Peter Burden » News of the World

Andy Coulson accused by New York Times

Peter — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:01:09 +0000

Yesterday the New York Times Online put up a long piece, to be published as the cover of the NYT magazine this Sunday, which includes several attributed references to Andy Coulson’s involvement with illegal phone-hacking at the News of the World. Andy Coulson is still – despite many warnings – David Cameron’s head spinner and chief conduit to the Murdochs’ British media empire.

The NYT is unequivocal in its conclusion that Coulson knew about, and was therefore complicit in an offence which saw two people working for him go to jail.

It was in any case very clear from Coulson’s evidence to the Common’s Culture Media & Sport Committee last year that he wasn’t telling the truth when he denied any knowledge of one specicfic high-profile royal story about which he could not possibly have been unaware, and which had been illegally obtained.

The Government should not under any circumstances be harbouring people of this moral calibre; it maybe that Coulson will soon be charged as a party to a proven crime and rehoused at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Much better to get shot of him first – as I have consistently advocated since he was appointed by the Conservatives in 2007.

Who else knew, besides Coulson? Managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, who was sacked for his ineptness in covering up, and former News Internationl CEO, Les Hinton, who blathered like a school kid denying he’d eaten the sweets when questioned by the CMS Committee?

Pakistani Bowlers in Another Fake Sheikh Fake Scam

Peter — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:30:42 +0000

It’s astonishing that not a single serious commentator has taken the trouble to question the veracity of Mazher Mahmood’s bowling/betting scam story in the News of the World. Very few even mention that it was a “Fake Sheikh” story – presumably for fear of devaluing it.
Which, of course, it would.
For Mazher Mahmood’s track record in achieving any kind of successful subsequent prosecution in any of his more spectacular “revelation” splashes is derisory.
What is strange too is that no one seems to have questioned the obvious doctoring of the videos put up on the NoW website to substantiate Mahmood’s fantasy story. He has already this year (the John Higgins snooker story in June; the Fergie “bribe” story) applied fresh sound tracks to the published video footage in the crudest and crassest way, where the spoken words simply don’t match the lip movements of the subjects. In this latest one, the speaker’s mouth is very often deliberately obscured in darkness to allow Mahmood’s inept technician to apply the sound track later, as required. In this case the “predictions” were put in the subject’s mouth after two big no-balls, quite unplanned, had taken place and excited the attention of the commentators. It stands to anyone’s reason that if a bowler wanted to fake a no-ball, he wouldn’t make it the biggest one of the match.
Large chunks of the text in the Screws story has just been made up. Mazher Mahmood has been dong this for so long he no longer as any concept of the truth or its relevance in a newspaper story.

I predict that no hard evidence will ever be found against these players, while Mazher Mahmood will still be allowed to roam the country, creating scams and destroying other people’s lives – as is the spoken aim of the news room in the Wapping HQ of Murdoch’s Old Yellow Rag.

No More – or Rather Less Mr Nice Guy.

Peter — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:16:28 +0000

Gary Lineker takes Rupert’s Shilling to join the Queen of Shag-Rags

For a man perceived as being unusually wholesome in the tawdry milieu of professional football and possessing limitless goodwill towards his fellow men, it’s more than disappointing to learn that, to compound his already questionable championing (for a big sack of loot) the thoroughly unwholesome foodstuff that is Walkers Crisps, he has now agreed to “write” for the News of the World, the nation’s most insidious Sunday rag and a publication that attacks privacy, promotes voyeurism with tacky sex and drug stories, that lies, breaks the law and is devoid of any visible standards of journalistic integrity.
And if you don’t like what Gary “writes”, blame the ghost. It emerged in a libel suit against him in 2005 that his column in the Telegraph hadn’t been written by him; he’d simply chatted to a hack on the phone and his by-line had gone at the top. Is that how Charlie Brooks (Mr Rebekah Wade) does it?

ANOTHER PAY-OUT AND MORE SHAME FOR RUPERT.

