News International boss, Rebekah Brooks has stamped her little foot, shaken her ginger curls and says she jolly well won’t go to the Houses of Parliament to tell the Culture, Media & Sport Committee that everyone in Wapping knew who was engaged in illegal “news” gathering. Pity, because she could also have told them why managing editor and senior spell-binder at the Screws, Stuart Kuttner was sacked last summer, just when the Guardian broke the story of the Screws’ out of court settlement with Gordon Taylor for hacking into his voicemails.
She might have been able to explain why, without any of the management at the paper (they say) being aware of phone hacking by Glenn Mulcaire, they thought they were liable for what Mulcaire had done without their knowlegde or involvement. After all the paper’s head legal honcho, Tom Crone suggested to the Committee last July that Mulcaire was working for other papers. On that basis, he could have hacked Gordon’s phone on behalf of the Sunday Mirror or one of the Dirty Des rags. If they didn’t even know it was going on – and they categorically denied that they did – why should they have coughed up before Gordon Taylor even got them to court?
    But the police had an email which made it clear that a transcript of Mulcaire’s interceptions on Taylor’s phone had been made by Screws reporter, Ross Hindley (AKA: Ross Hall) for senior shag hack, Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck. (You might ask why the police didn’t pursue this prima facie evidence of law-breaking at the Screws by people other than fall guys Goodman and Mulcaire.)
Maybe Kuttner’s firing was a response by James Murdoch, his ultimate boss in the UK, to the increasing filthiness of the paper’s reputation under Kuttner’s regime and the vast sums of money gushing down the Screws loos, thanks to pay-offs to Max Mosley, Gordon Taylor, Barry George and even £800K to one of their own, maligned ex-employees, Matt Driscoll (to name a few of many, not to mention Goodman and Mulcaire). And shortly they may well have to dig deep for veteran media warrior, Max Clifford, whose case against the paper for invasion of privacy gets underway early next month (if the paper doesn’t settle before). It seems unlikely, though, that Max Clifford would be ready to sign a non-disclosure agreement, like the one Taylor did. So maybe the paper will be forced to take its chances in court, where Clifford’s lawyers (and the intelligent press) will have a field day. I can’t wait.
Who’s next?

Popularity: 6% [?]

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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 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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Yesterday the Employment Tribunal at Stratford, East London dealt a well-deserved blow to the already noxious reputation of the News of the World when they found in favour of former senior sports writer, Matt Driscoll. He had claimed unfair dismissal and disability discrimination by the newspaper; the tribunal will hold a further hearing early in the new year to determine compensation to be paid by the paper.

The tribunal heard that Matt Driscoll had since 1997 been a well-thought of sports journalist on the News of the World. He’d been promoted in 2001 by his boss, Mike Dunn to chief sports features writer. But incoming editor, Andy Coulson, had taken against him, and Driscoll was subjected to a series of baseless disciplinary hearings to force him to resign. As a result he developed a stress-related illness, on the basis of which Coulson and his managing editor, Stuart Kuttner dismissed him. Driscoll has been unable to work since.

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Max Mosley was awarded £60,000 in compensatory damages and £200,000 in costs in the High Court today. The News of the World were found by Mr Justice Eady to have breached his privacy by filming a private S&M session in a flat in Chelsea. The paper will also have to pay their own similar legal costs, leaving News International some £460,000 out of pocket.

It wasn’t a great result for the News of the World, but it could have been an awful lot worse. Max Mosley and his team were asking for punitive, exemplary damages which could have run to millions. For that to have succeeded, the judge would have to have deemed that the paper printed the story, with its embellishments, knowing them not to be true.

Popularity: 2% [?]