Brian cathcart phone hacking

That email offered — on any normal reading — firm evidence that Goodman had not been the only News of the World reporter involved in illegal hacking. There were two people in the room with James Murdoch that day in Both have now asserted firmly that not only was he aware of the email, but it was either shown or described to him there and then.

Only a fool picks a fight with a lawyer, and sure enough they have come back and slated his evidence.

James has been asked back to the media committee to clarify his evidence. That will be a humiliation so dreadful that he will be looking for any way he can to avoid it. Meanwhile a number of people accustomed to executive limos and seven-figure salaries are beginning to wonder what it might be like in jail.

Journalism , Privacy. Inforrm can be contacted by email inforrmeditorial gmail. Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address:. Sign me up! In this scenario, Morgan would have believed his own newspaper to be in the clear, but his rivals up to their necks in criminality — giving those rivals a significant competitive advantage in getting big stories.

What more reason could he have asked for to expose hacking at this stage? Not only would it have been a public service, it would also have been extremely good for business. Merely on the evidence of his own words, and without taking any account of the great volume of evidence about Morgan and phone-hacking that has been brought forward by other people — it seems clear that he should be ashamed.

He might well take the same line he tried at the Leveson Inquiry — that he never really knew about phone-hacking and had just heard industry rumours.

Piers Morgan was an editor, and the responsibility of editors, when they hear rumours about criminal activity, is to establish whether or not they are true. Otherwise, they are just covering it up. Byline Times is funded by its subscribers. Receive our monthly print edition and help to support fearless, independent journalism. New to Byline Times? Nor, for that matter, do some of their predecessors from the Labour era.

It is a measure of the insidious influence of Rupert Murdoch that his company's shame has the capacity to embarrass not one but three prime ministers, all of whom, miraculously, have counted Rebekah Brooks as a friend, while cabinet ministers going back a dozen years or more some of whom were hacked themselves have as much to fear.

None of them fancies a trip into the witness box. So we may expect plenty more wriggling and squirming, ducking and weaving. And we need to be alert to some basic tricks. Here are four gambits ministers and their allies may use:. Gambit 1: Keep the whole thing fuzzy for as long as possible in the Micawberish hope that somehow, eventually, the thing will go away.

Civil proceedings and a police investigation are still under way, we will be reminded, and it would be wrong to prejudge these, so let's agree to an inquiry of some kind but leave the details for later.

This is a smokescreen. It takes months to set up an inquiry and if, when it starts, it can draw on the fresh fruits of a thorough police inquiry, so much the better.