Did The Sun break in to stars’ homes or was the newsdesk duped?
BY RICHARD DISMORE
What are we to make of actor Hugh Grant’s High Court claim that The Sun ordered investigators to burgle his flat to obtain private information and plant bugs inside?
The Love Actually star says he and other celebrities – including Madonna, Spice Girl Geri Halliwell and model Kate Moss – were victims of organised break-ins, landline tapping and mobile phone hacking.
News Group Newspapers, parent company of The Sun, refutes the claims, which were revealed late last week in a court statement by Grant.
I find it hard to believe that Editors and newsdesks, though hardly saintly, were behaving criminally in the pursuit of news. Were they duped, though? That’s another matter.
It may be that the private investigators were selling the stories through Press agents, such as the disgraced Max Clifford, and newspapers were disingenuously failing to ask how they were obtained.
Or perhaps there were rogue freelancers out there, off the books, working with the investigators, whom executives knew nothing about.
Fleet Street has always attracted more than its fair share of shady characters. Bullies, thieves, liars, thugs and legions of charlatans came, and sometimes went.
For me, they include those ruthless reporters who plunder mantelpieces from Bournemouth to Banff. Pity the widow who invites them inside: no lovingly-framed portrait of the crime or accident victim is safe.
If they manage to get there first, these men – always men – have two abiding principles. One is “scorched earth” (no snapshot knowingly left behind). The other is “poison the well” (convince the poor soul that any reporter who follows, especially from the Daily Mail, is not to be trusted).
But they are just junior school rascals compared with the investigators who, Grant alleges, committed their skulduggery against him and his then girlfriend Liz Hurley.
Grant’s claims might seem fantastical to some but, if they are true, they are part of a shameful tradition that began early in the last century in Chicago, a city that once had nine daily newspapers.
By chance, the latest flurry of developments in the phone hacking saga comes as I am reading a book on Ben Hecht, a journalist, playwright, novelist and Hollywood screenwriter.
Hecht, who joined the Chicago Daily Journal in 1910, aged 17, first found fame as the writer, with Charles MacArthur, of the 1928 Broadway play The Front Page.
It was a black comedy about a Machiavellian editor, Walter Burns, and his attempts to hold on to ace reporter, Hildy Johnson, who is trying to go straight by quitting journalism and getting married.
Billy Wilder brilliantly turned it into a film in 1974 with unforgettable turns from Walter Matthau as Burns and Jack Lemmon as Johnson (catchphrase: “Cigarette me!”).
The early part of the book, by Julien Gorbach, deals with what Gorbach calls “the dark chapter in journalism” that began when William Randolph Hearst, the New York media magnate, turned his attention to Chicago.
In 1900, after launching the Chicago American, he hired a bruiser called Max Annenberg to persuade newsboys to dump bundles of rival newspapers by roughing them up.
But The Tribune and the Daily News hit back and what started as a punch-up with bricks and knives escalated to shooting sprees that “claimed the lives of newsboys and residents alike,” Gorbach reports.
Hecht’s first newspaper job was as a “picture chaser”. His aunt sewed large pockets into his jacket to conceal burglary tools and he claimed to have “clambered up fire escapes and crawled through windows” to reach the loot. If challenged, he posed as everything from a gasman to an undertaker’s assistant.
Back then, newspapers employed telephone reporters, the greatest of whom was a wonderful mimic called Harry Romanoff, of the Herald and Examiner. He once called a bar which had become a murder scene.
When the phone was picked up, he said: “Hello, this is Sergeant Donohue of the coroner’s office.”
“That’s funny,” said a voice at the other end. “So is this.”
An editor staged a crash between two news vans in front of a police station. Officers rushed out to deal with it – and journalists sneaked in “to steal the diary of alluring murderess Ruth Randall out of the evidence room.”
One agency reporter got a caretaker at the courthouse to put a plank in the ceiling space above a room where a grand jury was sitting in an infamous murder case. The Press were barred, so the reporter drilled a hole in the ceiling and settled down on the plank with a stethoscope to listen in. It baffled court officials for days.
In another case, a friend of Hecht’s hung upside down from the eaves of the courthouse roof, 50ft up, to peer through the windows of the jury room.
One journalist, Vincent Starrett, even owned up to planting false evidence.
“If it occurred to us that a janitor’s missing mother-in-law might have been lured into the janitor’s furnace, and the clues did not fit that attractive hypothesis,” he wrote in a memoir, “we helped the story to headlines by discovering incinerated bones that somehow the police had missed.”
Another reporter, Sam Blair of the Herald and Examiner, summed it up like this: “The things we do for our papers! We lie, we cheat, we swindle and steal. We break into houses. We almost commit murder for a story. We’re a bunch of lice.”
No doubt, some of these tales are legend or folklore, at best. But they also demonstrate that maybe Grant’s allegations might not be as incredible as they first sound.
*The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist, by Julien Gorbach, published by Purdue University Press, available on Kindle for £22.45
*****
Poor Harry. Not only is he Spare (and so far, surplus to requirements) but it seems he is the only one in the Family not to take a nice wedge from News Group Newspapers (NGN) over hacking claims.
The Duke of Sussex, 38, blames his misfortune on the dismissal in 2017 of the late Queen’s private secretary, Sir Christopher Geidt, whose successor failed to support his case.
He told the High Court in a witness statement that he had delayed bringing the case because of a secret deal in 2012 between the Queen and other senior Royals and NGN.
He says his brother, William, Prince of Wales, accepted “a very large sum” in 2020 to settle his claim against the Murdoch publishers.
Spare some change, Rupert?
*****
Moments after my piece on Fox News was put on the Daily Drone last week, its star presenter Tucker Carlson was fired on the express orders of Rupert Murdoch himself.
OMG! I considered filing an update but then I imagined the scene at Drone HQ. The CSE, who was WFH, would groan FFS, then decide CBA and reach for the VSOP.
It’ll keep, I thought. LOL.
PS: Turns out Carlson was in fact an Ivy League liberal with PC views and not the rabid Right-wing SOB he posed as. WTF, Tuck!
*****
Intro of the week: In a Comment piece in The Times yesterday, by Patrick Maguire.
“Sir Keir Starmer gave a fascinating interview to The Economist a few days ago. No, wait, come back!”
2 May 2023