Peter — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:12:38 +0000

The News of the World have been ordered to pay out yet again for their sleazy journalism.
    As I predicted on this blog back in January, the High Court in London has today awarded Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie a settlement (undisclosed but likely to be huge) for the paper’s illegal intrusion of their privacy. The Screws had bought some dodgy information, and (as is their practice) drawn the conclusion that suited their permanently warped sense of news. The wrong conclusion, naturally.
   Ol’ Rupert Rumplechops must be getting mightily pissed off with his former love, The Harridan of Wapping, especially as the finishing touches are put to a fresh major revelation about the mess his people made there three years ago when they clumsily tried to cover up their involvement in a string of phone-hacking crimes.
    And the boss in London then, Les Hinton, is now boss of Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal. That will be more than a bit embarrassing.

Can Andy Keep his Breakfast Down?

Peter — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:30:38 +0000

Andy Coulson’s been out of the news since his new salary was as No 10’s head spinner was revealed a month ago.
Not for long.
Coulson’s spectacular stonewalling, sidestepping and truth economy that we witnessed last year in front of the Commons Culture Committee are about to turn round and bite him (and his trusting boss) in the arse.
A lot of hard-working journalists on both sides of the Atlantic have been working on this important revelation of the truth since Nick Davies of the Guardian, a year ago today, revealed that The News of the World had paid off Gordon Taylor for hacking his phone.
However adept the Screws people have become at covering their tracks and misleading their interrogators, when up against investigative reporters of quality, they are bound sooner or later to stub their toes.
So far, the only head among the foul-smelling cabal that has run the country’s most shameful Sunday paper to have been sacrificed is that of former managing editor Stuart Kuttner – ignominiously sacked after twenty years of journalistic malpractice.

Who will follow?
Among those who are having difficulty keeping their breaklfast down since an unexpected visitor at Wapping from New York last month are Tom Crone, Les Hinton and, most significant of all, Andy Coulson.

Another shameful case of entrapment by the News of the World…..

Peter — Mon, 24 May 2010 05:00:19 +0000

How helpful is it, how meaningful, when the sleaziest reporter on the nation’s sleaziest paper sets up another victim in a completely implausible scam?
Mazher Mahmood is notorious for fabricating stories out of nothing, creating and casting scenarios that he hopes will make a front page splash in the News of the Screws – like he did with the non-existent Beckham “kidnap” story; like he did with the so called “Red Mercury” scare.
He often identifies victims, people in the public eye, who might have fallen on more difficult times, and tempts them with an opportunity to make some easy money.
The Duchess of York may have wondered why on earth some obscure businessman wanted to meet Prince Andrew but if he was offering £500,000 to her to make the introduction, it probably seemed too good a chance to pass up. She shouldn’t have responded, although she may have recognised that the introduction wasn’t going to help this punter in the slightest. There is no way in which meeting Prince Andrew could have made any money for an international businessman. The prince functions only as an ambassador at governmental levels, not as an entrepreneur or a trader in his own right; he doesn’t do deals, make or even influence anyone else’s business decisions. It was clearly a preposterous request that was never going to come to anything. In other words Sarah is being accused of taking part in a negotiation that could never have come to anything. Of course she should have turned him down, but maybe she just thought he was a rich businessman who wanted to upgrade his own self-esteem by rubbing shoulders with royalty. He would not, she would have realised, have been the first to suffer from that kind of pathetic aspiration.
As usual, Mahmood has created a non-existent misdemeanour for her to commit, and has done whatever he can to embellish the story in such a way as to make the biggest impact. The claims the paper’s story make are scarcely backed up in any visible way by the video they show online.
The quality of the pictures is deliberately bad, to obscure the detail. It is not at all clear that the pile on the table is a stack of $40,000. We see no transfer of this into the black bag with which Sarah leaves. (Mahmood claims they did this in another room – why didn’t they fill the bag on camera?) The reporter’s voice is obscured and, confident that the Duchess could never sue or go through the business of challenging their version, they may well have subsequently matched the words to their story. No single specific money-making deal is mentioned.
Since they were offering £500,000 for doing very little, and she evidently needs the money, Sarah went along with the idea that it would be helpful for this man to meet Prince Andrew, although there was no obvious way in which it could be.
While Sarah should not have agreed to meet the man, and she’s the first to admit that her judgement in these things is not good, no harm could have come because it was based on an entirely bogus premise, which is why stories acquired like this through entrapment are completely meaningless, other than making public figures look silly for the entertainment of those people dim enough to read the News of the World in a non-ironic way.
Mazher Mahmood has a long history of creating stories that cause a sensation for 24 hours before they then sink without trace. This could be another of them.

