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Phone-hacking trial told NoW safe held intimate details of David Blunkett affair

Court hears that lawyer's safe held recordings of 330 voicemail messages from then home secretary to Kimberly Quinn

David Blunkett's struggle to save the relationship with the woman he loved was monitored in intimate detail by the News of the World, the Old Bailey heard on Thursday.

Blunkett, then home secretary, never suspected his private words to her were being tape-recorded and that her movements were monitored around the clock.

The story emerged in full after police found recordings of 330 voicemail messages in the safe of the News of the World's lawyer, Tom Crone.

The jury in the phone-hacking trial was told the messages had been taken from the phone of Kimberly Quinn, publisher of the Spectator magazine, with whom Blunkett had been having an affair for three years.

The inhouse lawyer's safe also contained transcripts of the messages and drafts for an article in which Blunkett and Quinn were disguised with the codenames Noddy and Big Ears.

In one of the messages, the court heard, the cabinet minister had told Quinn: "You're breaking my heart."

The court later heard a tape recording which had been made by Blunkett in August 2004 when Andy Coulson, then News of the World editor, came to his office and confronted him about the affair.

The home secretary was heard pleading: "I want a private life. I'm young enough to want a private life."

Two days later, the paper published a front-page story, headlined "Blunkett's affair with a married woman."

The NoW's specialist phone hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, first targeted Blunkett in January 2004, when he collected phone numbers linked to the home secretary, his two sons and his special adviser, Huw Evans, according to the prosecution. By July, Mulcaire was also targeting Quinn.

One of the documents found in Crone's safe was headed "Noddy and Big Ears summary." Apparently written early in August 2004, it noted that the couple appeared to have marked the third anniversary of their affair on 22 July, when Blunkett had left a particularly affectionate message.

The document said old news cuttings suggested Quinn might have met Blunkett when he was interviewed by the Spectator in July 2001; the document recorded the birth date of one of her children, attempting to establish when the child had been conceived.

The document continued: "Reading the messages, they are clearly splitting up. This has been instigated by Big Ears. Noddy is devastated."

The writer said Blunkett was asking to meet her, and had gone to his country cottage.

"I have a possible address for her. We have bikes and cars on her round the clock – very low key. There is a meeting scheduled for Wednesday August 11 in the morning. No further detail on where, but if it's brought forward we are in a good position to catch it."

The paper was trying to locate Blunkett's country address, the document noting that it was "clearly next to a church as a church bell can be heard on one of the messages". Andrew Edis QC, for the crown, suggested this was a funeral bell tolling.

The jury was told that on the same day that Blunkett had left his "heartbreak" voicemail for Quinn he had also left a message saying he was going to go to the 40th birthday party of the TV actor Ross Kemp, who was then Rebekah Brooks' husband; it was "a gesture and then [he would] collapse into bed".

Detective Constable Tim Hargreaves told the court he had listened to all 330 messages and he described them as "deeply personal and intrusive". Mulcaire had submitted a bill for £750 for his work on the story.

On 13 August Coulson went to Sheffield to confront Blunkett about his affair, telling him: "There's no desire at all to cause you damage, politically or otherwise."

The home secretary replied: "Politics is one thing. Private life is another … If you don't have a private life, you don't have anything." Coulson said: "My view is that there are some matters, some stories, that have to be dealt with."

Blunkett suggested that his relationship with Quinn was simply a friendship. Coulson had countered: "This story isn't about friendship. The story is about an affair, the fact that you are, and have been, very much more than friends."

He refused to identify his source but said he was "extremely confident of the information", adding later: "People know about this affair. I'm not suggesting it's an open secret but people do know about it."

Blunkett pleaded repeatedly for the privacy of himself and Quinn: "My private life is my own. I'm divorced … I have always, always, kept my private relations private."

He said he wanted to protect Quinn from damage and also "to prevent open season" on his private life.

"I want a private life. I'm young enough to want a private life … I'm not a media star. I'm a politician trying to do a very difficult job."

Coulson stood his ground: "In an ideal world, that's perhaps how it should be. But you are home secretary and I don't think you can use your right to privacy to bat back an accusation that you have had an affair with a married woman."

Coulson offered to run the story without naming Quinn if the home secretary confirmed it. In the event, the NoW did not name her in their story but the Sun did so the following week.

The court heard that Coulson and Brooks were in frequent phone contact at this time.

Coulson and Brooks deny conspiring to intercept communications. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Milly Dowler case: job agency staff bombarded by NoW inquiries

Tabloid dispatched reporters to Telford after message had been hacked and ran an article about it in April 2002, court hears

Recruitment firm's experience

Staff at a recruitment agency which the News of the World mistakenly believed Milly Dowler was working for received calls from a woman claiming to be the missing schoolgirl's mother, the Old Bailey jury in the phone-hacking trial heard on Wednesday.

Employees at the Mondays Recruitment Agency in Telford, Shropshire, received a call demanding to know where she was. The trial has been told that a message for a "Nana" was mistakenly left by the agency on the mobile belonging to the 13-year-old, whose real name was Amanda. The tabloid had dispatched reporters to Telford after that message had been hacked and ran an article about it on 14 April 2002.

On Friday 12 April, Stephanie Hardy, an employee at the agency, took a call from a woman. In a statement read to the court, Hardy said the woman, whom she did not know, "asked me if I could tell her if her daughter was working for Monday's Recruitment Agency. She told me her daughter's name was Amanda Dowler and asked if I had heard of her".

Staff at the agency checked their records and could not find details of an Amanda Dowler, the court heard.

Valerie Hancox, who ran the agency with her son, Mark, said a further call was received, inquiring about Milly in which a woman said: "I'm her mother and I want to know where she is living and working."

Hancox's statement said that a male reporter from the News of the World turned up at her house on Saturday 13 April. She described him as slim, in his 30s, "not aggressive and well mannered". He asked if she wanted to help in the Milly Dowler case and asked if they could go to her offices to check if the schoolgirl was on their records.

Hancox's statement, read aloud to the court, said she was "quite wound up and agitated at this time". She phoned Hardy who was "adamant" that Milly was not on their books.

