In July last year, I suggested this treament for the former editor of the Sun’s  sister paper, the Screws’, Andy “Notso” Coulson after he failed comprehensively to tell the truth to the Commons Culture Select Committee.

Under the heading “A Case for Waterboarding?“, I blogged……..

The MPs on the Culture, Media, Sport Committee must have been asking themselves yesterday, what on earth a reasonable person could do when confronted with three hardened, well-rehearsed liars, all desperate to avoid having their collars felt?

Experienced interpreters of body-language can enjoy a revealing session by tuning into the video-archive of yesterday’s oral evidence in front of the CMS Committee in Portcullis House.

Andy Coulson – bullish, assertive, knowing his best defence is attack, with a dash of cheeky chappy charm.

Tom Crone – for once not so sure of his ground, nervously cutting in a little too quickly when little Colin Myler gets it wrong, with a giveaway sheen of sweat on the strong, ruddy features.

Stuart Kuttner – eau de nil, haunted, shaking like an aspen, fiddling, fiddling, picking up his water, putting it down undrunk, rearranging files and pens, moving his large spectacles from side to side – meaning, for those who speak body language, that he is shitting himself; that after an ignominious dismissal by … who? Which Mr Murdoch? … his long, wicked career at the Screws is well and truly on the skids.

Little Colin Myler doesn’t need to lie. He wasn’t there when events at the centre of this enquiry took place. [When he’d arrived, he did arrange a few training sessions in act-cleaning-up for his newsroom hacks. But did Mazhher Mahmood and Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck attend? From the continuing and relentless shoddiness of their output, it seems they were excused – or just weren’t paying attention.]   

When Crone, legal boss of News Group is asked about the terms of a pay-off to Glenn Mulcaire, a former investigations contractor who has been imprisoned for carrying out tasks from which his company profited, and he claims he doesn’t know what those terms were (although he’s very sure that Mulcaire did not sign any non-disclosure agreement), you have to conclude either that he is suffering from severe amnesia and should instantly be relieved of his post, or that he is not telling the truth.

He directed the MPs to ask Stuart Kuttner.

When Kuttner told the MPs, confirming that an arrangement had been made with Glenn Mulciare, he too was utterly unfamiliar with the terms, conditions and size of the pay-off, and that he didn’t know who in an organisation of which he has been Managing Editor for 22 years was responsible for making such arrangements, you have to conclude that he has become insane – for imagining that any rational person would believe him.

When Andy Coulson tells his questioners that he has no recollection whatever of a story, flagged on the front page of an issue of the paper that he’d edited, occupying the whole of Page 7, depicting a verbatim transcript of a message left by one prince on another prince’s voicemail, knowing that not a single person in the Wilson Room in Portcullis House, or viewing the session on Parliament TV, or in the evening news broadcasts would believe him, you a have to conclude that here is a youngish man who sees his whole future in jeopardy if he breaks and admits to a scintilla of knowledge of the phone-hacking that was involved in acquiring the story.

It was very clear that before the three men came in to answer the awkward questions that would be put to them, they had agreed between themselves that they would simply declare either that they didn’t know the answers or that they couldn’t remember the events

Still, one must – albeit grudgingly – hail Ol’ Rumplechops for having the bollocks to lead where others will have to follow.

The old boy forgave her though, and she is strongly tipped to move up to the top shelf at News International UK, although she has promised him she will stay on as editor of leading Shag-Rag, the Sun until after the general election. Maybe, if the Boy Dave gets in, he will, as I have previously predicted, feel he must ditch his tainted chief spinner, Andy Coulson, who will then be free to come back to Wapping and take over Rebekah’s chair. But will he be able to give up some of the nasty habits he learned from Stuart Kuttner while editing the News of the Screws?

“MUMMY’S IN HEAVEN NOW.”

What do they mean?

Why do they imagine she is any more in heaven than the several hundred other cancer sufferers who died this week having probably contributed a lot more to the world around them than Jade Goody ever did?

