Once you start playing the numbers game, those numbers have to add up. The Mirror Group, enmeshed in the baleful aftermath of phone-hacking, admits that dozens of its stories (between June 2000 and October 2006) arrived via hacking: 49 in the Sunday Mirror, 40 in the Daily Mirror and 23 in the People. Meanwhile David Sherborne, counsel for eight mainly showbiz claimants seeking compensation, cites 10,000 hacking calls to Orange’s voicemail platform, with one reporter hacking 100 celebrities every day through 2003 and half of 2004. Alan Yentob, creative director of the BBC, was a victim many thousand times over, it’s asserted. Sherborne resurrects “the proverbial tip of the iceberg” in this “Aladdin’s cave”.
And no one, least of all the three Mirrors, would deny the humiliation of past misdeeds uncovered or the cost of settlement. But I took a routine edition of the daily last week and counted the number of news or gossip stories: a total of 63 – which, by happenstance, is supposedly the total number of admitted hack tales printed in the Daily Mirror and People over six years.
“Why on earth would [reporters] have kept using this method unless it was hugely productive in all sorts of ways?” asks Sherborne. “Not least because it was valuable in producing stories. It makes no sense.” Obviously, he concludes, responsibility must reach upwards, far beyond junior desks. A conspiracy, not an “entertainment”.
All of which, naturally and rightly, is for the judge to decide. Young reporters churning, sniggering and hacking for years on end, doing verylittle else on their shifts? A haul of tales so seemingly paltry that one edition of the Mirror could swallow the lot? Something’s out of sync here; something so time-wasting and trivial, perhaps, that the last thing you’d do is get clearance from on high – especially when the rewards are ludicrously thin.
Sherborne bridles when his version of tabloid life “doesn’t make sense”. Others on the redtop inside may wish to draw a different conclusion. If it seems a bit dopey and dozy, perhaps it’s true.