TOM WATSON ASKS: ARE THE MET WORKING WITH THE SCREWS?

Peter — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:37:31 +0000

Last Thursday, intrepid West Bromwich MP Tom Watson, who joined the Commons Culture Media & Sport Committee last summer after a stint in the Cabinet Office, asked the Solicitor General, Vera Baird if she would look into the question of whether or not the Crown Prosecution Service had successfully brought cases based on information gathered by illegal phone hacking at the News of the World.
    Presumably specific instances have been identified and Tom feels that this might explain the very obvious reluctance of the Metropolitan Police – specifically Asst Commissioner John Yates – to reveal all that they know about the extent and detail of the paper’s one time routine hacking of private voicemails to find the celebrity trivia stories on which they rely so heavily.
    It’s long been clear from prosecutions obviously instigated by the utterly discredited Screws former “Investigations Editor” (now Expensive Embarrassment) Mazher Mahmood, that there exists between the paper and the police more than the normal cosy relationships between a few detectives and a few crime reporters.
    With Mahmood, high profile cases were pursued by London police and prosecuted by the CPS – The “Red Mercury Dirty Bomb” scare, the Beckham’s “Kidnap” and the Kieren Fallon “Fixer” story (all of which collapsed through a complete lack of evidence) – which show that they are prepared to co-operate with the paper on the flimsiest, most fanciful of grounds. In return for what?
    Surely not simply the ongoing News International Sponsorship of the Police Bravery Awards ceremony?
    Of course, the police are aware, as is reported from New York by Murdoch biographer, Michael Wolff, that Rupert ‘Rumplechops’ is seriously concerned that the truth about the Screws lawless behaviour under the 20 year regime of (now sacked) Managing Editor, Stuart Kuttner and head lawyer, Tom Crone, will emerge, leaving Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal CEO, Les Hinton quite possibly implicated in the journalistic crime wave that was in operation while he was i/c News International.
    Certainly Hinton’s bumbling, obfuscating evidence given to the CMS Committee by video-link last autumn (and part of the “collective amnesia” described by committee chairman, John Whittingdale) was strongly indicative of his involvement and a guilty conscience.
    Could this be another reason why Young James Murdoch can’t wait to see the back of the embarrassing, venal old cow the Screws has become?

MAX AND THE SCREWS KISS AND MAKE UP

Peter — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:24:44 +0000

Max Clifford has made up with the News of the World after a four year tiff. He originally fell out with the Screws (when Andy Coulson was editor) over their rough treatment of someone called Kerry Katona (remember her?), who was then (but not now) his client. Posing as a white knight for that sad individual must have been a tricky position to maintain. I dare say Mr C is glad to have £1m gift from the paper as an excuse to climb down. (I’m told the Screws are still the best payers for celebrity trivia.)
A publicity agent like Max Clifford being paid a million quid by a Sunday newspaper is a very big story – but it doesn’t feature much in some papers.
Coverage in The Times – 0 words
The Sun – 0 words
Are they asleep on the news desks at Wapping.

MAX SETTLES FOR MURDOCH’S MILLION.

Peter — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:21:09 +0000

Max Clifford has accepted £1m in what is described not as compensation for invasion of privacy (which is what it is) but as “costs” and a “personal payment” from the News of the World. A Court Order rescinding the Feb 3rd request for disclosure by Mulcaire and of the Screws’ settlement with Gordon Taylor, also states that there shall be no order as to costs, and makes no mention of a settlement, which effectively allows the Screws to deny any wrongdoing, despite this massive pay out to avoid having to make the potentially catastrophic disclosures ordered at the request of Clifford’s lawyers.

No wonder the deal has taken so long to work out, with all this give and take, though it seems likely, with Max holding the whip hand, and Ol’ Rumplechops hopping around in New York, worried shitless about the truth coming out, that he could have held out for a great deal more. After all, Les Hinton was in charge of News International at the time of their Royal phone hacking debacle, and there are few who doubt he knew what was going on, at leat as much as managing editor Stuart Kuttner (who master-minded the scheme), head of legals, Tom Crone and Andy Coulson, who was editor at the time. This is a big problem for Murdoch who is desperate to be perceived as a respectable, major player in New York, as the proprietor of the pre-eminent Wall Street Journal, which Les Hinton now fronts up for Rupert.