Obviously it’s a tragedy for Goody’s young sons, and for her mother, but that has no bearing on an hysterical tabloid outpouring that is out of all proportion to what she has left to the world.

It was bad enough a month ago to see the Screw’s headline on Goody’s marriage to her mumbling, brawling consort:

‘MARRIAGE OF THE DECADE!’

What?

The Jade Goody phenomenon represents the essence of all that is crass, banal and dishonest in our current tabloid media. A talentless, witless, know-nothing, whose only positive benefit to BB viewers and Sun readers was that she showed them there was someone in the world more stupid and ill-informed than themselves, has become famous for just that. Is this really the path to whatever the Mirror means by ‘Heaven’? What do they feel she has done to merit this sainthood?

Some media commentators, in a scramble not to be seen as unpopulist, were claiming this morning that the public admired her because she’d made money from her spurious fame. While not in the same league of controversial earners as Sir Fred Goodwin, I can’t think that any of her alleged money-making enterprises did anything to better a single person’s existence.

It will be tough on her sons, as it will be on the children of all the others who have died of cancer this week, and of course most of us will feel some compassion for them. But that this individual should have been picked out for such special treatment for no other reasons than her own studied inadequacies, demonstrates the truly bizarre criteria by which the rubbish media (and, today, the Guardian) value this kind of fly-by-night ‘celebrity’.

The Guardian attempts to attribute her lack of knowledge to her schooling. But she could read (I believe), and she could hear. There was certainly no excuse for not knowing, at the age of 19, if Rio de Janeiro was a bloke or a place. Her lack of knowledge was undoubtedly a result of her lack of interest, for her chief preoccupation, at least as demonstrated by dozens of public displays of petulant self-absorption, was Jade Goody. Her very public bullying of Shilpa Shetty wasn’t particularly racist, but it was spiteful, aggressive and opportunistic, with the support of two women almost as dim as she was.

That she shamelessly traded her privacy for a small crock of gold was her decision; the downside was the regular abuse she received, especially from the Sun, who of course, in an utterly unsurprising volt-face, pandered to the absurd sentimentality of their readers by fawning all over her memory. It’s a truly disgusting sight. Wouldn’t you just love to hear what Rebekah Wade really has to say about Jade in private?

In the old days, one of the first things they taught young hacks on the Chuffing Sodbury Argus was to make sure they always spelled the punters’ names right. Not, it seems, any more at the London College of Communications, the country’s premier hack school, who announced their up-coming lecturer as “Rebecca” Wade. I wonder if she was cross. You don’t go round spelling your name “Rebekah” unless you really care.

That, however, is not the point. More interesting perhaps are the criteria by which speakers are chosen to deliver this important lecture (past deliverers: Alastair Campbell, Paul Dacre, Andrew Marr and Michael Grade.) What, you might ask, could the editor of one of the most dishonest, self-serving and prurient of British tabloids have to tell any aspiring journalist that might enhance their future career, other than the clear knowledge that, if all else fails, you can always sell your soul?

She beat the drum for the few cynically inspired “campaigns” which she’s launched, including, as News of the World editor in 2001, the “naming and shaming” of convicted paedophiles when the paper took matters into its own hands by printing pictures of 50 offenders.

But when an entirely innocent 49-year-old man was attacked after being mistakenly identified as one of the paedophiles because, like the named man, he was wearing a neck brace, a proposal to identify a further 110,000 was dropped. The police had also claimed that the paper’s campaign was wrecking investigations and potentially placing children at risk. It was described by Tony Butler, Chief Constable of Gloucestershire Police as ‘irresponsible journalism’. He said he had attempted to get the newspaper not to run the campaign. ‘I strongly pointed out what the possible pitfalls of publication were to the News of the World staff,’ he said. ‘I am saddened to see that they have ignored my advice and published without any evidence.’

