Nick Davies's Blog, page 4

Rebekah Brooks: shes always been able to get what she wants from people

From charming the powerful to threatening foes, the ex-News International chief is adored and loathed in equal measure

When Elisabeth Murdoch celebrated her 40th birthday in the summer of 2008, Rebekah Brooks produced a 32-page souvenir edition of the Sun for the guests at her party with joke stories, a spoof agony aunt column and a Page 3 picture with Elisabeths head grafted on to the body of a naked woman (headline: Lizzies the breast).

Among the parody, Brooks had also secured personal messages from the then prime minister, Gordon Brown; his predecessor, Tony Blair; and his eventual successor, David Cameron; as well as two serving cabinet ministers, John Reid and Tessa Jowell. All were effusive, if not sycophantic. Liz is fabulous, fantastic and funny was Blairs opening line.

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Police use unauthorised weapons, Blair Peach jury told: from the archive, 7 May 1980

The inquest into the death of Blair Peach, who was killed during a demonstration against the National Front, hears that crime squads often carry pick-axe handles and homemade truncheons

Duncan Campbell: The lessons of Blair Peach

Police officers on crime-fighting duties often use unauthorised weapons such as pick-axe handles and special heavier truncheons, the Blair Peach inquest at Hammersmith coroner's court was told yesterday.

Inspector Douglas Hopkins, the head of Scotland Yard's No 3 Special Patrol Group, said that the use of these weapons was known to senior officers but, that as a result of the Peach case they would probably be formally issued in future.

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Aviation body attempts to ground high-flying balloons: From the archive, 15 April 1982

The Civil Aviation Authority wants to amend a loophole which allows bin-liners and balloons to be registered as aircraft

The Civil Aviation Authority has registered more than 400 plastic bin liners as aircraft, entitled to fly in uncontrolled air space. It may also have registered a manhole cover in Cambridge, but it is not sure.

The bin liners are fuelled with Calor gas cookers or electric hair dryers and have been given such names as Broken Wind, Hot Pants, and Fat Glenda. They are also causing apoplexy in the aviation world.

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Clive Goodman denies he stole cash from News of the World

Newspaper's former royal editor denies being in cahoots with phone-hacking detective to claim expense money

The former royal editor of the News of the World denied colluding with the paper's specialist phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire to steal money from the paper, as he continued to give evidence in the phone-hacking trial.

Questioned by the barrister representing Andy Coulson, Clive Goodman said that each week he would collect £500 from the office cashier and then meet Mulcaire somewhere near the office, quite often in his car, to hand it over.

Timothy Langdale QC, acting for Coulson, asked whether he had ever paid money directly into Mulcaire's bank account.

Goodman said he did not recall that.

"Had you come to some arrangement with Mr Mulcaire about getting some of the proceeds of the Alexander project for yourself?"

Goodman replied: "That's untrue."

Goodman has told an Old Bailey jury that in October 2005 Coulson, the then editor of the tabloid, personally agreed to pay Mulcaire £500 a week in cash to "monitor" the phones of three members of the royal household. The payments were to be recorded under a false name, David Alexander, with a false address, he said.

Langdale also asked Goodman to explain why it was that for a 28-month period when he was regularly claiming cash for three other anonymous sources, his personal account at Lloyds Bank showed no record of his withdrawing any cash for himself.

Goodman replied that this coincided with his getting married and having his first child. "I lived a much more quiet life because things had changed." He said he had spent less and got cash back when he made payments at the supermarket or the garage.

Langdale asked him: "Did you keep for yourself any of the money that you got from the News of the World?"

"No. I did not," he replied.

Langdale asked if it was a coincidence payments to all three anonymous sources ended in March and April 2006, when the newspaper introduced tighter rules on cash payments. Goodman said he did not know: "I'm sorry. I don't have an answer for you."

Langdale asked if it was a coincidence that he had resumed drawing cash from his Lloyds account in June 2006. Goodman replied: "You are talking about events that are two months apart so I don't see the connection."

Questioned about a story which he had written about minor injuries sustained by Prince Harry, Goodman told the jury that the information had come from a voicemail which had been hacked from the mobile phone of the prince's personal secretary, Helen Asprey.

Langdale then asked him why it was that a schedule of his payments to contributors showed that for the same story, he had claimed £700 in cash for an anonymous source recorded internally under the alias Ian Anderson. Goodman has told the jury that Anderson was a freelance journalist.

