Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson Page B

487). Under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, Mulcaire also pleaded guilty to hacking the phones of five other individuals whose voicemail inboxes he had called a total of sixty-six times. He had ransacked the messages of Max Clifford, who had negotiated Rebecca Loos’s £300,000 kiss and tell on David Beckham, but who had refused to deal with Andy Coulson again after the Screws turned over Kerry Katona. Two of the other figures came from the football world, which Mulcaire knew well: Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and Sky Andrew, a sports agent whose most famous client was the Arsenal footballer Sol Campbell. The other two were the supermodel Elle Macpherson and the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, who had recently admitted he was bisexual after being confronted by the Sun with evidence that he had called gay chatlines. All five would have been of interest to the News of the World , but probably not to its royal editor – which indicated the involvement of others at Wapping.
    Even though the charges represented only a fraction of the Screws’ true criminality, they were highly embarrassing for News International: one of its most senior journalists had been caught burgling the secrets of the royal family. As an act of contrition, Andy Coulson wrote to Sir Michael Peat, Prince Charles’s Private Secretary, apologizing and offering to make a substantial donation to charities of the prince’s choosing.
    Despite the seriousness of the offences, News International still desperately hoped Clive Goodman would be spared jail, and hired one of the country’s most expensive criminal barristers, John Kelsey-Fry QC, to represent him. At sentencing on 26 January 2007, Kelsey-Fry painted a sorry picture of the royal editor: ‘He was demoted, sidelined, and another younger reporter was appointed to cover the royal family. Undoubtedly the newspaper business is a tough business. It is a ruthless business. It was while under that pressure that he departed from those high standards by which he had lived his entire life.’ Seeking to minimize the extent of Goodman’s wrongdoing, Kelsey-Fry made plain that his client had not been embroiled in Mulcaire’s non-royal hacking, saying very briefly: ‘Whoever else may be involved at the News of the World , his involvement is so limited.’ Kelsey-Fry argued that his client should be spared the ‘clang’ of the prison gates because of the relative unimportance of the stories he had written, prison overcrowding and his public disgrace. On 26 January 2007, the judge, Mr Justice Gross, jailed Goodman for four months and Mulcaire for six for the ‘grave, inexcusable and illegal invasion of privacy’.
    Neither the judge, nor the prosecution, nor the hundreds of victims, nor the wider public had any idea of the scale of the lawbreaking at Wapping. That knowledge was confined, for the moment, to News International and Scotland Yard.

Rogue Defence
     
    Goodman’s hacking was aberrational, a rogue exception, an exceptionally unhappy event in the 163-year history of the News of the World involving one journalist
    – Colin Myler, 22 February 2007
     
    If Clive Goodman had been given a suspended sentence or community service, Andy Coulson might have been able to maintain his position, but that was now impossible. His glorious career at Wapping ended in ignominy at the age of thirty-five. In a statement to the media, Coulson said that although he had not known about hacking, he ‘ultimately’ bore responsibility as editor. In a bad-tempered farewell speech to staff that evening, he remarked that the Home Secretary had recently recommended only the most dangerous criminals be imprisoned, to relieve overcrowding, and that only that day a downloader of child pornography had been spared jail. Terribly unjust it may have been, but the award-winning editor was now out of work.
    Rupert Murdoch quickly replaced him with an old tabloid hand,