A judge has ruled against an application by Alan Yentob for Mirror Group Newspapers to search internal emails for terms including “Ying Tong Iddle”, from a nonsense Spike Milligan song.
Yentob, the BBC’s creative director who was awarded £85,000 for the “intensive hacking” of his voicemail by Mirror journalists as far back as 1999, wanted emails searched using the words “Ying” “Tong and “Iddle” as well as “Botney”, his name spelled backwards.
He has said he felt violated on a “truly massive scale” by the hacking. The song from the Goon Show was allegedly sung by journalists when they hacked his voicemail.
A lawyer for Yentob, who is not believed to have been the subject of any stories written as a result of the phone hacking, said his client would benefit psychologically from the information he sought.
Yentob was present at the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the hearing.
Last month Mr Justice Mann awarded damages totalling £1.2m to eight people whose phones were hacked by Mirror Group journalists writing celebrity stories.
The scale of the award reflected invasions of privacy being “so serious and so prolonged”, he said.
The actor Sadie Frost was awarded £260,250 while the former footballer Paul Gascoigne was awarded £188,250. MGM is set to launch an appeal against the payouts on Wednesday afternoon.
Before the application, Jeremy Reed, who is representing all the claimants, asked for further disclosure in relation to Yentob. He argued that such disclosure was “reasonable and proportionate”.
The barrister told the court that Yentob had searched but had not found any stories about himself. He would, however, be surprised if some had not been written as a result of hacking.
Reed said the additional information would be “psychologically useful” to his client. “There is a difference between simply knowing that your phone has been hacked … and then the next stage, seeing particular journalists doing it, and then the next stage is even more – to know what those journalists were doing with it.”
He said his client wanted to know if there were “more nasties lurking in MGN’s system”.
Lord Pannick QC, for MGN, said the request was disproportionate, “speculative in the extreme” and would cost £25,000. It was unlikely to yield information useful to Yentob, he said.
The judge said he had considered whether the request for relief was proportionate and practical, and concluded that it was not.
He said: “The question is what legitimate objective would such disclosure achieve? It simply does not come within any reasonable distance at all of achieving what would be a reasonable objective to a post-trial disclosure exercise. Finding another dozen documents would not put Mr Yentob in any better practical or psychological position than he is now.”
He noted that previous disclosure of documents by MGM in relation to key journalists and their emails yielded only two emails.
MGN previously admitted misuse of private information in respect of all eight but contested the size of the awards.
MGN will formally ask for permission to appeal later, as well as a stay on damages payments until any such appeal is resolved.
The hearing continues.