Goodman replied that the Anderson alias was sometimes used to pay other contributors and that, on this occasion, Mulcaire's handler, the assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, thought Mulcaire should be given something in addition to his regular payment of £2,000 a week because the hack was "above and beyond his duties."

Langdale said: "How can it possibly be above and beyond a hacker's duties to hack Helen Asprey's phone?"

"You'd have to ask Greg," replied Goodman.

Langdale suggested that his answer was a fiction: "This was a device where you could get £700 out of the News of the World in cash when in fact the source of the story was a hacked voicemail message."

"No. That's not true."

Langdale asked why Goodman had authorised five cash payments for up to £650 for another anonymous source, recorded internally with the alias Alec Hall, for information which, the court heard, had already appeared in other newspapers or magazines. Goodman said that Hall was a reporter working for another newspaper, which would not be interested in these particular stories, and that he was paying Hall for spotting and packaging the information. "It's the sort of thing that is done all the time,"he added.

Goodman and Coulson deny conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. Coulson also denies conspiring with Goodman and others to intercept communications.

The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Phone-hacking trial: Coulson pressed me to keep quiet, Goodman claims

Former royal editor says he had been prepared to name names, but had been persuaded to say he was acting as a 'lone wolf'

Andy Coulson suggested he was in contact with police and using his influence to keep his royal editor Clive Goodman out of prison after Goodman was arrested for phone hacking in 2006, an Old Bailey jury has heard

Goodman made the claim as he told the court that he had felt threatened by a News International lawyer who told him he could keep his job if he agreed to say nothing about the involvement in hacking of others at the News of the World. He added that his own solicitor, Henri Brandman, who was being paid by the company, had also advised him not to name names.

Giving evidence, Goodman said that following his arrest on 8 August 2006 he had been distraught when he saw the size of the case that detectives had assembled against him and the News of the World's specialist phone hacker, Glenn Mulcaire.

"I was immensely worried that I was going to be blamed for all of Glenn's activities and so I told Henri that that wasn't the case, that lots of people from the News of the World were doing this. I just happened to be the one that got caught," Goodman told the court.

He had been surprised the next day when Brandman had suggested that his line of defence should be: "Under stress and some kind of lone wolf." He told the jury: "I knew he was there to represent me, but he was being paid by News International and I had a pretty strong feeling that everything I said would probably go straight back to them."

On 10 August, he had received a phone call from Coulson that had left him feeling disturbed and worried that he was being "bounced into pleading guilty".

He added that Coulson had given him the impression that he had been discussing the case with the police or the Home Office, suggesting that they had no intention of seeking a prison sentence as long as Goodman pleaded guilty and got the case out of the way quickly.

That same day, Goodman had gone to an internet cafe, created a new Hotmail email address and accessed his email account at News International: "I felt at risk of being passed off as Glenn Mulcaire's only conspirator. I was seeking email that would prove that others were involved and that Andy knew what was going on."

On 14 August, he had agreed to meet Coulson in a Cafe Rouge near his home in Wimbledon, south London. Coulson again urged him to plead guilty, he said.

"He expressed the view that through his and the newspaper's contacts he had discovered that the police didn't want the case to go any deeper than me and Mulcaire, and nobody wanted it to end up in a jail sentence.

"There was a clear suggestion his influence somehow had arranged for me not to go prison."

Coulson had told him he could keep his job and that, if he did get a prison sentence, the paper would continue to pay him and would look after his wife and daughter. David Spens QC asked him: "Was that dependent on anything?"

Goodman replied: "Keeping silent."

"About?"

"The involvement of others."

Goodman said he had already hired a specialist employment lawyer – "I couldn't really ask Henri Brandman because I thought he was representing News International as well."

In the meeting at Cafe Rouge, he noticed that Coulson seemed to have a lot of detail about the criminal case. "The only way he could have got that was from Brandman. He was supposed to be working for me, not for the paper. I thought it was not quite right that he should be telling the paper what I was telling him."

And then, Goodman claimed, Coulson had given him some advice: "All you've got to say is that you're a lone wolf." That had "really put the fear of God" into him, because it was exactly what Brandman had already suggested.

