The Guardian reports:
David Cameron’s close adviser, Andy Coulson, has come under fresh attack after the disclosure of new evidence of the News of the World’s role in the illegal interception of the royal household’s voicemail messages during his time as editor.
The evidence is in the outline for a book planned by the private investigator at the centre of the affair, Glenn Mulcaire. The outline was written before Mulcaire signed a deal with the paper which stopped the book’s publication and gagged him from speaking about the scandal.
The outline directly contradicts the News of the World’s claim that Mulcaire broke the law without the paper’s knowledge or consent. It describes an unnamed editorial executive at the News of the World commissioning Mulcaire to intercept the royal messages and claims that the paper pressed him to continue with the interceptions when he tried to stop.
You can read the full story here, and don’t forget the small matter of Andy Coulson’s salary.
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5 Comments
One question – how do you reconcile a story like this with the anger the LibDems showed when the national press went after Nick Clegg. If you are all so holier than thou to regard any criticism of your leader as a “smear,” and to be the only party that can clean up politics how on earth with good conscience can you publish a post like this…?
John, I pity you if you can’t see the difference between this and a piece describing Nick Clegg’s wish that we could grow up in our attitude to Germany as “a Nazi slur on Britain”.
Liberal Democrats believe in fairness – and fair fights.
One is a fresh story from a reputable news outlet. The other, I took ten whole minutes to read the article in question (that Clegg wrote several years ago on a totally different topic) and see that describing it as “a Nazi slur” was not just a lie, it was libel, and would have got the paper sued if they had said it about anybody rich. He was in fact talking about British kids bullying German ones and calling them Nazis just because they were German, so it’s pretty much the opposite of what Murdoch’s media claimed.
How do you find this difficult to reconcile?
Nick ain’t poor, he really should sue them over that article.
The faster the dead tree press is bankrupt the better.
I don’t think he’s that rich. Libel suits against large corporations cost millions. It would look bad, anyway.