• Top BBC executive was affected, says newspaper
• Police have begun to contact alleged victims
A top BBC executive and the former Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair were targeted by the News of the World’s phone hacking operation, it was claimed today.
Blair was named in a report in the Sunday Times, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which also owns the News of the World. However, tonight police sources denied his name was on the list.
The names emerged as the Met said it had begun to contact people who allegedly had been the subjects of hacking by the tabloid newspaper, but warned that the process could take some time to complete. “We are not discussing who we are contacting at all,” a spokeswoman said.
BBC sources said that the corporation did not know which of its executives had been affected by the scam at the paper, which led to Clive Goodman, then News of the World royal correspondent, and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, going to jail in 2007.
Andy Coulson, former editor of the tabloid and now director of communications for the Conservative party, subsequently resigned from the paper saying he did not know about the hacking.
Late on Friday the police confirmed they had started to contact people after the Guardian revealed last week that News International had paid £1m to settle privacy actions brought by Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and two others who took action after Mulcaire hacked into their mobile phone messages.
“The process of contacting people is under way and we expect this to take some time to complete,” the police said.
The Met today refused to divulge how many people it was contacting.
The Sunday Times reported that the police investigation into Goodman and Mulcaire uncovered a list of “fewer than 20 people”; it included Boris Johnson, now the London mayor, and a senior executive at the BBC, whose phones were illegally accessed.
This list includes those named in the 2006 court action against Goodman and Mulcaire – besides Taylor, the model Elle Macpherson, the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, the publicist Max Clifford, and football agent Sky Andrew.
Macpherson’s publicist said in a statement: “Elle is obviously very concerned that her private telephone conversations and those of other people may have been intruded upon by reputable newspapers. She is aware that the director of public prosecutions (DPP) and the information commissioner have files on the issue. “Miss Macpherson is confident in the ability and the determination of the DPP, the police and information commissioner to ensure that appropriate and proportionate action is taken to prevent any further abuse.”
The DPP is reviewing police evidence and could recommend further charges.
A second, larger, list of about 50 people, contained the names Mulcaire had obtained mobile phone details for, but which police had no evidence had been successfully hacked. The Sunday Times reported that Blair and the former culture minister Tessa Jowell were on this list.
The third list, according to the Sunday Times, reportedly included the former deputy prime minister John Prescott and held between 400 and 500 names that Mulcaire wanted to target but for which he had no numbers.
This week the culture, media and sport committee, which has reopened its 2007 phone hacking inquiry in the light of the Guardian’s revelations, will hear evidence from the Guardian.
The following week, the News International lawyer Tom Crone, and News of the World editor Colin Myler (appointed after Coulson’s resignation), will go before the MPs. The committee hopes to hear evidence from the former executive chairman of News International Les Hinton, who at the original inquiry said Goodman had been acting alone without the knowledge of News of the World executives. Hinton has yet to confirm his attendance.
Public figures and celebrities who fear they were the subjects of the phone hacking have been contacting lawyers. The Bethnal Green and Bow MP George Galloway said he was seeing if any action could be taken. The politician had clashed with the paper in 2006 when its investigations editor, Mahzer Mahmood, attempted to “sting” him at a hotel and implicate him in illegal political funding.
Rod Christie-Miller, partner at the specialist media law firm Schillings, said: “Clients are going to want to see what comes out. Sooner or later there is going to be more concrete evidence about who has been targeted.”
Christie-Miller said his firm was already suspicious that phone hacking could have been used against high-profile clients before the story broke.
“It is something we were concerned may have been happening,” he added. “We have advised clients to change settings on phones and turn off bluetooth.”
One lawyer told mediaguardian.co.uk he had advised clients to “hold their horses” to see what details emerged over the coming days but added that legal claims were “imminent”.
The report in the Sunday Times, sister paper of the News of the World, shed further light on the Gordon Taylor case.
The paper stated: “Taylor’s claim was settled when new evidence emerged out of the police files that another News of the World reporter knew how Mulcaire was obtaining some of his information,
“That reporter has since left the paper and there is no evidence he committed any offence. News International executives are not aware of any other evidence in the police files that show any other News of the World journalist was involved in commissioning Mulcaire to hack phones.”
I apologise for Berlusconi
I’m sorry for our prime minister’s predictable reaction to a story about G8 summit preparations, please keep the spotlight on Italy
As a member of the Italian parliament and former magistrate who ensured that many corrupt politicians and businessmen were brought to justice in the 1990s, I wish to apologise to the editor and staff of the Guardian newspaper for the utterly predictable reaction of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and our foreign minister, Franco Frattini.
The Guardian does its best to keep the public informed. In Italy this government is not accustomed to free debate, or to hearing the truth being told. While sections of the article dealing with preparations for the G8 summit may be debatable, the rest of it contains little that can be refuted.
However, there is one classification missing from the list in the article, one published by Freedom House, which puts Italy 73rd place for freedom of the press. The real problem in our country is that information is firmly in the grip of one individual, namely our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi – which must be one of the worst cases of conflict of interest ever recorded in any country in the western world.
Berlusconi’s control over the media is exercised via his ownership of the largest Italian publishing house, Mondadori, as well as via the country’s six television networks: three private Mediaset channels owned by Berlusconi himself and three channels of the public broadcaster RAI which Berlusconi indirectly controls and influences, with very rare exceptions I might add, through managerial staff appointments.
His virtually total control of the media allows him to maintain a dominant position and provides an endless source of revenue that helps to consolidate his position within the institutions via a wide-ranging system of patronage. In the past, these revenues were made possible by the tacit approval of previous governments that refused to address the issue of obvious conflicts of interest. Currently Berlusconi pays the Italian government a mere 1% of turnover in return for the television broadcasting frequencies conceded to him and now used for Mediaset transmissions. Since the centre-right coalition government came to power, a number of major parastatal companies have diverted their advertising expenditure from the RAI public television networks to the private networks belonging to the prime minister.
In addition to the media issue, there is now also another, namely the scourge of the “unconstitutional” government reforms. The first of these was a law known as the Alfano bill, which was ordered by Silvio Berlusconi himself as his first act after coming to power, which prohibits the prosecution of himself and the incumbents in three other senior government posts.
The provisions of this law mean Berlusconi did not have to appear in a trial in which he was facing charges of bribing a witness. David Mills, his lawyer and former husband of Blair government minister Tessa Jowell, has been sentenced to four years and six months imprisonment for accepting a bribe. On 6 October, the constitutional court is due to issue a ruling regarding the constitutionality of the Alfano bill and, should the court rule that it is indeed unconstitutional, then Berlusconi will be obliged to stand trial for allegedly bribing Mills.
I would like to conclude by appealing to the Guardian and the other foreign press not to allow the spotlight to move away from Italy and to continue to perform the same vitally important task that they have always performed in the past, namely the task of informing the public, a role that most of our media have abdicated from because they are no longer being allowed to do their job.