British Conservative party communications chief Andy Coulson admitted yesterday that "things went badly wrong" under his editorship of the News of the World.
But the former editor of the popular Sunday tabloid rejected any suggestion he knew about alleged phone-hacking by the paper’s journalists. He told MPs he had been deceived by one “rogue” reporter who was involved in illegally accessing telephone messages on the telephones of royal aides.
But he acknowledged his ultimate responsibility for the scandal, adding that he had paid for it by sacrificing his 20-year career with News International.
Appearing before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, Mr Coulson said: “During that time I neither condoned the use of phone-hacking nor do I have any recollection of instances when phone-hacking took place.”
He insisted he had never met, e-mailed or spoken to private investigator Glen Mulcaire, who was jailed at the same time as News of the Worldroyal editor Clive Goodman, over the royal hacking affair in 2007.
But Mulcaire’s consultancy was known to him and he was paid £100,000 a year for “legitimate investigation services” on behalf of the newspaper. Further payments to Mulcaire, made by Goodman, were “unknown to me and concealed from the managing editor”.
He said he had no knowledge of the paper’s recent settlement with Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, whose voicemail was also hacked into by Mulcaire.
The Guardian’s disclosure of that settlement, as well as claims that other senior journalists were involved in hacking, prompted the select committee to re-open its inquiry earlier this month.
“Thousands” of public figures, including celebrities and a Royal aide, were targeted, the Guardian alleged.
Tom Crone, the legal adviser at News International, said Mr Taylor had been first to raise the confidentiality clause.
“Every single case against us for breach of privacy results, unless the information is already out in the public domain, in a very strict term of confidentiality at the end of the case,” he said.
In bitter exchanges with Tory MP Philip Davies, the newspaper’s former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, denied his decision to quit shortly before the Guardian’s allegations were published was related to the issue. – (PA)