosed, most rhino-skinned Screws execs tripped themselves up as they ducked and dived their way around the truth in the face of some serious probing from committee members Adam Price and Paul Farrelly.
          Or perhaps the committee think she’ll do as her underlings have done, and block every question with a ‘don’t know’ or a ‘can’t remember’.
          They could be right, and another session could be a waste of time. Certainly the written answers she’s already submitted are evasive and fail entirely to satisfy the questions put to her. (see yesterday’s blog)

It’s clear that crimes were being knowingly committed and it is out of the question that the two jailed scapegoats, Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire, were the only people who knew what was going on. John Whittingdale and his committee must continue to pursue her relentlessly until they have genuine, satisfactory answers and the names of the culprits.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

At last, it’s been announced that the Justice Minister, Michael Wills, will activate a clause originally passed by Parliament in last year’s Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. Shamefully, it was then effectively neutered by three press heavies leaning hard on Gordon Brown to have it removed.
One of them was Les Hinton, former CEO of News International, who displayed such strong symptoms of convenient, chronic News International Amnesia when interviewed over a satellite link by the Commons Culture, Media, Sport Committee last month – like the senior management of the News of the World, who had already sat in front of the committee outrageously claiming they couldn’t remember/didn’t know how much and on what terms they’d paid off miscreant reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. Even Stuart Kuttner, wily old managing editor and architect of many of the distasteful journalistic scams that the paper has pulled off, didn’t know who would know – which was a bit of a surprise. [And former Screws editor Andy Coulson couldn't remember publishing a verbatim transcript of a message left on Prince Harry's private voicemail by Prince William and illegally accessed by two of his staff who went to prison for it. He'd have gone too, if he'd admitted being party to it. But he said he wasn't - at least, he couldn't remember anything about it..... not.]
Also present at what was reported to be a dinner with the Prime Minster, was Paul Dacre, the man who employs Richard Littlejohn (in itself a crime against human decency). Muckraker Dacre then described the provision to make Data Theft an imprisonable offence as “a truly frightening amendment.” Truly frightening, for sure, to the editor of a newspaper which was found by the Information Commissioner a few years before to have routinely engaged in wholesale illegal information gathering (and got away with it).
Gordon Brown, as lily-livered as any politician confronted by press bosses who might have nasty things written about him and his government, agreed to “suspend” the clause, which the former Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas had fought so hard to have put in place.
The current Commissioner, Christopher Graham last month accused MPs of chucking out the clause, when, in fact Parliament had passed it. It was the Government, not Parliament who changed their mind.
Now, after the Guardian’s valiant disclosure that the Screws had been hacking into the voicemails of Gordon Taylor and two other people involved in the Professional Footballers’ Association, the government has accepted [as I have advocated many times on this blogspace] that it has no choice but to enact the clause. That they should now qualify this with a public interest defence is quite right and proper – no one wants to see responsible journalists impeded from exposing crime and corruption.
But the core fact is that medical records, bank account details, tax records, phone-call traffic information, or even journey details obtainable from registered Oyster cards, of individuals who have committed no offence greater than being of interest to those who read the Shag Rags can easily be passed on by an employee of the many companies and agencies that keep these records, using a USB stick with little risk of being caught and for a sizable cash fee. A serious penal deterrent is the only way this kind of traffic can be contained.
The press will circle to cut off this development, and it should be made clear to the government that public concern over personal privacy will not tolerate any more back-tracking, however many seductive dinners Dacre and Co buy the Prime Minister.

Popularity: 1% [?]