Hancox said she asked the reporter to leave but, "he refused to leave the outside of my house and just sat in his car outside".

Hancox's son Mark said a "heavy set man" knocked on his door on that Saturday and said "it was important". He said he refused to speak to the man, who "sat in his silver Range Rover outside" and that he then received a call on his home phone "asking if he was Mark Hancox".

His statement read: "He told me he had reason to believe Milly Dowler was working for my employment agency and he wanted any information we had on her …He said he was an editor, or editor in chief or high-ranking employee of the News of the World".

Mark Hancox's statement added that he subsequently believed the voice of the caller to be Stuart Kuttner, managing editor of the Sunday paper.

The Dubai holiday

Rebekah Brooks was on the telephone to the News of the World "quite a lot" during a holiday in Dubai taken at the height of the hunt for Milly Dowler and told a fellow holidaymaker that she liked to keep on top of things even on her days off, the jury also heard on Wednesday.

Dean Keyworth, an interior designer, said he met Brooks and her then partner, Ross Kemp, twice during the holiday in April 2002, once in a nightclub and once around the swimming pool. He said he did not recall the former News of the World editor talking about Milly or a missing schoolgirl.

Keyworth told the court he had known Andy Coulson, who was Brooks's deputy on the at the time, for 26 years. He said Coulson was a loyal friend and an honest person who would not have pursued a story at "any cost".

The jury heard that Keyworth had met Coulson when a mutual friend attended the same journalism school.

Brooks and Coulson have pleaded not guilty to charges that they conspired to intercept voicemails on mobile phones while at the News of the World. They sat in the dock with just one other of the eight defendants on trial, Brooks's husband Charlie.

Asked by the prosecution to tell the court about the conversations with Brooks in Dubai, Keyworth said: "Rebekah was on the phone quite a lot back to the office so there wasn't actually that much of a conversation."

He said he had found himself spending a few hours lounging around a pool with Brooks after Kemp had gone to play tennis with one of the two friends in the group.

"I did say [to her] 'You must get bored having to take work calls all the time'; she said she would rather keep on top of things."

Keyworth told the court that the only thing that "sticks out" in his mind about conversations with the couple in Dubai was talking to Kemp about EastEnders, which the actor had just quit.

He told how he had helped get Brooks and Kemp moved to a neighbouring hotel because he was friends with the marketing manager and that the former EastEnders star was "very pleased" because the hotel had Hermes toiletries.

Reporter's story denial

A former News of the World reporter whose byline appeared on a 2002 Milly Dowler story that referred to her hacked voicemails has told a jury he did not write the article.

Robert Kellaway said: "My recollection is, I was never assigned to the Milly Dowler story, it wasn't a running story that I was part of." He added: "As far as I am aware, the first time I saw this article was in the summer of 2011."

Asked to explain how his name could have got on it, he said it could have been "a simple production error".

Another explanation was, he said, that journalists on the new defunct Sunday tabloid were judged by a "key performance indicator" based on the number of times their names were published in the paper.

Sometimes when, through no fault of their own, a reporter's name had not appeared for some time, the "news desk append your name to a story in order to keep your byline count up", he said. "If that's what happened, it's slightly ironic that this might have been a professional favour that somebody has attempted to do," he said.

Nick Davies
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Phone hacking trial: Sven-Göran Eriksson was targeted, court told

Jury hears News of the World repeatedly hacked England manager's phone over four-year period as it exposed his sex life

The News of the World repeatedly hacked into the voicemail of Sven-Göran Eriksson over a four-year period as it exposed his sex life and then set him up for a sting by its "fake sheikh" reporter, Mazher Mahmood, an Old Bailey jury heard yesterday.

At the climax of the campaign, the court was told, the then England manager announced that he would resign, and the newspaper prominently claimed the credit for his fall.

In 2004, Greg Miskiw , a news editor, tasked the specialist hacker Glenn Mulcaire to hack Eriksson, the prosecution said. This time, the notes that were shown to the jury included the home address and phone number of Faria Alam, a secretary at the Football Association.

The News of the World then published a sequence of stories exposing her relationship with Eriksson ("Sven's secret affair") and with a senior FA executive ("I bedded Sven and his boss"). The stories were among those which won the News of the World the award for Newspaper of the Year 2004-05, the court heard.

Two years later, Mulcaire returned to Eriksson's phone, repeatedly calling into his number in January 2006, allegedly listening to his private messages. On 22 January, the News of the World published a series of embarrassing comments which Eriksson had made to the paper's undercover reporter Mahmood, under the headline "This man is a crook".

Mulcaire's phone records suggest that he continued to hack the England manager's phone until Eriksson announced that he would resign, the prosecution told the jury.

The prosecution said the targeting of Eriksson dated back to 2002. Notes written by Mulcaire suggest that Eriksson was first hacked in 2002 on four occasions on the instructions of two senior executives at the News of the World: Miskiw and the then news editor, Neville Thurlbeck.

Mulcaire's notes of the time, which are scrawled by hand and intersected by arrow-marks and doodles, included Eriksson's name and mobile phone number and the personal details of an unrelated pole-dancer from Brighton who had also been targeted.

Mulcaire, Miskiw and Thurlbeck have all pleaded guilty to charges of phone hacking. During the targeting of Eriksson's phone, the jury has been told, the paper was edited by Rebekah Brooks in 2002. In 2004 and 2006, the editor was Andy Coulson. Brooks and Coulson have denied conspiring to intercept communications.

Earlier, the jury heard that a team of reporters from the News of the World had descended on a recruitment agency in Telford, Shropshire, in April 2002 when a hacked voicemail led Thurlbeck to believe that the agency had given work to the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

The evidence included allegations that a reporter had falsely claimed to be working with the police and that somebody had tried to get information from the agency by pretending to be Milly's mother.

The court heard that one of the reporters who was sent to Telford, Vanessa Altin, had been working undercover in the Sugar Lounge club in Manchester, looking for stories about Manchester United players who drank there, when Thurlbeck told her he believed the recruitment agency had found Milly work at an Epson factory in Ironbridge, Shropshire.

