The picture editor at the Sun has told a jury that the paper paid a record £100,000 plus for pictures of Cheryl Fernandez-Versini in a car crash, a jury has been told.
John Edwards, who has been on the paper for 22 years, said the most he had ever paid for a set of pictures was between £75,000 and £80,000.
Charged with conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office, Edwards was giving evidence for the first time in the case in Kingston Crown Court where six former and current Sun staff are on trial. All six have denied all charges.
Edwards told the jury that during his tenure as picture editor, his budget has been as high as £4m a year and as low as £2.9m.
He said there was huge interest in show-business pictures and the paper had gone all out for the pictures of X Factor star Fernandez-Versini in a car accident with Will.i.Am in Los Angeles in August 2012.
“There was a recent incident with Cheryl Cole [Fernandez-Versini], a set of pictures [of her] in a car crash in Los Angeles, and they went for over £100,000,” he said.
Edwards also told jurors he has never heard of either of the two public officials he has been accused of conspiring with to commit a crime.
He has been charged with conspiring with police officer Simon Quinn and Robert Neave, a health worker at Broadmoor, to commit misconduct in public office.
He told jurors that he didn’t know who they were before the case and had never been offered pictures by them in his 22 years on the Sun.
“Were you ever offered any picture during the course of your job ever by a police officer?” asked his counsel, Sacha Wass QC.
“No.”
“Or a nurse from Broadmoor?”
“No”
“Had you ever met Simon Quinn?”
“No.”
“Had you ever met Robert Neave?”
“No”
“Had you ever heard their names?”
“No, not until these proceedings,” said Edwards.
He told jurors he was unwilling to pay cash to anyone because of the risk that photos were not cleared for copyright ownership. Readers often phoned in with photos that didn’t belong to them. He recalled instances of photos being retrieved from skips or from other people’s homes after house moves.
Son of the Sun’s veteran royal photographer Arthur Edwards, he said he never really wanted to get into the business and had started his career in a travel agency.
His brother, who was working on the now-defunct Today paper, got him a job on the paper for £50 a day in the 1980s. “It was quite a significant pay rise,” he said.
He joined the Sun in 1992 as number five on the picture desk and soon found himself as the picture editor, another job he told jurors he didn’t really want.
He said the pressure of the job intensified as a result of the promotion. “There were constantly calls on mobile. It just went crazy, It just completely changed my life.”
He said he received no training at any point at the Sun, apart from learning the systems at the picture desk.
Earlier, the trial heard from witnesses for Ben O’Driscoll, the paper’s former deputy news editor who now works at the Daily Mail.
His father Joe testified that he was the tipster behind a story “Maniac stabs two nurses in hospital”, which another reporter had hinted had come from a police contact.
Joe O’Driscoll runs a fishmongers in Windsor and, in a written statement, said a customer had told him about the incident at Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot.
The evidence comes a day after discussion of an email exchange involving O’Driscoll and reporter Jamie Pyatt who had made a request for “£350 to give my police guy”. O’Driscoll had sent Pyatt an email “joking” that he should put “£500 in the fish shop and £100 behind the bar at the Brewers”, a reference to a pub in Windsor.
The trial continues.