During November, Goodman said, he had drafted a proof of evidence for his court case in which he had implicated senior executives, including Coulson, in knowledge and approval of phone hacking. However, Brandman had advised him that a judge "would not take a benign view of someone who thrashed around blaming everybody else". Goodman said he had not known whether Brandman was giving him his own point of view or News International's. But eventually he had agreed to remove the references.

In the first week of November, a News International lawyer had asked to see the 2,000 pages of evidence that had been served on him by prosecutors.

Goodman said he did not want to hand it over, because he did not trust the company. He had then discovered that Brandman had gone ahead and supplied the material to the lawyer. "It was the exact opposite of my instructions," he told the court.

The same News International lawyer had attended Goodman's meetings with Brandman and with his barrister, John Kelsey-Fry QC, and had told him several times that he could keep his job at the News of the World only if he agreed not to name others who were involved in the hacking. Following one such meeting, Goodman emailed Brandman, complaining that the presence of the News International lawyer had been "unhelpful" and that he had delivered "a fairly crude carrot and stick from the NoW … I found the attempt to dictate lines of our defence highly inappropriate and just a bit shocking. I felt more threatened by the message that he was asked to deliver than I have by much of the prosecution case."

Clive Goodman and Andy Coulson deny conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. Coulson and Stuart Kuttner deny conspiring to intercept voicemail.

Nick Davies
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Coulson approved monitoring of Palace phones, says NoW ex-royal editor

Prince Harry's voicemail and royal aides' messages were intercepted, Goodman tells Old Bailey

The former royal editor of the News of the World on Tuesday accused his former boss Andy Coulson of personally approving a plan for the paper's specialist phone-hacker to monitor the phones of three royal aides.

Clive Goodman, giving evidence in the phone hacking trial, claimed that Coulson read the transcript of a voicemail left by Prince Harry and discussed the detail of news stories which had been derived from hacked messages.

He also said that, as the tabloid's editor, Coulson had chaired daily conferences where a senior journalist openly referred to messages that had been left on telephones and to the use of mobile phone data to locate the subject of a story.

After four months of the Old Bailey trial during which he has been seated next to Coulson in the dock, Goodman yesterday sat about 30 feet away in the witness box and told the jury of his involvement in hacking phones, and of Coulson's alleged role in it.

He said he had been taught how to intercept voicemail in January 2005 by the paper's then associate editor, Greg Miskiw, who had started listening to Palace phones three years earlier but had begun to find it "tiresome" to do so.

In October 2005, he had been contacted by the paper's specialist hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, who was worried that his £2,000-a-week retainer was going to be cut. "He was looking to make up this shortfall. Through Greg he clearly knew that I had been monitoring some royal voicemail."

Mulcaire had suggested that if Goodman chose three royal staff, he could provide their phone data, hinting that he could obtain this from the security service who were already monitoring Palace phones. Goodman told the court he then took the offer to Coulson.

The jury has heard that the two men had known each other since the late 1990s and were guests at each other's weddings. "I said that Greg's old contact, Glenn Mulcaire, had offered to monitor three royal phones for us. He would give us direct dial numbers and PINs. He would monitor them ... I did say that there was a suggestion that this was feedback from the security services but I didn't put any strength of belief behind that."

Coulson had agreed that for a two-month trial period, they would pay Mulcaire £500 a week for the project. The money was paid in cash and with the recipient recorded internally under a false name, David Alexander. Goodman had told Mulcaire to target three aides who worked closely with Prince William and Prince Harry.

Soon he was reporting back to Coulson, according to emails shown to the jury: "That new project is getting results." Goodman claimed that Coulson asked him to "pop in" to his office, where they had discussed the project and how it was going. After two months, Goodman emailed Coulson: "Got a second on extending the Matey file please?" Coulson emailed back: "Another month."

Early that December, Goodman told the court, he had recorded Prince Harry, who was then a cadet at Sandhurst, leaving a message for his private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, asking him for help on an essay about the 1980 Iranian embassy siege. He had shown a transcript of the message to Coulson, he said.

He and Coulson had then exchanged a series of emails as Goodman attempted to confirm the story without revealing its source to the Palace. In one message, Goodman told Coulson "As we know it is 100% fact." He went on to tell him that in dealing with the Palace, he would not say that he knew the subject of the prince's essay. "I think that's too precise to get through unnoticed," he wrote.