In a statement to police, Altin said she had thought this was "far-fetched in the extreme" and that it was a "pointless waste of time". Nevertheless, she told police, Thurlbeck had sent her and six others to pursue the story.

Staff from the recruitment agency described to police how an unidentified woman made three calls to them claiming to be Milly Dowler's mother and wanting to know whether they had given work to her daughter. They has refused to give her information.

The agency's owner, Valerie Hancox, told police that a News of the World reporter had come to her house. "He told me he was helping police with their inquiries," she said in a statement read to the jury.

"He was not aggressive. He was well-mannered. He asked if I wanted to help Milly Dowler. He informed me he was working with the police investigation team."

On Monday, the jury heard that after his reporters had returned empty-handed from Telford, Thurlbeck had called Surrey police, who were investigating Milly Dowler's disappearance, and told them that the recruitment agency had confirmed that they had given work to the missing girl.

The paper's crime reporter, Ricky Sutton, had told a Surrey police press officer that he was "100% certain" the story was true. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Police did not investigate hacked Milly Dowler message, court hears

Trial told how News of the World played hacked mobile phone message to Surrey police working on teenager's disappearance

Surrey police made no attempt to investigate the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone in April 2002 even though News of the World journalists told them at the time that they had accessed her voicemail and even played one of her messages to them, the Old Bailey heard on Tuesday.

The disclosure came as the prosecution used notes kept by the specialist hacker Glenn Mulcaire as well as phone records, diaries, internal News of the World paperwork and live witnesses to reconstruct what apparently happened after the 13-year-old girl went missing on her way home from school in Surrey on Thursday 21 March 2002.

On Wednesday 10 April, Mulcaire was tasked with listening to the messages that had been left for her, the court was told. Some were emotional messages from friends and family, according to transcripts shown to the jury: "Please come home. I miss you so much … Hey, Milly, if you get this, call me … Hello, Milly. It's just that we want you home."

But the one that attracted the News of the World's attention was from a recruitment agency in Telford, West Midlands, apparently using Milly's real name, Amanda. It had been left on Wednesday 27 March.

As recorded by the News of the World, it said: "Hello, Amanda. This is Jo from Mondays Recruitment Agency. We are ringing because we have some interviews starting today at Epson. Please ring."

However, the court has heard that the message was, in fact, intended for a woman called Nana who had a similar phone number. Neverthless, believing they might find Milly alive, the paper dispatched a team of journalists to an Epson factory near Telford, without telling the police.

When that failed to yield any sighting, the News of the World went to Surrey police, putting pressure on them to confirm their story with increasingly explicit references to the intercepted voicemail.

On Friday 13 April, the managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, spoke to a detective who noted him saying: "The News of the World are in possession of a recording of the message." The same detective then spoke to the paper's then news editor, Neville Thurlbeck, and noted at the time: "Thurlbeck told me he had accessed Milly's voicemail with pin no 1210." Thurlbeck then repeated the claim to a press officer, saying the paper had obtained Milly's phone number and pin code from children.

Surrey police believed that the message was probably the result of a hoaxer posing as Milly. But the News of the World duly published a story on Sunday 14 April headlined "Milly hoax riddle", which quoted verbatim the voicemail from the recruitment agency. The story was amended after the first edition, the court heard, to remove the verbatim quote.

The following week, Kuttner emailed police, challenging the accuracy of the hoaxer angle and adding that during the previous week: "We passed on information about messages left on Amanda Dowler's phone … We offered a copy of a tape-recording of the messages."

Shortly afterwards, a press officer called the paper's crime reporter, Ricky Sutton, insisting that the hoaxer story was true. According to the press officer's log, Sutton replied: "This is not true. It's inconceivable … Milly has been up there in person. She has registered and applied for a job at the factory. We know this for 100%." During the conversation, Sutton played the message down the phone, the court heard.And yet, the jury was told, when senior Surrey officers held their weekly Gold Command meeting that week and discussed the activity of the hoaxer, the evidence that the News of the World had hacked the missing girl's voicemail was not even mentioned, and no investigation was started.

The court was also told that in the week leading up to the News of the World printing the hoaxer story, the editor, Rebekah Brooks, had been on holiday in Dubai. The prosecution have produced phone records apparently showing that she stayed in contact with executives on the paper including her deputy, Andy Coulson.

William Hennessy, a marketing executive who was on holiday in Dubai at the same time, told the court that he had met Brooks and her then partner, the TV actor Ross Kemp, and that he recalled Brooks going off to make a phone call explaining that it was about "the missing Surrey schoolgirl". But the QC acting for Brooks, Jonathan Laidlaw, suggested that Hennessy had not spent the time that he claimed with her.

Brooks, Coulson and Kuttner all deny conspiring to intercept voicemail. Mulcaire has pleaded guilty to hacking Milly Dowler's phone. The trial continues.

Messages accessed by police

Moving transcripts of some of the voicemail messages found on Milly Dowler's mobile phone were read to the court on Tuesday. They were obtained when Surrey police accessed the 13-year-old's messages during their investigation into her disappearance in March 2002. Her body was eventually found the following September.

One mesage simply read: "Hi Milly it's just that we want you home soon, bye."

Prosecuting, Mark Bryant-Heron said there was noise from a television in the background immediately afterwards, and someone could be heard telling a third party after having left the voicemail message: "I just called Milly to come home." Another voice then asked why they had done so. "Because I did," replied the first person.

A second voicemail message played to the Old Bailey jury said: "Hi Milly, please come home. I miss you so much. It's David." A third read out to the court said: "Hi Milly, if you get this call, call me back, OK."

No identities of those who left the messages were given in court.

There were seven saved messages on her phone, the court heard. On some of them no message was left.

Evidence was given that Surrey police were told by News of the World journalists that another message left for the youngster had said: "It's America, take it or leave it."

Caroline Davies

Nick Davies
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Phone-hacking trial told of Rebekah Brooks' attempt to 'hide evidence'

Jury hears a curious tale involving an underground car park, two pizzas and a famous movie line of Richard Burton's

Rebekah Brooks and her husband hatched a complicated plot to hide evidence from the police only to be foiled by a conscientious cleaner, an Old Bailey jury has heard. It was a curious tale involving an underground car park, two pizzas and a famous movie line of Richard Burton's.