The media consensus at the time was that Rebekah Wade’s campaign was a naive stunt to curry public opinion. She’d only recently been appointed to the Screws and was keenly aware of the need to prove herself. It’s hard to believe now, after her innings at the Sun since 2003, that she’d promised readers of the NoW fewer girly pictures, less prurience and fewer celebs and vice girls.

In the lecture she repeated her recent claim that breach of privacy actions, like that brought by Max Mosley against the News of the World were restricting investigative journalism, while failing, naturally, to point out that if journalists are pursuing real news stories of genuine public interest, they are protected against prosecution.

She delivered more sanctimonious stuff about ‘getting close to her readers’, which seems to mean arriving at lowest common denominator journalism, while assessing what inducements will get those ‘readers’ to go on buying the Sun.

About journalistic excellence there was very little, and even less in her own newspaper to offer as example. It would be helpful to know why one of our leading Schools of Journalism felt that an editor of the Sun would have anything of value to teach their students.

Those who don’t read (or ‘look at’) the Sun won’t have seen the fine piece of journalism that filled its front page the day after Wade’s lecture. It focused on the meaty matter of the quantity and hue of facial make-up being worn by an insignificant female student at Leeds University. The paper felt that Prince Harry’s – apparently former – girlfriend was looking a shade too orange. These are Sun priorities. And they are delivered with spite, envy and a lack of respect for an individual’s privacy or emotional state.

These are not values and priorities that should be guiding us or our children. And they shouldn’t be guiding young journalists either.

They had claimed, without a crumb of proof, that Sharon was pushing Ozzy back on the touring circuit to earn more money for her parties and baubles. The article wrongly alleged that she was ‘driving her frail husband Ozzy Osbourne to destruction’, was working him ’so hard she will kill him’ and that ‘Sharon will keep Ozzy on the road until, like Tommy Cooper, he dies on stage’. (Even if that weren’t a lie, it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go; I always thought Tommy C. must have died laughing.)

Naturally, in court, the story couldn’t even get out of bed, let alone stand up. It was never going to; the source of the story was David Arden, Sharon’s estranged brother, who had no doubt been offered (though probably never received due to non-performance) a few £10Ks himself, and had prompted the strap: ‘Chilling warning from brother of X Factor Sharon’.

The paper even illustrated their fantasy with a shot of Ozzy looking a little knackered – at the end of a four mile jog round the UCLA athletics track in Los Angeles with a personal trainer – four years ago! You’d think even the Sun could do better than that.

‘These allegations are entirely without foundation and were obviously extremely distressing, hurtful and damaging for the claimant,’ said Sharon’s barrister to the judge. ‘The claimant’s distress was increased as a result of the photograph being captioned, “Pushed too far – Ozzy looking like a man who’s had enough”.’

It was all rubbish. They knew it was all rubbish, but with their usual cynical contempt for the truth and their readers, they had spewed it out and hoped for the best. The only people who do it better are the boys from Screws, their big sister with the dirty habits, whose axiom has been, since its foundation in 1843, “Our motto is the truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth.”

I may have pointed this out before; the irony of it is too gross to ignore.

“Yesterday was a dark day for British freedom.”

Their sister ShagRag, the News of the World has just been ordered to pay £60,000 in damages and £200,000 in costs to Max Mosley. That was a lot more than their legal boss, Tom Crone had bargained for and everyone in Wapping is feeling jumpy.

They say: “A judge representing power and privilege laid down the law on what newspapers can write about powerful and privileged public figures.”

In fact a judge interpreting the law ruled that to promise to pay a woman £25,000 to film events in a private dwelling in which a number of consenting and willing adults were engaged in unconventional sex constituted a clear breach of privacy, and awarded accordingly.

Would Ms Rebekah Wade feel comfortable if I sent round a covert crew to film her and her current beau engaged in, say, fellatio? Probably not, but then, by her standards, she couldn’t object if I put it up on this site, so that the public could see in graphic detail what the editor of a major selling national newspaper did in private in her spare time.