Goodman said during this time the newsroom of the paper was engaged in hacking "on a pretty industrial scale." As royal editor, he had attended the daily conference chaired by Andy Coulson where, he claimed, the subject of phones had often come up in discussion.

He said that one senior journalist, Mr A, had been in the habit of referring to the telephone traffic between the subjects of stories and to the "Friends and Family" numbers of some targets. Mr A had also referred to voicemail in conference: "It would be a story about a couple: 'We had a great message last night from him to her or her to him.'"

He told the jury that Coulson had banned talk of phones in conference after Mr A spoke openly about the possibility of locating the target of a story by "triangulating" the signal from his mobile phone.

"After that Andy said 'That's enough of that. You're not talking about this in conference any more.'"

Goodman said that Mr A had been using Mulcaire to hack the mobile phones of Coulson and also of Rebekah Brooks, then editing the Sun, in an attempt to steal other reporters' stories and "to find out what the Sun were up to".

Jurors were shown an email which Goodman wrote to Coulson on 3 February 2006 after he learned that Coulson had decided to end "Matey's weekly payment".

In the message, he listed the stories which Mulcaire had delivered in the previous eight weeks: "This information isn't manageable on a story by story basis. There are costs for Matey in setting it up and maintaining it, which he has to cover. A few weeks ago, you asked me to find new ways of getting into the family, especially William and Harry, and I came up with this. Safe, productive and cost-effective. And I'm confident it will become a story gold mine for us if we let it run for just a little longer."

Coulson, however, was unmoved and replied: "I'm sorry but it has to go." By that time, the court was told, Coulson had authorised 15 payments of £500 from his editorial management budget. Goodman had requested the money in memos to the managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, in which he referred to "a source whose details are known to the newspaper but whose identity is security sensitive and must be protected."

Mulcaire had continued to monitor the three royal phones, Goodman said, being paid a total of £4,800 over the following six months on a story-by-story basis.

Jurors were shown emails in which Coulson queried the source of stories. Goodman had replied that one was "from the source we had on a retainer: we absolutely know it to be true". And that another was from "that fella who used to be on a monthly retainer", adding that a quote from Prince William were "his exact words".

Coulson and Stuart Kuttner deny conspiring with Clive Goodman and others to intercept communications. Coulson and Goodman deny conspiring to commit misconduct in public office.

Nick Davies
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Phone-hacking trial: Clive Goodman denies paying palace police officers

Former NoW royal editor claims he told bosses money was for paying off police but that it actually went to other journalists

Clive Goodman repeatedly told his bosses while royal editor at the News of the World that he needed cash to pay police officers working at royal palaces when, in truth, he was passing the money to other journalists, an Old Bailey jury has heard.

The claim was made by Goodman who also told the court that his former editor Piers Morgan had made "a heartless commercial decision" to expose the identity of one of the paper's genuine palace sources, who was arrested and sacked as a result.

Giving evidence in his defence in the phone-hacking trial, Goodman denied paying royal police officers to obtain three confidential palace phone directories. He said it was "fairly routine" for journalists to exaggerate the importance of their sources and that he had often done so. "If people thought your sources were more important than they actually were, you stood a much better chance of getting your stories in the paper."

He said he invented false names – Farish and Anderson – for two sources who regularly sold him information and then requested payments for them in internal emails that described them as "one of our palace cops", "a man who normally wears a uniform" and "a Buckingham Palace cop". He said he had never discovered their real names but believed Farish was an executive in another newspaper group and Anderson was probably a freelance journalist.

It was these two sources, he said, who had received payments totalling £2,750 for the three directories. Answering questions from his barrister, David Spens QC, Goodman agreed that 25% of the stories credited to Farish and 8% credited to Anderson were about palace police officers. But, he said, he had never paid police for a story: "There is no truth in that whatsoever." The jury has heard detectives have visited addresses recorded for Farish and Anderson but been unable to identify them.

Goodman told the court that one of Prince Charles's valets, Kenneth Stronach, had been a long-standing source, providing stories initially through his son and then directly. Stronach had decided to leave his job and to write a book about his long career with the royals and had asked the News of the World to find a publisher who would give him a £1m contract. Goodman claimed the then editor, Morgan, and an associate editor, Alex Marunchak, decided the plan was too complicated because of confidentiality problems and decided instead to expose Stronach for trying to sell royal secrets. "It was a heartless commercial decision that he would be of little use to them in the future as a contact."