The story was told by the Crown as part of a wider allegation that, as the chief executive of News International, Brooks had tried to conceal evidence of wrongdoing at the News of the World by deleting email records and destroying her journalistic notebooks. She denies two counts of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

The jury at the phone-hacking trial also heard an opening speech on behalf of Andy Coulson that the Crown had mis-stated his role as editor of the News of the World and that "it is his case that he was never party to an agreement to hack phones whatever others might have been doing on his watch".

Completing his three-day opening argument for the Crown, Andrew Edis QC took the jury back to July 2011, to the aftermath of the Guardian's disclosure of the hacking of Milly Dowler's phone. "A media firestorm was about to engulf the News of the World," he said. "You can imagine the extremely anxious, if not panic-stricken approach to these developments that must have been going on at the News of the World."

With a Scotland Yard inquiry closing in, Edis said, News International announced it would close the News of the World, and Brooks, a former editor of the paper, realised she faced arrest when she kept an appointment with police on Sunday 17 July. It was in this context, Edis claimed, that she and her husband Charlie Brooks came up with a plan to stop police finding computers and records at their country home, Jubilee Barn in Oxfordshire, and their flat at Chelsea Harbour, central London.

That Sunday morning, a chauffeur drove the pair in their Audi from Oxfordshire to London. Back at Jubilee Barn, Edis alleged, the head of security at News International, Mark Hanna, collected items which were to be concealed and set off in a black Range Rover to the company's office in Wapping. Hanna, meanwhile, was in charge of protecting the Brookses from "newspaper people" and others in what had been named internally Operation Blackhawk.

By noon the chauffeur had dropped off Charlie Brooks and driven Rebekah Brooks to Lewisham police station, waiting while she was formally arrested and questioned. At 12.15pm, Edis said, Charlie Brooks was caught by CCTV cameras at Chelsea Harbour going down to the underground car park, carrying a jiffy bag and a laptop computer which he appeared to leave in or around a waste bin. Two hours later, the CCTV recorded Hanna apparently removing both items. According to cell site information from his mobile phone, Hanna then returned to head office at Thomas More Square.

That afternoon the police searched both of the Brookses' homes. Edis suggested to the jury that among the material concealed from there were two iPads and an iPhone which, according to electronic records, the couple had been using recently. "The coast is clear," he said. "The police have been and gone. But of course, it may not be entirely clear because there may be police or press keeping an eye on what was going on."

This became important, the jury heard, when it was decided to return some "safe" items to the Brookses that evening.

Hanna texted one of his men: "Have plan. Can you call please?" Edis suggested to the jury that this security man had been tasked to go to News International headquarters at Wapping, to collect a big bin bag containing some of the concealed items and to take them to Chelsea Harbour where there was some risk of being spotted by police or press. "There has got to be some sort of pretext," he said. Which is where the pizzas allegedly became involved.

According to Edis, the security man had picked up two pizzas, phoned Charlie Brooks, delivered the pizzas to an unnamed man who came down to the underground car park, left the bin bag behind a bin and then texted his immediate boss with a line famously used by Richard Burton when communicating with his commanding officer in Where Eagles Dare.

"Broadsword to Danny Boy" he texted, adding: "Pizzas delivered. The chicken is in the pot."

His boss texted back: "Amateurs! We should have done a DLB or a brush contact on the riverside. Log the hours as pizza delivery." Edis explained that a DLB is a dead letter box of the kind used by spies and that what the text as a whole meant was: "You have done the secret little job. We could have done that better. Log in the hours as pizza delivery because you can't log in the hours as perverting the course of justice."

"The whole exercise," said Edis, "was quite complicated and quite risky and liable to go wrong." On the following morning, the prosecutor told the jury, it had indeed gone wrong: when the chauffeur drove the Brookses to see their solicitor, leaving the bin bag still behind the waste bin.

In their absence, a cleaner, Mr Nascimento, had noticed the bag and its contents and taken it to his manager. When the Brookses returned, CCTV records showed, Charlie Brooks had searched the area around the waste bin and texted the security man who had left the bin bag there: "Need to get Rebekah some lunch. Pizza."

But by then, said Edis, Nascimento's manager had decided to call the police "which is how the police ended up with the bin bag".

Separately, the jury heard that in the previous week, on Friday 8 July, the day after the closure of the News of the World was announced, Rebekah Brooks and her personal assistant, Cheryl Carter, had arranged to remove from the company archive seven boxes allegedly containing all the notebooks Brooks had used from 1995 to 2007. Carter had falsely told the archivist that they were her own notebooks, Edis said, and then falsely told police that Brooks had not been in the office on this day. "It was quite dishonest," the prosecutor said. The notebooks had never been found.

Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, Cheryl Carter and Mark Hanna all deny conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Andy Coulson told news editor to 'do Calum Best's phone', court hears

Prosecution says former editor of News of the World demanded that his journalists illegally target celebrities

Andy Coulson sanctioned hacking the phones of royal advisers to Prince Harry, demanded that his journalists illegally target celebrities, and authorised payments to sources he believed were police officers, the prosecution said as the trial of the former editor of the News of the World and seven others entered its third day.

Prosecuting counsel, Andrew Edis QC, added that Coulson had been warned he could face criminal charges for paying police to leak information, that he was directly involved in discussing special payments for the hacking of phone messages, and that in one instance ordered his news editor by email to verify a tip about TV celebrity Calum Best with the instruction: "Do his phone."

The crown argued that the former tabloid editor was part of a phone-hacking strategy at the now closed Sunday tabloid which was "a totally rational but entirely illegal system". Edis said phone hacking was well known to those working for the paper: "There aren't any secrets. Why would there be? They are all working as a team – and he's the boss."

Andy Coulson edited the News of the World from 2003 to 2007. After his departure from the newspaper, he became David Cameron's director of communications, eventually working in No 10. On Thursday, the jury in the high-profile trial also heard that he had had a six-year affair with Rebekah Brooks, his predecessor as editor of the News of the World, who is on trial with him.

