12 Jan 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Richard Desmond, founder and owner of Daily Express owner Northern & Shell, today defended his editor’s coverage of missing toddler Madeleine McCann despite the volume of defamatory articles the paper published.
I don’t wish to minimise it,” he told the Leveson Inquiry, “but if there were 102 articles on the McCanns, and 38 bad ones, you could argue there were 68 or 70 good ones.”
He told the Inquiry that the McCanns took four months to take legal action over the paper’s coverage, claiming that until then “they seemed quite happy for us to run articles about their poor daughter.”
Counsel to the Inquiry, Robert Jay QC, called this a “grotesque characterisation”. He also said the coverage of the Express and the Star, also owned by Northern & Shell, were the “most egregious defamations” of all the redtops.
Despite apologising and paying Kate and Gerry McCann over £500,000 in damages for “entirely untrue” and “defamatory” articles written about their daughter’s disappearance, Desmond believes the Express was “scapegoated by the PCC” over its coverage, claiming it was only the Express that “stood up and said yes we got it wrong”.
An increasingly irritated Jay criticised Desmond for drawing comparisons with the death of Princess Diana and attempting to justify his papers’ coverage of the McCanns by arguing speculation over what had happened was rife.
“There has been speculation that Diana was killed by the royal family,” Desmond said. “The speculation has gone on and on. I don’t know the answer.”
Desmond’s performance this afternoon was pugnacious, with potshots being taken at rivals and regulators. He called the current Press Complaints Commission a “useless organisation run by people who wanted tea and biscuits and by phone hackers; it was run by people who wanted to destroy us.”
He called the Inquiry “probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to newspapers in my lifetime.” He said he would rather “get rid” of it, “prosecute people that committed offences, and get on with business.”
He also took particular care to reignite hostilities with the Daily Mail, calling it “the Daily Malicious”, “Britain’s worst enemy”, and referring to its editor Paul Dacre as “the fat butcher”.
Desmond seemed at pains to define the term “ethical”, adding: “We do not talk about ethics or morals because it’s a very fine line and everybody is different.”
The Inquiry continues on Monday.
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12 Jan 2012 | Leveson Inquiry, News and features
The former editor of the Daily Express has denied claims made to the Leveson Inquiry that he was “obsessed” over coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
Peter Hill said it was an “international story on an enormous scale” and that there was an “enormous clamour” for information.
“It was not a story you could ignore”, he said, “you simply had to cover it as best you could.”
Hill said it was “nothing to do with an obsession”, adding that the “entire country” had an opinion about the 2007 disappearance of McCann.
Express reporter Nick Fagge told the Leveson Inquiry in December that Hill had “decided it was the only story he was interested in.”
There was a tense exchange between Hill and Robert Jay QC, during which Hill accused the Inquiry counsel of putting him “on trial” during questioning about the tabloid’s McCann coverage. Lord Justice Leveson reassured him he was not.
“I did not accuse them of killing their child. The story that I ran were the people that did accuse them and those were the Portuguese police,” he said.
He added that there was “reason to believe that they might possibly be true.”
When asked by Jay about checking the accuracy of the stories, Hill said: “We did the best we could do which was not very much.” He added that the McCann stories boosted circulation “on many days”.
Madeleine’s parents accepted £550,000 in damages and an apology from Express Newspapers in March 2008 for what the company said were “entirely untrue” and “defamatory” articles. Hill told the “nothing” further happened after the libel case.
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12 Jan 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
The editor of the Daily Express has suggested to the Leveson Inquiry today that one of the reasons for the paper opting out of the Press Complaints Commission was because it failed to stop the tabloid publishing defamatory articles about the McCanns.
Hugh Whittow said: “Because of the McCanns I think that was a huge problem for us and I think they should have intervened.” He added that “no one was intervening at all, and the coverage “just went on and on”.
Kate and Gerry McCann accepted £550,000 in damages and an apology from Express Newspapers in March 2008 for what the publisher admitted were “entirely untrue” and “defamatory” articles.
Whittow told Lord Justice Leveson: “I don’t blame the PCC. I just think in hindsight they might have been able to intervene and perhaps this will reflect in the body that you set up.”
Whittow was deputy editor at the time of the paper’s libellous coverage of the parents of the missing toddler, and said was not party to the decision to withdraw from the PCC.
Daily Star editor Dawn Neesom also testified to the Inquiry this morning. As counsel Robert Jay QC took her through a series of front-page stories from the paper, Neesom admitted headlines can at times “go too far”, with one story headlined “Terror as plane hits ash cloud” resulting in copies of the paper being removed from airport newsagents’ shelves over fears they could cause panic among travellers.
Earlier in the day Express Newspapers’ legal chief, Nicole Patterson, revealed to the Inquiry that the company was using private investigator Steve Whittamore in 2010, five years after he had been convicted for illegally trading information.
Going through a list of invoices from Whittamore’s company, JJ Services, Jay revealed that the earliest date of payments to the firm was 31 January 2005, and that Whittamore was still carrying out services for Express Newspapers in 2010.
Patterson said was not sure if Whittamore was still being used by the company’s papers. Jay called this surprising, given the “cloud hanging over” the private investigator.
Patterson added that the company carried out an internal investigation into phone hacking and other unlawful news gathering methods at its tabloids going back to 2000. She said there was no evidence to suggest phone hacking “or anything of that nature” had occurred.
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11 Jan 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Associated Newspapers’ legal chief was questioned at the Leveson Inquiry today over the company’s statement accusing Hugh Grant of making “mendacious smears” against the paper.
Liz Hartley said Grant has used speculation “to accuse our group of phone hacking, which is a very serious allegation. We respond by defending ourselves.”
“And you’re responding by accusing him of perjury,” Lord Justice Leveson responded.
During his November testimony, Hugh Grant spoke of a 2007 story in the Mail on Sunday that claimed his relationship with Jemima Khan was on the rocks due to his late night calls with a “plummy voiced” studio executive. Grant said the only way the paper could have sourced the story was through accessing his voicemail, and that he “would love to hear what their source was if it wasn’t phone hacking”.
Associated Newspapers, the Mail’s publisher, responded with a statement accusing Grant of making “mendacious smears driven by his hatred of the media”. Hartley also revealed today that editor Paul Dacre, due to appear at the Inquiry next month, helped to draft the statement.
Victims’ lawyer David Sherborne suggested to Leveson this afternoon that the journalists responsible should give evidence under oath on 6 February to establish the source of the article.
Associated Newspapers has consistently denied that any of its staff were involved in phone hacking.
The Mail’s recent coverage of Grant, namely the birth of his daughter, was also a topic of discussion. Hartley denied that details regarding the birth had been obtained from a hospital source, asserting that the source came from Grant’s “celebrity circle” of friends.
She noted the difficulty of reporters establishing facts in the story, suggesting the real solution to this would have been for Grant’s publicists to say they would prefer the media to “desist”.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with evidence from Daily Express publisher Northern & Shell.
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