But the law as interpreted by Mr Justice Eady, maintains that an individual has “a reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to sexual activities (albeit unconventional) carried on between consenting adults on private property.”

It is not in any way implicit that only the powerful and privileged have this right. But naturally, newspapers like the Sun are only concerned with the sex lives of “celebrities”, many of whom could be described as powerful and privileged (whatever they mean by that), so it is only they who need to seek protection from the courts against invasion of their privacy by the Sun and the Screws.

The Sun’s contention that British Freedom has been affected one jot by yesterday’s ruling is quite untenable.

Astonishingly, other more serious (more intelligent) journalists have squealed the same, though why they should want to support their fellow red top hacks beats me – unless it’s a manifestation of the old journalistic freemasonry that binds them together.

The simple truth is that the freedom for journalists to report genuine news is as much intact as it has ever been. “Public Interest” is a clear defence for offences involving any kind of privacy invasion.

Tom Crone (is his job on the line?) desperately declared outside the court that because umpteen million people had voted for Max Mosley to remain President of the FIA (which of course isn’t true – representatives of a handful or organisations voted), they have the right to know about his sex life, and he feigned a Victorian primness over what he described as the depravity of it – like the Marquis of Queensberry wanting to horse-whip Oscar Wilde on the steps of his club for being a ‘Sodomite’.

If Max Mosley had been engaged in a whipping session with say, Osama Bin Laden’s daughter, or Pol Pot’s niece or Mr Putin’s personal dominatrix, or if the girls were underage and had been brought in by a human trafficking organisation, a public interest defence would, of course, have been justified.

In fact, the Sun should be crowing (and perhaps they are in the privacy of Fortress Wapping) because somehow they managed to persuade the judge that they didn’t make up the Nazi element of the story, (they would have been hit with punitive damages if he’d believed they did invent it), when the story had all the hallmarks of a Neville “Onan the Barbarian” Thurlbeck piece of prurient fiction. Thurlbeck’s an old gland at spotting a juicy spin to a story, and when his informant came to him with news of the planned session, his lightening mind quickly made the connection: Mosley=Nazi. It was clear to all of us listening to his stumbling, contradictory evidence in court that he’d set up his informant, the dominatrix known as Woman E, to extract what Nazi elements she could, and diddled her out of half the money when she didn’t deliver.

You could conclude that

“A judge representing power and privilege saved the powerful and privileged Rupert Murdoch at least a million quid.”

Nor can they tell the difference between an actress and glamour model – to them they’re just good-looking women with tits, and if the actresses won’t come in voluntarily, they feel it’s their duty to get them there anyway for their reader’s delectation.

Last year Sienna Miller took £37,500 from the Sun and the News of the World for publishing shots sold to them by renegade photographer, Warren Richardson. Sienna is an actress who accepts that from time to time, a movie part genuinely requires her to disrobe, but quite reasonably, she will only do it on a “closed” set, where no-one outside the production is allowed. On the set of Hippie Hippie Shake on a private estate in Surrey, Richardson used a long lens to sneak shots of her undressing before descending naked into a lake. The papers bought the shots, knowing they’d boost sales especially when accompanied by the online exposure.

Sienna also sued the photographer and won.

But the Sun and the News of the World are at it again. They’ve been prying on her during a private holiday in Italy, speculating about her personal relationships, with yet another photograph, supplied by Big Pictures.

And Sienna is suing again.

What is it about these Murdoch Shag Rags that they won’t leave it alone?

Their crass recidivism is amazing. From now on, though, it could start getting expensive.

They may be in for a very heavy pay-out on Thursday when Mr Justice Eady announces his judgement in the Max Mosley case, where Mosley has asked for exemplary, punitive damages. And a large award would make a lot of the Screws’ innocent victims very happy.