IT WOULD be nice to think that readers of the News of the Worldwill now do to their paper what the Sun's Merseyside readership did to it after its outrageous attack on the 96 dead football fans at Hillsborough in 1989. "Remember Captain Boycott!" Perhaps it's too much to expect, though carmaker Ford last night pulled its ads from the paper.
The truth is that, to date, the spiralling list of celebrities and politicians who have been the subject of telephone hacking at the paper’s instigation, not to mention the jailing of both its investigator Glenn Muclaire and royal correspondent Clive Goodman in 2005 for intercepting messages from members of Queen Elizabeth’s household, have been like water off a duck’s back to readers and advertisers. They, it seems, regard such illegality and intrusion most benignly; celebrities and bonking footballers are fair game.
But the revelation yesterday that the NoW,again in the person of Mulcaire, intercepted the voicemail and then deleted messages from the phone of missing, murdered 13-year-old Milly Dowler in 2002 must surely give pause to even the most hardened tabloid reader. Her family rightly described the deletions, which briefly gave them false hope that she was still alive, as "heinous" and "despicable".
The suggestion that the NoWmay have done the same to other families of murdered girls must surely finally dispel its "few rogue elements" defence. The police are to meet News International, which has reportedly put aside some £40 million to meet claims from aggrieved hackees, and now promises full transparency and assistance. That would be a first, not least for the then editor of the NoWand now the Murdoch group's senior British executive, Rebekah Brooks.
Once again she insisted yesterday, as she previously told the Commons implausibly, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers, that she knows "naaathing". In a memo to staff she said she was "appalled and shocked" by the claims: "I hope that you all realise it is inconceivable that I knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling allegations [sic]."
Yet, if she didn’t know what was going on in her newsroom, which few will credit, she most certainly should have – Ms Brooks can surely not last long in her current position. It is to be hoped the renewed police investigation will also do something to redeem the police’s somewhat lackadaisical approach to the hacking saga, the product many suspect of an improperly close relationship between some officers and journalists on the paper.