When the News of the World published its story, royal protection officers arrested Stronach and threatened to charge him with theft of royal property. They also tried to interview Goodman. In the event, was released without charge and dismissed. "One of the golden rules of newspapers is that you don't rat on your sources, and that's exactly what we did do. It was a pretty shameful thing to do."

At the beginning of yesterday's proceedings, the judge, Mr Justice Saunders, told the court that he had discharged one of the jurors on grounds of ill health but that the remaining 11 would stay in place.

Clive Goodman denies conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Princess Diana 'wanted Clive Goodman as ally against Prince Charles'

Jury in phone-hacking trial hears News of World's royal editor claim that Diana sent him a royal phone directory

Princess Diana sent the News of the World a confidential Buckingham Palace phone book and then personally called the paper's royal editor, Clive Goodman, to recruit him as an ally against Prince Charles, an Old Bailey jury has heard.

The eye-catching claim was made by Goodman on the same day as he spoke of bullying he had suffered at the hands of his editor, Andy Coulson, as he gave evidence in the phone-hacking trial.

The jury has heard that when Goodman was originally arrested for phone hacking in August 2006, police found 15 royal phone directories in his home. He is now charged with obtaining three of them illegally by paying a public official.

Goodman told the court that one of the 15 telephone directories arrived in his pigeon hole in an envelope which was addressed to him by name.

Shortly afterwards, he told the court, the Princess of Wales phoned to ask if he had received it. The journalist said he was not the only reporter to whom Diana spoke. She was "very close" to Richard Kay, who worked for the Daily Mail, and to Andrew Morton who went on to write a biography of her, he said.

Goodman added: "She was at the time going through a very, very tough time. She told me she wanted me to see this document to see the scale of her husband's staff and household compared to the scale of hers. She was in a very bitter situation with the Prince of Wales at the time.

"She felt she was being swamped by the people close to him in the household. She was looking for an ally to take him on, to show just the kind of forces that were ranged against her, to put the press on her side. We were quite a powerful organisation."

Goodman said that two of the other directories had been given to him by a senior valet to Prince Charles, whom he identified as Kenneth Stronach.

He told the court that Stronach's son had started selling him royal stories on his father's behalf but that the valet had then started to deal with him direct.

He had been hoping to negotiate a book deal and provided the directories as a sign of good will. "It became clear he was thoroughly fed up with working for the royal family and for the prince in particular," he said.

Goodman told the jury that he had been "well thought of" as the News of the World's assistant editor, specialising in royal coverage, until Coulson took over as the tabloid's editor in January 2003.

Previously, he said, he had got on well with Coulson. "Then my relationship with him changed. He became more aggressive, more combative, more bullying." The culture of the paper under Coulson had been "extraordinarily competitive, very fast, quite bullying and menacing".

He said one senior journalist had sidled up to him after a conference at the beginning of the working week and told him his ideas were not good enough: "Listen, Clive. It's a big story, or the Big Issue."

This same journalist, he claimed, was so competitive that when he heard that the paper's undercover specialist, Mazher Mahmood, was planning to expose a famous model who was working as a prostitute, he had secretly called the model's agent to warn her.

In the same way, he said, one of the executives, Alex Marunchak, had hired a company called Southern Investigations to follow him in the hope of identifying one of his contacts so that he could either blackmail the contact into working for him or else simply expose him as a source.

Under the new editor, he personally suffered three demotions, he said. First, he had been downgraded by Coulson's deputy, Neil Wallis, who did not like his work or the way he did it.

"He came up in the 1980s under Kelvin Mackenzie at the Sun – everybody shouted all the time and screamed at each other. Very, very aggressive. That was part of the Neil Wallis approach to journalism. Full stop," Goodman told the court.

The result, he said, was that in the "pecking order" in daily conferences, instead of being allowed to speak third or fourth, he found himself relegated to speak "after Jamie Oliver's recipes" or sometimes not at all.

Then he had been told he could no longer work directly for the editor but must take orders from the newsdesk. Then, he told the court, when he was unable to go on a royal trip to the United States, Coulson had been "very cross" with him and had appointed a new royal reporter, Ryan Sabey, who was given the job of covering stories about the younger members of the royal family, including Prince William and Prince Harry.