According to Edis, Coulson's former royal editor, Clive Goodman, had recently given police access to a file of old emails which, it is claimed, show that Goodman's hacking of royal phones was "officially sanctioned" by senior managers including Coulson. The file included the transcript of a message left by Prince Harry, calling from Sandhurst military academy to ask his private secretary to help him write an essay.

Coulson denies charges of conspiring to intercept voicemail messages and to commit misconduct in public office. Goodman, who has been charged with conspiring to commit misconduct in public office, also denies the charge.

Continuing the crown's opening statement at the Old Bailey, Edis showed the jury emails that were allegedly exchanged when Goodman asked Coulson to approve payments to Palace police officers.

On 24 January 2003, Goodman wrote to complain that he had been having "a heck of a time" getting cash payments authorised for a "royal policeman" at St James's Palace who was offering to sell a directory of royal phone numbers: "These people will not be paid in anything other than cash because if they are discovered selling stuff to us, they will end up on criminal charges, as could we."

Three minutes later, Coulson replied: "This is fine." He queried whether they had not already recently bought the directory. Goodman explained: "This is the harder-to-get one which has the Queen's direct lines to her family in it."

The jury was told that Goodman had then produced what he himself described as "a deliberately cryptic credit payment form" which led to £1,000 in cash being paid to a source who was recorded internally under the false name David Farrish and who has not been identified.

Two years later, on 14 May 2005, Goodman wrote again to Coulson asking him to authorise payment of £1,000 "to one of our Palace cops" for a new version of the same royal phone book. Goodman explained: "It is a very risky document for him to nick ... It's one of our normal cash contribution-only players."

Edis told the jury that it was clear "he is paying a policeman to commit a crime". Internal accounts showed that £1,000 in cash was then paid under the heading "confidential research assistance" to a source recorded internally under the false name "Anderson", whose real name has not been found. The jury were told that the emails presented "the clearest possible evidence of conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office" and also that they were evidence in relation to phone hacking. Edis showed the jury handwritten notes kept by the News of the World's specialist hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, which suggested that he had used numbers from royal phone directories to listen to voicemail left for members of the royal household, including Sir Michael Peat, private secretary to the Prince of Wales.

Edis told the court that Goodman had asked for special payments to be made to Mulcaire for hacking the royal household and that Coulson in December 2005 had agreed to pay the hacker a weekly retainer of £500 in addition to his existing contract. However, at the end of January 2006, under pressure to cut spending, Coulson had changed his mind. On 3 February, Goodman emailed his editor, pleading to preserve "Matey's weekly payment".

Goodman said the arrangement had produced a list of stories, adding: "A few weeks ago you asked me to find new ways of getting into the family especially William and Harry. I came up with this. It is safe, productive and cost-effective. I'm confident it will become a big story-goldmine if we let it run just a little longer."

Coulson had replied with a single line: "I'm sorry it has to go." Edis told the jury it was significant that the editor had not had to ask for any explanation about Goodman's source. It was, he said, "absolutely clear that Mr Coulson knows what he is talking about." Separately, Edis showed the jury timelines constructed from internal emails and Mulcaire's notes, detailing the hacking of targets including the former Labour minister Charles Clarke, Sir Paul McCartney, the ex-MP Mark Oaten, and Kerry Katona.

In the case of George Best's son Calum, the news editor, Ian Edmondson, emailed Coulson about fears that there might be a leak from inside the newspaper which would allow Calum Best to find out about the story they were planning. Coulson replied: "Do his phone."

Prosecutors disclosed for the first time that Clive Goodman had handed them a file of internal emails which he had downloaded from the News of the World's system following his arrest for phone hacking in August 2006 in an attempt to gather evidence that his own hacking had been "officially sanctioned".

One email included the transcript of a long voice message left by Prince Harry on the phone of his private secretary, Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, pleading for help with an essay he had to write about the Iranian embassy siege.

Goodman then drafted a story which he sent to Coulson, making no reference to the hacked voicemail but saying: "As we know, it's 100% fact."

The jury was told that, as editor of the Sun, Rebekah Brooks had exchanged emails with a reporter in which she allegedly agreed to pay £4,000 to a serving member of the armed forces for a photograph of Prince William wearing a bikini and a Hawaiian shirt. She had also used email to authorise a total of £40,000 of payments to a senior Ministry of Defence official.

Brooks denies charges of hacking, conspiring to make corrupt payments to public officials, and concealing evidence.

The trial continues on Monday.

Nick Davies
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Brooks and Coulson's 'six-year affair' revealed at phone-hacking trial

Prosecution says it is revealing relationship to show extent of secrecy and trust

The prosecution in the phone-hacking trial lobbed an emotional bombshell into the case by stating that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson had a secret extra-marital affair between 1998 and 2004, whose existence had been revealed in a highly charged note that the crown argued implied an intense bond between the two.

Andrew Edis QC told the Old Bailey jury that the clandestine relationship had come to light when police found a computer in a cupboard at Brooks's London flat on the day of her arrest in July 2011, containing a letter, written by Brooks to Coulson in February 2004, indicating that they had been having an affair for at least six years.

The letter, said Edis, was "elegant, intelligent and well-written" and evidently composed in reply to an attempt by Coulson to end the relationship by introducing new rules to limit their contact, something which had caused her "a great deal of grief".

Brooks and Coulson sat side by side in the dock, staring without expression into the well of the court as Edis read the jury a section of the letter in which Brooks wrote: "The fact is that you are my very best friend. I tell you everything, I confide in you, I seek your advice, I love you, care about you, worry about you. We laugh and cry together … In fact, without our relationship in my life, I am really not sure how I will cope.

"I'm frightened to be without you but, bearing in mind 'the rules', you will not know how I am doing, and visa versa [sic] … Obviously I can't discuss my worries, concerns, problems at work with you any more."

Edis said that the jury needed to know about the clandestine relationship because the two former editors face charges of conspiracy to hack phones. "The first question, therefore, is how well did they know each other? How much did they trust each other? The fact that they were in this relationship, which was a secret, means that they trusted each other quite a lot with at least that secret. That's why we are telling you about it," the prosecuting QC said.

