Phone hacking was widely known about at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World, according to a reporter blamed as the sole culprit, contradicting repeated denials by senior executives and dragging Britain's prime minister back into the scandal. In a letter written four years ago in an appeal against his dismissal from the tabloid, former royal reporter Clive Goodman said the practice of hacking was openly discussed until the then editor Andy Coulson banned any reference to it.
Coulson, who has repeatedly denied all knowledge of the practice, went on to become the official spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron, a move which took the affair into the political arena and forced the government to turn on Rupert Murdoch after years of courting his favour.
"This practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the Editor," the Goodman letter said, published as part of a parliamentary investigation into hacking. "Other members of staff were carrying out the same illegal procedures."
Goodman, who was jailed in 2007 along with private detective Glenn Mulcaire, said he had been told he could keep his job if he agreed not to implicate the newspaper - but was fired nonetheless after being sentenced to prison. The committee investigating the hacking scandal said on Tuesday it would probably recall James Murdoch to give further evidence after receiving the Goodman letter and statements from other parties, which contradicted his previous testimony.
"I think it is very likely that we will want to put those points to James Murdoch," said committee head John Whittingdale, adding that it was unlikely to recall Rupert Murdoch. Tom Watson, the parliamentarian who has most doggedly pursued the scandal, told Sky News it could be months if not years before the full picture of what had happened at the newspaper emerged. "If this letter is accurate, the whole foundation of the company's defence collapses," he said.
Allegations of widespread hacking at News Corp's British newspaper arm, and in particular reports that journalists had used investigators to hack into the voicemails of murder victims, sparked an uproar in Britain that dominated global headlines for almost the whole of July.
It forced the company to close the 168-year-old News of the World, drop its most important acquisition in decades - the $12 billion purchase of BSkyB - and accept the resignation of two of its most senior newspaper executives. Two of Britain's most senior police officers also quit over their failure to properly investigate the scandal and 12 people have been arrested.
"The Prime Minister took no action and looked the other way amid these allegations that he had brought someone aware of criminal activity into 10 Downing Street," opposition leader Ed Miliband said in a statement. Jonathan Tonge, politics professor at Liverpool University, said Cameron's credibility had been damaged at a time when he is striving to fix what he calls Britain's "broken society" following riots and looting in a string of cities last week.
"He's made a lot of worthy pronouncements about wanting to mend a broken society yet he's managed to appoint someone who presided over a paper that operated in the most amoral sense it's possible to conceive of," he said. "That doesn't look good." News International, the British newspaper wing of the News Corp media empire, did not deny the accusations made by Goodman. "We recognise the seriousness of materials disclosed to the police and parliament and are committed to working in a constructive and open way with all the relevant authorities," it said in a statement.
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