I understand that everyone has their price, as Rupert knows well. Since the Royal phone-hacking prosecution revealed five more victims, the Screws have already paid off Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, the hacks who’d been hung out to dry. They have also given a fat fee to Elle Macpherson for an interview (by Sarah Brown, for heaven’s sake!) in their “Crapulous!” magazine, in which pages are devoted to plugging her range of knickers. They’ve paid Gordon Taylor and his minions c £1m in costs and damages.

But a lot of us were hoping Max would abide by his pledge, issued when he launched his claim against the Screws, that his principal aim was to uncover the Truth. He didn’t especially need the money (and anyway said he would give any proceeds of the suit to children’s health charities.) If he hadn’t take Rupert’s tainted money and persisted with his claim, and won (which he almost certainly would have done), he’d have been lucky to be awarded £30K – £50K, but the News of the World, the Metropolitan Police and Glenn Mulcaire would have been forced to produce details which would have had disastrous effects, possibly leading to widened charges over the original phone-hacking crimes.

So, the Murdoch’s have sort of got away with it this time (for a £1m + their own costs), but the temptation for the growing number of confirmed Screws’ targets to ask for more of the same has been magnified. It only needs one whose sense of public duty outstrips their own greed to go all the way, and force them to throw into the public domain details of endemic illegal news-gathering.

And back in Romania, Albania, and probably still in London,too, is a band of men who have been falsely accused, imprisoned on remand and subsequently acquitted as a result of fabricated stories cobbled together by disgraced Screws Investigations Editor, Mazher Mahmood. In the currrent climate, these victims of the Screws’ outrageous attitude to Truth and Justice could offer a profitable project for a good, hungry lawyer.

AC/DC – A SHOCKING MESS. Andy Coulson/ David Cameron

Peter — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:14:44 +0000

While I applaud John Whittingdale and the Culture Media Sport Committee for their work on making the libel courts a level field of play and for proposing a set of effective teeth for the clapped out PCC, I have to ask myself why in this morning’s Guardian, Whittingdale downplays the importance of their having doggedly pursued the truth about the Screws’ phone-hacking scandal and identified the possibility that senior executives on a paper in Britain’s largest group of national titles may have been complicit, thereby liable to the legal penalties of those who were charged and jailed for phone-hacking.
You wouldn’t have too be much of a cynic to think it likely that people from Conservative Central Office have been leaning on the (minority) Tory members of the committee to leave Andy Coulson alone.
But it would be far safer, in the long run, for senior Tories to ask Coulson to step down, at least until every last investigation has taken place, than to let him stay until they are indelibly tainted by his presence. After all, he hasn’t been doing such a great job with the leader’s image over the last month or so.
With so many Screws’ phone-hacking victims waiting in the wings to sue (and there are hundreds of them), there’s a very good chance that – sooner or later - one of the targets won’t be fobbed off, as I hear Max Clifford will be, with a large purse of gold.

Another confirmed phone-hacking vicitm who won’t be calling in the services of the High Court is Aussie super-body, Elle Macpherson. Why would she, when the Screws , in their tacky little Sunday mag, CRAPULOUS generously gave her a multi-page spread , with an elaborate photo-shoot and a healthy number of name checks for her range of knickers – Elle Macpherson Intimates? (There – she just got another one!)
I dare say Ole Rumplechops (who’s right on top of this potentially disastrous embarrassment), encouraged a large ‘expenses’ cheque for her, too – almost certainly more than she’d have got from Mr Justice Eady for Invasion of Privacy (Max Mosely only got £60K by going to court, but the Screws paid c.£800k to make Gordon Taylor and his friends go away.) Max Clifford won’t come cheap, either. So the Screws may not have been nicked (yet) but it’s costing them plenty to keep out of the High Court, where they’d have to reveal all sorts of nasties. Poor Ole Rumplechops – throwing all that money away when he’s so close to retirement.

Pursuing the truth to the end will take strong principles and big bollocks –
Who’s got ‘em?
Lembit Opik? Not really.
Boris Johnson? I doubt it.
Tessa Jowell? Who knows? (David Mills might.)
George Galloway? Let’s hope so.