At that time, Coulson had been married to his wife Eloise Patrick since 2000, and Brooks had been married to the TV actor Ross Kemp since 2002. Brooks was editor of the Sun, and Coulson was editor of the News of the World; previously Coulson had been her deputy at the News of the World, when she edited the Sunday tabloid between 2000 and 2003.

The affair between the two former editors was disclosed on the day that the court heard detailed allegations that Brooks and Coulson had used illegally hacked voicemail messages to expose the extra-marital affairs of Labour ministers John Prescott and David Blunkett and of the trade union leader Andy Gilchrist. The jury was shown a leader column published by the Sun under Brooks's editorship which described Gilchrist as "a lying, cheating, low-life fornicator".

The whole day's proceedings focused on just one of the seven counts on the indictment which alleges that Brooks, Coulson, Stuart Kuttner, the newspaper's former managing editor, and Ian Edmondson, the former news editor, conspired to intercept voicemail messages. All four deny the charges.

The prosecution had disclosed the affair in the context of the hacking of the phone of Milly Dowler, the 13-year-old Surrey schoolgirl who went missing on 21 March 2002. The jury was told on Wednesday that the News of the World's specialist hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, has pleaded guilty to intercepting her voicemail.

Edis argued that, although Rebekah Brooks had been on holiday in Dubai during the key week of the Dowler story in April 2002, the nature of her relationship with her deputy, Coulson, was among a number of factors which made it "simply incredible" that she had not been aware of the hacking of Milly's phone.

He said notes kept by Mulcaire showed that he had been tasked to target Milly on 10 April by the former news editor Neville Thurlbeck, who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hack phones. Mulcaire had found a message from a recruitment agency, which appeared to invite the missing girl to go for a job interview at a factory in Telford, West Midlands.

In fact, the jury heard, the message had been intended for somebody else with a similar name and similar phone number. Believing they might find Milly alive before the police, the News of the World on 12 April had sent a team of reporters and photographers to the factory. When the visit yielded no sign of the missing girl, Edis said, Thurlbeck and the managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, had both attempted to persuade Surrey police to co-operate on a story and had told police explicitly that they were in possession of voicemail.

The News of the World then published a story on 14 April that quoted verbatim the message from the recruitment agency, though that had been removed from later editions. One of the reporters who was sent to the Telford factory had claimed his expenses for petrol under the heading "Milly Dowler answer phone messages".

"This phone hacking does not seem to have been much of a secret," Edis told the jury. "Was it only the editor who didn't know it had happened?" He said that from Dubai, Brooks had stayed in regular contact by text and phone with Coulson. "It is highly likely that if they were talking about work, they were exchanging confidences and discussing difficulties. The point of that letter is that what Mr Coulson, who was on deck as editor that week, knew, Mrs Brooks knew too."

The jury were also played a tape-recording made by David Blunkett in August 2004 when, as home secretary, he was visited in his office by Coulson who tried to persuade him to confirm that he had been having an affair with a married woman, Kimberly Quinn. Coulson argued that the fact that she was married meant that any newspaper would want to publish the story.

Coulson told Blunkett: "I'm extremely confident about the information." He refused to say how he knew. Edis said Mulcaire's notes and audiotapes that had been found in a News International safe showed Coulson's source in fact was the hacking of messages left by Blunkett.

The jury heard that in their efforts to expose Prescott's extra-marital affair, the News of the World had offered Lord Prescott's lover Tracey Temple £100,000 for her story, hacked the phone of Prescott's special adviser Joan Hammell, and also hacked the phones of two rival journalists, Dennis Rice and Sebastian Hamilton from the Mail on Sunday, in an attempt to steal their story.

Brooks, Coulson and Clive Goodman also deny conspiring to pay money to corrupt public officials. Brooks together with her husband, Charlie Brooks, her PA, Cheryl Carter, and her head of security, Mark Hanna, deny destroying or concealing evidence. The trial continues.

Nick Davies
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Four admit to phone-hacking plots in Coulson and Brooks eras

News of the World editors 'must have known' of crimes, says prosecution as trial opens

Three former news editors from the News of the World have pleaded guilty to conspiracy to hack mobile phones during a six-year period when Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson were editing the Sunday title, it was disclosed in court.

The two high-flying tabloid journalists were accused of knowing about voicemail interception at the newspaper, of plotting to pay money to corrupt public officials – and, in the case of Brooks, participating in "a cover-up" when concerns about hacking became public in 2011.

Opening the Old Bailey trial of Brooks, Coulson and six others, crown counsel Andrew Edis QC said the guilty pleas meant that the original claim made by the tabloid's publisher, News International, that the hacking was the work of just one reporter, Clive Goodman, was demonstrably incorrect.

The three former News of the World news editors who had pleaded guilty to the interception of voicemails were Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup.

Edis told the jury that the paper's specialist hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, had separately admitted intercepting the messages of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

"There is no doubt that initially News International was keen to say that phone hacking in the News of the World was really limited to Mr Goodman but this inquiry has proved conclusively that that is not true," Edis told the jury in his opening statement at the start of a high-profile trial that is expected to last up to six months.

Among the victims of phone hacking, Edis said, were Lord Frederick Windsor, 13 of whose voicemail messages were found on recordings in Mulcaire's office, Sir Paul McCartney, Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Will Young, Lord Prescott and David Blunkett.

The prosecuting counsel said that the management of the paper, including Brooks and Coulson, "must have known" about the hacking.

He told the jury that Brooks and Coulson had been part of the conspiracy to hack phones between October 2000 and August 2006. Brooks edited the News of the World between May 2000 and January 2003, before moving on to edit the Sun. Coulson, her deputy, was then editor until January 2006.

Brooks and Coulson deny all the charges.

The prosecutor said that the jurors must ask "whether these people were doing their jobs properly, in which case we say that they must have known what they were spending their money on, they must have known where some of these stories came from.

"Either they were doing their jobs properly, or at least three – and we say four – of the news editors were running this operation with Glenn Mulcaire – a great deal of phone hacking – and the management never even noticed."

Mulcaire, the prosecutor said, "was very good at hacking people's phones - obviously a very useful talent if you are a newspaper wanting to publish things about people that they would like to keep private".