"That was 40 to 60% of royal coverage. It left me wondering where I was," Goodman said.

Coulson had often berated him for the quality of his stories and had excluded him from the paper's leader writers' conference although he was supposed to be one of the leader writers. "These things sound petty," he told the jury, "but they were meant to degrade you in the eyes of the people at the paper."

Goodman and Coulson deny two counts of conspiring to commit misconduct in public office.

The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Rebekah Brooks denies phone hacking evidence is 'carefully prepared script'

Former News of the World and Sun editor said she had no knowledge of contract with phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire

Rebekah Brooks on Wednesday rejected a claim that her 13 days of evidence in the witness box at the phone-hacking trial have been "a carefully prepared and presented script that bears little relation to the truth".

The claim came on a day when the court heard how Brooks received a stream of supportive text messages from Tony Blair in final week as chief executive of News International in July 2011 while she contemplated seeking further advice from Peter Mandelson.

Ending his cross-examination of Brooks on Wednesday, Andrew Edis QC suggested that her 20-year career at News International had been a "meteoric rise in … a really tough world" during which she had tried to get the best stories. "And you didn't much care how you got them."

"That's absolutely not true," she replied.

"Getting them was what mattered to you. Is that fair or not?"

"It's not fair."

He challenged her over the detail of the three offences with which she is charged.

On phone-hacking, Brooks said two of her executives at the News of the World – Greg Miskiw and Neville Thurlbeck – had never told her of the existence of the paper's specialist phone-hacker, Glenn Mulcaire. And that her managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, had never told her of the paper's annual contract with Mulcaire.

On the charge that as editor of the Sun she approved payments to a source at the Ministry of Defence, she said the journalist who asked for the money had never told her the source was a public official. She agreed that he should have told her.

On two charges that as chief executive of News International in July 2011 she conspired to hide or destroy evidence, she said she had not known that her PA, Cheryl Carter, had removed from the company archive seven boxes that, the Crown claim, contained 12 years of her notebooks; and that she had not known that her husband, Charlie Brooks, had given some of his belongings to security staff before police searched their homes. "You were completely unaware of everything?" asked Edis.

"Yes" she said.

"I'm going to suggest to you that that is quite untrue. You were running your world – and not much happened in it that you didn't want to happen. Is that right? You were the boss?"

"I was the CEO."

"And before that you were the editor."

"Yes."

"You were very much aware of what these people were doing?"

"Which people?"

"Kuttner. Thurlbeck, Miskiw. Cheryl Carter. The journalist from the Sun. Even your husband. All these people."

"That's not true."

"In fact, Mrs Brooks, your evidence, I'm going to suggest to you, has been a carefully prepared and presented script that bears little relation to the truth about these offences."

"It has not," she said.

Earlier, the court heard that as the hacking scandal came to a head in July 2011, Brooks exchanged a sequence of texts with Tony Blair. On the evening of Sunday 10 July, with the final edition of the News of the World on sale, Blair flew into Washington DC and texted her: "Hi it's Tony. I've just landed. Is it too late to speak or should we stick with tomorrow?" She replied that they should speak the next day, then added a second message: "Can't wait xx."

The jury has heard that on the following day, Monday 11 July, she spent an hour on the phone with Blair, after which she emailed James Murdoch to report that Blair was suggesting that they should set up a "Hutton-style inquiry" and was offering to advise them generally on a "between us" basis.

During the rest of the week, the court heard yesterday, Blair texted again on the Tuesday: "I'm in the Mid East. Call me when you can. Tx." Again on the Friday, when Brooks announced that she was resigning from News International: "I'm really sorry about it all. Call me if you need to. Tx." And again on the Saturday, as she prepared to give evidence the following week to the House of Commons media select committee: "If you're still going to Parliament, you should call me. I have experience of these things! Tx." She replied five minutes later "Definitely."

The court has heard that by Saturday, Brooks knew that she was to be interviewed by police the following day. She continued the text exchange, telling Blair: "Feeling properly terrified! Police are behaving so badly." He replied: "Everyone panics in these situations and they will feel they have their reputation to recover." Then he added: "I'm no use on police stuff but call me after that because I may be some help on Commons."

"Great," she replied. "Will do."

The court heard that in preparation for their appearance before the select committee, Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Brooks planned to have a full rehearsal and that Brooks had wanted to ask Lord Mandelson to help with "mock sessions". In the event, however, her arrest and questioning by police had prevented that happening.

