When you think ‘how could it get any worse’, it actually does. Now, it emerges that the News of the World hacked the phones of families of soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq. To treat these revelations with the legalese caveat ‘if true because they are just allegations’, is akin to saying “This idea of gravity, if true, would have serious implications, but it is just a theory.” Yet still no resignations from News International. Rupert Murdoch wants to brazen it out, yet he is doing so with the public, a constituency he usually is so adept at keeping onside. He may treat Rebekah Brooks like a daughter but sometimes children must face up to the consequences of what they have done or overseen.
Robert Peston, nominally of the BBC, is such a New International bitch. He also seeks to protect Brooks when last night he ‘was told by inside sources’ that the newsroom of the News of the World was ‘out of control’ between 2003 and 2006. How convenient that 2003 was the year Brooks (née Wade) moved on from the News of the World and that period is the primary domain of the man they are hanging out to dry, Andy Coulson. It’s a little inconvenient that these hacking allegations go back from before 2003. They try to say that Brooks, then Wade, was on holiday and out of the country as if the culture that condoned this behaviour did not exist before of after her holiday plans – it is beyond credibility.
Meanwhile, Coulson is in serious trouble. Not only is the bribery of police officers an offence punishable with prison, it also emerges that in the libel case involving Tommy Sheridan and the News of the World, Coulson lied under oath in court about not paying police officers, making him guilty of perjury. It would be a scandal if this was not followed up, especially as the disgraced Sheridan went to chokey for exactly the same offence.
Coulson is the sordid individual that, on the prompting of George Osborne, David Cameron invited into the heart of his Downing Street operation. It is not enough for the Prime Minister to say “I take responsibility for whomever I employ,” as what responsibility is that (apart from embarrassment)? It is meaningless.
A bit like the PCC. Lady Peta Buscombe was torn to pieces on the Today programme. Relating how she herself has said that the PCC has been lied to by News International, the interviewer pressed her over who was the person who had lied to her and the PCC. It was like the Jeremy Paxman and Michael Howard face-off in 1997. Lady Buscombe found varieties of evasion over the exact person or people who had deceived her, making her sound ever more ridiculous. No wonder the tabloids were happy with her appointment as chair of the PCC.