Hacking happened under both Brooks and Coulson, Edis told the jury. "There was phone hacking done for the benefit of the News of the World and at its expense. It started when Mrs Brooks was the editor and continued after Mr Coulson took over."

He added: "You will have to decide whether this could happen without the editor knowing."

Edis said: "The News of the World was a Sunday newspaper. That means it published once a week, at most 52 times a year. It wasn't War and Peace. It wasn't an enormous document. It was the sort of publication if you were its editor you could take an interest in its contents without too much trouble."

The News of the World's former managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, and former news editor, Ian Edmondson, also deny conspiracy to hack phones.

Setting out the broad themes of the indictment, Edis went on to say that Brooks and Coulson had also conspired to pay money to corrupt public officials during more than a decade of alleged criminality at the News of the World and the Sun.

Brooks, he said, had personally authorised payments of £40,000 to a senior official from the Ministry of Defence. Coulson, he told the jury, had written emails agreeing to pay a Palace police officer for royal telephone directories that could be used to assist hacking.

These were not whistleblowers, Edis said. "There may be a degree of integrity in that kind of behaviour. We are talking about people who sold stories about people's private lives."

As editor of the Sun, according to the prosecution, Rebekah Brooks had authorised payments to a member of the armed forces and his spouse and to a senior Ministry of Defence official who had been paid a total of £40,000 for stories.

The official had been vetted to see secret material and was particularly trusted, he said, "but over a long period of time she sold an awful lot of information for an awful lot of money".

Coulson, he told the jury, as editor of the News of the World, had twice exchanged emails with Clive Goodman, the paper's former royal editor, agreeing to pay an unidentified Palace police officer for royal telephone directories. Fifteen such directories had been found in Goodman's home, including two that matched the timeframe of the email exchanges. Goodman denies conspiring with Coulson to pay the Palace police officer.

The trial, which is scheduled to last until next April, is the result of three police operations that have been working for a total of 33 months. On Tuesday, the judge, Mr Justice Saunders, told the jury that it was not only the defendants but also British justice that was going on trial.

On Wednesday, Edis also suggested that the police and press had questions to answer. He said police had first investigated the hacking in 2006, securing the convictions of Mulcaire and Goodman, but he added: "That inquiry turned out to be quite restricted. This inquiry has revealed a lot more than that one."

Edis told the jury that Brooks and others were accused of plotting to pervert the course of justice – "a cover-up", as he put it. Brooks and her former personal assistant Cheryl Carter had removed seven boxes of Brooks' journalistic notebooks from the News International archive, Edis said. They had done this in July 2011 in the aftermath of the Milly Dowler story.

"It was quite obvious to everybody that this was not going away, that the police were going to find out how much phone hacking had been going on," Edis said.

The notebooks had never been found. "We will never know what they contained because they have gone. That is a classic perversion of the course of justice."

That same month, he said, Brooks, her husband and her head of security had conspired to remove computers and other records from the Brooks' two homes to prevent police finding them.

This had been "a complicated little operation" which had been discovered by police "as a result of an accident that was rather bad luck for those involved".

Brooks also denies perverting the course of justice by destroying notebooks and concealing computers from the police inquiry. Her husband, Charlie Brooks, Carter and her head of security, Mark Hanna, deny assisting her to destroy or conceal evidence.

Edis confronted the link between crime and journalism: "This prosecution is not an attack on the freedom of the press or the process of journalism. The prosecution accepts that it's important in a free country that there is a free press, but the prosecution says that journalists are no more entitled to break the law than anybody else. The criminal law applies to all of us equally."

The crown is due to continue its opening on Thursday.

Nick Davies
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Phone-hacking jury warned of prejudice risk in trial of Brooks and Coulson

British justice also on trial, says judge as he tells jurors to ignore comments they may come across in all media

The jury in the News of the World phone-hacking trial has been told that British justice is on trial in addition to Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and their co-defendants.

Mr Justice Saunders told the jury of nine women and three men at the Old Bailey in London that the case had attracted "perhaps an unprecedented amount of publicity" across all media, and that some content, particularly on the internet, was inaccurate, offensive, demeaning and ill-informed.

Saunders said some of the eight defendants were well known public figures and some had been written about on social media, but he directed the jurors to ignore comments they may come across during the trial, which is expected to last up to six months. The prosecution is expected to open its case at 2pm on Wednesday.

He drew particular attention to the latest issue of Private Eye published on Tuesday. Shortly after being sworn in, the jury was shown the magazine. "It bears a picture of Rebekah Brooks on the cover. It's meant to be satire. You ignore it," Saunders said. "It has no serious input and it's not relevant to your consideration. It's one of those things which you will have to ignore – a joke, that in the circumstances of today is a joke in especially bad taste."

The cover was referred to the attorney general Dominic Grieve. His spokesman said: "The front cover of the current edition of Private Eye has been brought to the attention of the attorney general, but it has been decided that proceedings for a potential contempt of court are not required in this case."

Saunders stressed that his directions to the jury were extremely important because they raised a concern about what jurors would read on the internet, which was outside the British judicial system. "In a way, it is not only the defendants who are on trial but British justice is on trial," he said.

He directed the jury not to discuss the case with others, not to look up back editions of newspapers, not to look up anything on the internet and not to look up anything at all to do with the case, those involved and the witnesses. "It is absolutely vital that you try this case solely on the evidence and arguments that you hear in court. There has been a great deal of publicity, perhaps an unprecedented amount which amongst other things concerns phone hacking at the News of the World," Saunders said.

"A significant amount of speculation has been inaccurate and misleading," he told the jury. "As you will appreciate, the role of juror is vital, it is essential – essential – that you put all that material that you may have become aware of before the trial out of your mind."

He warned jurors about blogs by "well known actors, musicians, politicians and others", saying they were "on topics about which they know very little". Saunders said: "It is very much hoped that they will not do so [blog] the trial and they may well be breaking the law if they do so and I hope appropriate [action] will be taken against them if they do [blog]."

He said jurors who breached his directions could face a contempt of court action and be punished by a fine or imprisonment. Trials in the past have sometimes have had to be abandoned because jurors disobeyed the judge's directions, he added.

