Among the muddle-headed ramblings that senior executives of the News of the World offered by way of evidence to the Commons Culture Media Sport Committee on July 21^st, there was at least one small grain of accuracy, although the details of even that are open to question.

          Tom Crone, head legal honcho at the Screws, was deftly ducking his way through some incisive questioning by CMS Committee chairman, John Whittingdale, who wanted to know what had happened to an email sent by a “junior reporter” to Private Investigator, Glenn Mulcaire.

          This email had been used by lawyers acting for PFA boss, Gordon Taylor in their action against the Screws for invasion of privacy. It contained a transcript of a message left on Taylor’s voicemail. This transcript had been prepared by the junior reporter and returned to Glenn Mulcaire with the heading, “Hello, this is the transcript for Neville,” clearly referring to senior reporter Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck who was working on the story.

          It will come as no surprise, though, that when Mr Crone questioned Thurlbeck about it, the position was that, “He had never seen that email, nor had any knowledge of it.  He says that he was brought into the relevant editorial project, the story, at the end of the story and his task was to go and knock on the door of one of the story’s subjects, which was either in Blackburn or Manchester, and put the essence of the story to the person in order to get their comments, which is mostly standard practice in what we do.”

          Coincidentally , it’s not the first time Thurlbeck has used this excuse for his extraordinarily hazy memory of major events. He gave exactly the same one when asked in the Mosley case if he knew the origin of a verbatim transcript of a voicemail message left by Prince William for Prince Harry. He had, amazingly, absolutely no idea that the story could have been obtained by illegal means, much as Andy Coulson told the CMS Committee an hour or so after Crone gave evidence last month.

          Crone went on to say, “When I spoke to (Thurlbeck) the first time he said he was briefed by one of our executives, Greg Miskiw who was then based in Manchester.  He subsequently came back to me and said that he had refreshed his memory and in fact it could not have been Greg Miskiw, because Greg Miskiw left the News of the World on 30 June 2005, which was the day after that email was created. (My italics) He had worked out his redundancy package, I think, a week or two weeks before that, and he was no longer on active duty.  Neville Thurlbeck told me that his refreshed memory told him that in fact the briefing that he received was from the London news desk.”

          John Whittingdale went on to ask if the London news desk was aware of the contents of this email.

          To which Crone replied, “Well, no, I went to speak to the relevant person at the London news desk who told me that he had no knowledge of the email and he had never seen it.”

          So Neville Thurlbeck was sent off to ask about a story based on a transcript which none of them were aware of?

          Crone admitted, “I do not know whether the story entirely came from the transcript; but certainly part of it must have come from the transcript, yes.”

          This was, of course, all standard Screws obfuscation tactics. 

          Crone said he had also questioned the junior reporter, who also had little recollection of the email and transcript.  But Crone did know that about this time, he had only just become a reporter. “Prior to that actually I think he had been a messenger and he was being trained up on the floor.  In the early weeks and months of him being trained up as a reporter what he did more than anything else was transcribe tapes of journalists’ interviews – whatever tapes were relevant to the News of the World.  He does not particularly remember this job in any detail; he does not remember who asked him to do it; and he does not remember any follow-up from it.  He saw the email and he accepts that he sent the transcript where the email says he sent it.”

          If the CMS committee had wanted to question the junior reporter, they would have found that in April of this year he left the paper, having filed several key stories about the fatal stabbings of London teenagers, Jimmy Mizen and Robert Knox.

          It seems almost too absurd that the Committee should be expected seriously to believe that a young reporter would have no recollection of transcribing an illegally obtained message left on the voicemail of the boss of the Professional Footballers’ Association.  And this young reporter, Ross Hall is no fool. He comes from a journalistic background, at least to the extent that his uncle, Phil Hall, now a leading PR, is a former editor of the News of the World.

          One of his colleagues told me that in the spring – about the same time managing editor Stuart Kuttner was learning about involuntary plans for his future – Ross Hall decided that he was fed up with working for the Screws, and took off to travel round the world.

          It may be a simple coincidence that his companion, a high profile young free-lancer also left the Sunday Mirror at exactly the same time and hasn’t worked in London since.

          So the one person who can say definitively who did or didn’t see the email which ultimately cost the Screws over £700k in damages and costs paid to Gordon Taylor is conveniently unavailable for some months to come.

          And Ross Hall’s disillusionment with Britain’s leading ShagRag wasn’t so great that it stopped him filing a little puff, disguised as a travel piece in the Screws, for the safari lodge where he was staying in Botswana in April.

          I wonder who he’ll be working for when he gets back from his travels.

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The hysteria level in Grub Street over the wickedness of MPs is mounting by the day. You have to ask yourself if there isn’t just a hint of Schadenfreude in the editorial mix. It was pointed out only a couple of weeks ago by a witness giving evidence to the CMS Inquiry into Press Standards that MPs were second only to journalists in the depth of contempt in which they are held by the public.  Now the hacks (not unfamiliar with expense chitties themselves) are doing all they can to consolidate the reversal of those placings.

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The Culture, Media, Sport Committee goes fishing for Eels.

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).

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Despite a display of arrogant disdain and disingenuousness, Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre was given a soft ride by the House of Commons Culture Media Sport Committee when he gave evidence to their Inquiry into Press Standards.

It was disappointing to see that besides the chairman, John Whittingdale, only five of the ten members turned up. I hope there were good reasons for their absence; after all, Dacre is now surely the most influential – and most feared – newspaper editor in the country and it seems likely they would have wanted to put their questions at first hand. I truly hope they didn’t stay away because they didn’t want to upset him. For Dacre has a history of intimidating Members of Parliament – even Prime Ministers, as he did (and subsequently boasted about it) last year when he persuaded the government to remove Clause 76 from the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, which would have made offences against Section 5 the Data Protection Act 1998 punishable by imprisonment – thereby protecting those of his journalists who make a habit of doing that sort of thing.

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Mariella Frostrup, writing in the Guardian today, feels that laws (bizarrely headlined ‘draconian’) proposed to protect personal privacy are a threat to public interest. The idea that papers should be required to forewarn victims of the intended publication of intimate details of their private lives was put forward by Max Mosley in his evidence to the ongoing CMS Committee Inquiry. Ms Frostrup and most other commentators on the subject are journalists who persistently show a knee-jerk aversion to any suggestion that their sacred right to reveal whatever they like should be restrained. Most readers of serious papers wouldn’t argue with the importance of wholly truthful reportage when it concerns matters of genuine public interest (a politician’s lies, a criminal’s crimes or a bishop’s hypocrisy) but Mariella Frostrup and many of her colleagues continue to ignore the fact that any breaches of privacy or transgressions of the Data Protection Act are (and would remain) clearly defensible in law on public interest grounds.

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