The last time a High Court judge ordered Glenn Mulcaire and the Met to produce disclosures about their part in the Coulson/Screws phone-hacking saga, they were let off the hook when Max Clifford, whose lawyers had asked for them, accepted the tainted Murdoch shilling (and the rest) and dropped his claim.

If his assistant, Nicola Phillips, now suing the Screws for the same thing, sees it through and it is confirmed that Ian Edmondson, senior news editor under Andy Coulson, specifically ordered the targeting of her voice-mail, the Screws and Coulson and, by extension, the Prime Minister will have a lot of egg on their visages. However, the judge is unlikely to award her more than a miserable £20K – £30k for the personal affront of having her voice-mails recorded on the paper’s behalf by Glenn Mulcaire.

But past events suggest that the Screws will make her a much larger offer. We can only hope that she has the principles, the bollocks and enough collateral support to see the case through, because I’m not so sure that George Galloway will when his case reaches this stage.

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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.

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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?

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 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.

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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.

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