Rebekah Brooks denies conspiring to intercept communications, commit misconduct in public office and pervert the course of justice. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Rebekah Brooks insists she never heard of Glenn Mulcaire until 2006

Prosecution questions her about senior staff commissioning Mulcaire from 2000 to 2003 when she left NoW for the Sun

Senior executives at the News of the World commissioned the specialist phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire to work on a series of stories about paedophiles and murdered children but never told their editor that they had done so, an Old Bailey jury heard on Tuesday.

In her twelfth day in the witness box, Rebekah Brooks agreed with prosecuting counsel Andrew Edis QC that, as an editor, her "agenda" had focused on paedophiles and sex offenders, but she repeatedly said that she had never heard Mulcaire's name until he was arrested in August 2006, three years after her editorship.

Edis asked her about notes kept by Mulcaire which suggested that the paper's assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, and four other journalists had told him to locate convicted child sex offenders from the summer of 2000 when Brooks was publishing the names and addresses of convicted paedophiles. "Did any of them tell you where they were getting their information from?" he asked.

"No," she replied.

The prosecutor went on to ask her about other notes suggesting that in September 2002, both Greg Miskiw and the news editor, Neville Thurlbeck, had commissioned Mulcaire to uncover stories about the murder in Soham of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells. This was "something which is directly part of your agenda," he suggested.

Thurlbeck had asked Mulcaire to investigate two detectives from the Soham inquiry who had been accused of downloading child pornography. "Did you know about that?"

"No," she replied. "I don't remember that."

Miskiw had asked Mulcaire to target the sister of Maxine Carr, who had been arrested for perverting the course of justice. "Did you know that Glenn Mulcaire had been tasked apparently to hack Maxine Carr's sister's phone?"

"No," she said. "I didn't."

Edis also challenged her over the hacking in April 2002 of the voicemail of Milly Dowler. The court had heard that Brooks was on holiday in Dubai in the week when Mulcaire intercepted a message suggesting that the missing schoolgirl was alive and possibly working at a factory in Telford.

Brooks agreed that she had been "extremely interested" in the missing girl and that the paper had run stories about her for the three weeks before Brooks went to Dubai. Edis suggested that she would have wanted to "keep it under review" while she was away. She replied: "The problem is that it's impossible to be in control of the newspaper – certainly back then – when you go away. I don't remember saying to anybody 'Keep in touch over missing Milly.'"

Edis asked her about an email written during that week by her managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, asking Surrey police for details of convicted sex offenders who lived near Milly Dowler's home. "I don't remember saying to Stuart Kuttner 'Please investigate paedophiles in the community.' I don't remember having that conversation, but it's possible."

She agreed that if the paper had found the missing girl alive, it would have been a big story, which would have made the front page. She was told that the paper had sent five or six journalists to Telford to investigate and agreed that this was "quite a lot" of staff. She was shown phone records which showed she had called the editor's desk from Dubai twice on the Thursday of her holiday week and three times on the Friday, including one call which lasted 38 minutes. Edis asked her if the acting editor, Andy Coulson, had told her about the story.

"No. He didn't."

"Did anyone?"

"No."

She said she did not recall having any conversation about Milly Dowler while she was in Dubai. The following week she had returned to the office. "Did nobody tell you at all what had happened while you were away?" Edis asked.

"I don't remember any conversation," she replied. She added that she did not believe that Stuart Kuttner had mentioned that he had contacted Surrey police to ask them about the contents of the voicemail. "Nobody told me we had accessed Milly Dowler's voicemail."

Edis said: "You say all this was hidden from you?"

"I did not know that Glenn Mulcaire worked under my editorship until 2006."

"It was hidden from you by Greg Miskiw?"

"He did not tell me that he had a private detective called Glenn Mulcaire working for me."

"You weren't told by Mr Thurlbeck?"

"No."

"By Mr Kuttner?"

"No."

"Nobody told you anything?"

"People told me an awful lot. I was the editor but I had not heard Glenn Mulcaire's name until he was arrested in 2006."

Glenn Mulcaire, Greg Miskiw and Neville Thurlbeck have pleaded guilty to conspiring to intercept communications. Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and Stuart Kuttner deny a similar charge. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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