Leveson inquiry pantomime season: the story so far | Media | The Guardian

by peterjukes

Leveson seems to have been toiling through the tabloid jungle, in search of an incubator of the original phone-hacking virus.

A voice from the grave – that of Sean Hoare, who died recently of drink – pointed to one possibility. His brother testified to Leveson that Sean had been one of a raffish group of young men writing sex and celebrity stories in the late 90s. They all clustered around the Bizarre showbusiness column on the Sun, from which three tabloid editors were later to be selected – Piers Morgan at the Mirror, Andy Coulson at the News of the World, and Dominic Mohan, the current editor of the Sun.

Hoare claimed that phone-hacking started there at the Sun. He said it was “routine”, and migrated from the Sun to the News of the World, where it went out of control. This chimes to an extent with a claim aired at Leveson on behalf of the actor Jude Law, that private eye Glenn Mulcaire wrote “the Sun” on the corner of one hacking file he compiled .

via Leveson inquiry pantomime season: the story so far | Media | The Guardian.