I hope this doesn’t spoil your  breakfast, but it’s important we should know how diligently  this man goes about his work. – before we judge him too harshly.

Thurlbeck is  the hard-nosed  hack who usually handles the dirtier celebrity shag’n'brag  stories for the News of the World. A sting went badly wrong for him a few years ago. He’d set out to expose a naturists’ boarding house whose owners allegedly offered ‘extra’ sexual services to guests. Having made his investigations, Thurlbeck carelessly forgot to ‘make his excuses and leave’ (in the time-honoured News of the World manner). Instead, no doubt to his eternal regret, he made his excuses and came. He was  caught on film begging the couple to have sex while he stood at the foot of their bed, exposed what, in its primmer days, the News of the World would have called his ‘manhood’ and indulged in an unmistakable act of onanism. Since the film was posted on the internet to the delight of his fascinated colleagues, it was inevitable that sooner or later the moniker ‘Onan the Barbarian’, bestowed on him by an uncharitable ex-colleague, would stick.

Telling lies to judges in court is an imprisonable offence.

If Rebekah decides he has to go, he’s going to cost Master James an awful lot in ‘be discreet’ money. We’ve never heard how much his former dodgy colleague, managing editor for 25 years, Stuart Kuttner was awarded when he was sacked (to get this arch-organizer of illicit practices out of the way before the dung hit the windmill).

Have the MET raided his gaffe yet, I wonder? Not too late, DAC Sue Akers.

What next?

If Ian Edmondson was involved, so was Andy Coulson

If Andy Coulson was involved, so was Rebekah Brooks.

If Rebekah Brooks was involved, so was Master James.

And if they were, it’s very likely that Les Hinton, CEO of The Wall Street Journal (the brightest bird in Rupert Murdoch’s bush), was involved, too, becasue he was Executive Chairman of News International at the time.

 And then there’s the Fake Sheikh, the nation’s most mendacious hack……

Watch my next blog….

          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.

It’s right that exceptional acts of personal bravery shown by individual police officers in the exercise of their job should be recognised and honoured, as indeed they are at the annual Police Bravery Awards ceremony. But for some of the recipients of these awards it must be disappointing that this event should be deeply tainted by a commercial sponsor, particularly one so deficient in integrity and moral purpose as the Sun newspaper.

That the police federation – or whatever body came to this arrangement with the Sun – should show such lack of judgment is worrying enough. That the Sun’s editor – Rebekah “Testarossa” Wade should be seated for the event on July 17th at the same table and close to Met Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson and assistant commissioner John Yates should sound cacophonous alarm bells.

Only a week before, when the Guardian revealed that the News of the World had agreed out of court to pay nearly £1million to three individuals whose voicemails they had accessed illegally, Yates announced that the Met had, in the course of 24 hours, reviewed all the factors involved in this and the hacking of the Clarence House phones in 2006 (for which just two of the culprits were jailed) and concluded that there was no case for further inquiry.

The following Tuesday, in front of the Commons Culture Media Sport Comittee, Guardian journalist Nick Davies produced clear, irrefutable documentary evidence, which the police had seen, that Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck, a senior hack on the Sun’s joined-at-the-hip sister rag had been supplied with transcripts of illegally acquired voicemails, and therefore that other journalists besides royal editor, Clive Goodman had been involved in this practice.

The CMS committee are in no doubt that a wide-ranging series of follow-up investigations should have been made by the Met, but weren’t. Officers investigating the crime at the time called in no further journalists – other than Goodman – for questioning, nor any of the management who were clearly in positions of command at the time – news editor Greg Miskiw, editor Andy Coulson and managing editor Stuart Kuttner, whose job it was to set up and oversee special situations of this kind.

I have noted extensively in my book, News of the world? Fake Sheikhs & Royal Trappings the inexplicable way in which the Met have co-operated in several patently bogus stories concocted by Screws “Chief Investigations Reporter” and totally discredited Mazher Mahmood.

Now it is inevitable that speculation is mounting over the relationship between the Met and News Group Ltd, the subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp which owns the Screws and the Sun, which sponsors the Annual Police Bravery Awards ceremony.

          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.

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.

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.

During the hearing Kuttner, who has previously admitted to ‘small fabrications of the truth’, was unconvincing when he claimed in evidence that he couldn’t remember what his paper had paid in damages to a famous injured party. Incredulous eyebrows were raised when he told the tribunal that he was unaware of how much Wayne Rooney had received in damages from the paper (“Our motto is truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth”) after they claimed quite wrongly that the footballer had slapped Coleen McLoughlin (then his fiancée) in a Cheshire nightclub. (It was a memorable £100,000 and paying these bills is Kuttner’s job.)

His disingenuousness in the witness box was matched by that of his deputy, Paul Nicholas, who lied in part of his evidence when he said he didn’t know if any disciplinary action had been brought against chief reporter Neville ‘Onan the Barbarian’ Thurlbeck over the Max Mosley story earlier this year. In the Mosley case it was shown that Thurlbeck had tried to blackmail one of the participants in the S&M session and, as is his normal practice, attributed quotes to her which he’d made up after she’d signed off her interview with him. His behaviour was consistently far worse than anything of which Driscoll had been accused, yet he’d never been disciplined. It was clear to observers that he was part of the tightly knit and, some would say, evil cabal which runs the Screws.

‘We do not believe Mr Nicholas’s professed ignorance,’ the employment tribunal stated. ‘He was, to put it plainly, lying to us in this part of his evidence.’

They didn’t think much of Mike Dunn’s evidence either, which differed substantively from records at the time. They said that with the benefit of hindsight, and in order to attempt to bolster the Screws’ case, he’d exaggerated Driscoll’s shortcomings.

They also said the original source of the hostility towards the claimant was Andy Coulson, then editor of the News of the World, now David Cameron’s chief spinner. But Coulson had not come to the tribunal to explain why he wanted Driscoll dismissed.

They added, ‘We find the behaviour [of the paper’s management] to have been a consistent pattern of bullying behaviour… with the intention to remove [Driscoll] from their employment, whether through negotiating a settlement package or through a staged process of warnings leading to dismissal.’

Most media watchers have known for years that the News of the World was presided over by liars and bullies. It’s good to hear an official tribunal come to the same conclusion.

Mosley has suggested that he might use some of the proceeds of these libel actions (and it’s likely he’ll win several of them) to set up a fund so that those less rich than he could also pursue the Wapping lie-factory next time they transgress.

That’s generous and thoughtful, but it really should not be up to the private generosity of an individual who has received damages for having his reputation torn to shreds by the intrusive Screws. There should be in place a fund supported by the newspaper industry itself that will allow injured people to take the risk of suing those organs who have printed untruths about them. In cases where the individual won, it would anyway usually fall to the offending paper to pay the costs, so the fund wouldn’t be ultimately liable for a great deal.

Of course, frivolous, or potentially hopeless cases would have to be weeded out before they incurred heavy costs, but the judges could see to that.

Perhaps the PCC might consider pursuing this idea, but I doubt it.