Saunders said he was not going to order the jurors "not to go on to Facebook or any social media for the duration of the trial" but "I urge you to consider whether you ought to" and said they should avoid reading comment on the trial.

Brooks, the former News International chief executive, and Coulson, the former Downing Street communications director, are former News of the World editors and the most well known figures in the trial.

They are facing a variety of charges including conspiracy to listen to mobile phone voicemails of politicians, celebrities and others, conspiring to commit misconduct in public office and authorising payments to public officials, a charge also faced by the paper's former royal correspondent Clive Goodman.

Brooks faces a charge of conspiring to pervert the course of justice with her husband, Charlie, an allegation also faced by her former personal assistant, Cheryl Carter, and News International's head of security, Mark Hanna.

Stuart Kuttner, former managing editor of the News of the World, and Ian Edmondson, the paper's former head of news, are accused of being involved in the alleged phone hacking conspiracy.

All eight have pleaded not guilty to all charges.

The jury heard that Kuttner would not be required to attend the trial every day because he had "a history of heart attacks" and "a brain stem stroke".

Lisa O'CarrollCaroline DaviesNick Davies
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Who should judge whether Snowden's leaked secrets are too sensitive to report? | Nick davies

The Guardian's critics say journalists cannot be trusted to judge what may damage national security. But the press's track record shows it to be more trustworthy than politicians or spooks

In the last few days, two national newspapers – the Times and the Mail – have suggested that the Guardian has been wrong to publish material leaked by Edward Snowden on the specific grounds that journalists cannot be trusted to judge what may damage national security.

Ignore for a moment the vexing sight of journalists denouncing their own worth. Set aside too the question of why rival newspapers might want to attack the Guardian's exclusives. Follow the argument. Who should make the judgment?

The official answer is that we should trust the security agencies themselves. Over the past 35 years, I've worked with a clutch of whistleblowers from those agencies, and they've all shared one underlying theme – that behind the screen of official secrecy, they had seen rules being bent and/or broken in a way which precisely suggested that the agencies should not be trusted. Cathy Massiter and Robin Robison, for example, described respectively MI5 and GCHQ pursuing politically motivated projects to spy on peace activists and trade unionists. Peter Wright told of MI5 illegally burgling its way across London "while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way". David Shayler exposed a plot both lawless and reckless by MI5 and MI6 to recruit al-Qaida supporters to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi.

All of this was known to their bosses. None of it should have been happening. But the agencies in whom we are invited to place our trust not only concealed it but without exception then attacked the whistleblowers who revealed it.

Would we do better to trust the politicians who have oversight of the agencies? It's instructive to look back from our vantage point, post-Snowden, to consider what was happening only two years ago when the government attempted to introduce new legislation which came to be known as the snooper's charter. If the oversight politicians are as well-informed as they claim, they must have known that this was in part a cynical attempt to create retrospective legal cover for surveillance tools that were already secretly being used, but they said nothing. And when parliament refused to pass that law, clearly indicating that there was no democratic mandate for those tools, they still stayed silent.

Politicians fall easy victim to a political Stockholm syndrome which sees them abandon their role as representatives of the people in favour of becoming spokesmen for the spooks. It was there in the 1970s when the New Statesman bravely exposed security lapses and financial corruption in GCHQ, only to face a prosecution orchestrated by a Labour attorney general; there again with Jack Straw describing in his autobiography how MI5 had spied on him and his family since he was 15 but declaring that he was "neither surprised nor shocked – this was the world we lived in"; and there again, of course, in the foreign secretary William Hague's bland presumption that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" from the systems of mass surveillance exposed by Snowden.

So what about journalists? I suggest our track record is better. In a film muddied by fictional detail, the new Spielberg production Fifth Estate's portrayal of the Guardian's work with Wikileaks is accurate in describing the running dispute between journalists who wanted to redact documents to make them safe and Julian Assange who wanted no such restraint. We ran dozens of stories, based on the biggest ever leak of military and intelligence material. We caused plenty of political embarrassment but we did so without jeopardising anybody's safety or damaging any nation's security.

I spent most of June with a handful of colleagues in a secure and airless room in the Guardian combing through GCHQ documents provided by Snowden. We did so knowing that the pressure to avoid damaging national security was not only moral but political, that the security agencies and their political friends were poised to attack our work with their standard smear – that we were aiding the enemy. So we were careful. Repeatedly, we disclosed the outline but held back the detail. We had specialist reporters to advise us, and they in turn took advice from specialist outsiders. We talked to the government and invited it to show us if we were in danger of causing harm: it puffed and protested but failed (as they continue to fail) to come up with a single example of our making a dangerous disclosure. Its greatest angst was reserved for the possibility that we might name the phone companies that have allowed GCHQ to tap into the transatlantic telecoms cables – nothing to do with damaging national security, everything to do with protecting the companies from accountability to their customers.

And reading those documents, I was struck by two things. First, that GCHQ is much cleaner than it used to be, that it has now adopted internal procedures which are designed to ensure it complies with the law – and that surely can be seen, at least in part, as the achievement of those earlier whistleblowers. Second, that there is still ample reason to worry. Critics of the Guardian's Snowden stories insist that the power of GCHQ is used only to deal with terrorism and serious crime, but the signs of mission creep are there. As a single example: is migration from sub-Saharan Africa a serious crime? The Snowden material shows it has been targeted by GCHQ. Perhaps that is to be defended as essential for the UK's economy. Perhaps it is another example of a politically motivated project.

Which brings me back to the Daily Mail and a cautionary tale from the experience of the former MI5 officer Massiter. When first she tried to sound the alarm internally about the service's targeting, for example, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, her bosses told her (with a gentle combination of sexism and Stalinism) that she was just being emotional and needed to see MI5's approved psychiatrist, which she did. When later she blew the whistle, MI5 used a compliant Tory MP as messenger to carry the wretched smear that she'd been treated for mental illness. You'll guess which newspaper put that on its front page.

Edward SnowdenThe GuardianSurveillanceEspionageWikiLeaksDaily MailNewspapers & magazinesNick Davies
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