Hugh Grant’s account of a (secretly-taped!) conversation he had with a former News of the World hack-turned-whistleblower is most entertaining. Credit to our friends at the New Statesman for commissioning* it. There’s plenty to enjoy, including this fine exposition of the mentality of our upstanding truth-seekers in the popular prints:
Me Well, I suppose the fact that they’re dragging their feet while investigating a mass of phone-hacking – which is a crime – some people would think is a bit depressing about the police.
Him But then – should it be a crime? I mean, scanning never used to be a crime. Why should it be? You’re transmitting your thoughts and your voice over the airwaves. How can you not expect someone to just stick up an aerial and listen in?
Me So if someone was on a landline and you had a way of tapping in . . .
Him Much harder to do.
Me But if you could, would you think that was illegal? Do you think that should be illegal?
Him I’d have to say quite possibly, yeah. I’d say that should be illegal.
Me But a mobile phone – a digital phone . . . you’d say it’d be all right to tap that?
Him I’m not sure about that. So we went from a point where anyone could listen in to anything. Like you, me, journalists could listen in to corrupt politicians, and this is why we have a reasonably fair society and a not particularly corrupt or criminal prime minister, whereas other countries have Gaddafi. Do you think it’s right the only person with a decent digital scanner these days is the government? Whereas 20 years ago we all had a go? Are you comfortable that the only people who can listen in to you now are – is it MI5 or MI6?
Me I’d rather no one listened in, to be honest. And I might not be alone there. You probably wouldn’t want people listening to your conversations.
Him I’m not interesting enough for anyone to want to listen in.
Me Ah . . . I think that was one of the questions asked last week at one of the parliamentary committees. They asked Yates [John Yates, acting deputy commissioner of the Metropolitan Police] if it was true that he thought that the NoW had been hacking the phones of friends and family of those girls who were murdered . . . the Soham murder and the Milly girl [Milly Dowler].
Him Yeah. Yeah. It’s more than likely. Yeah . . . It was quite routine. Yeah – friends and family is something that’s not as easy to justify as the other things.
Me But celebrities you would justify because they’re rich?
Him Yeah. I mean, if you don’t like it, you’ve just got to get off the stage. It’ll do wonders.
[…] Me So you’re saying, if you’re Johnny Depp or me, you don’t deserve to have a private life?
Him You make so much more money. You know, most people in Dover take home about £200 and struggle.
Me So how much do you think the families of the Milly and Soham girls make?
Magnificent, in its way.Him OK, so there are examples that are poor and you can’t justify – and that’s clearly one of them.
The celebrities receive much of the attention but it’s these other examples – of the Soham and Dowler families and lord knows who else – that should really be the biggest issue. The News of the World – and other newspapers – were running what amounted to an intelligence-gathering operation. Eavesdropping on voicemail messages (another reason to hate voicemail!) is not substantively different from intercepting and reading people’s mail and should not, I think, be treated any differently.
Were all this a matter of exposing matters that were plainly in the public interest it might be one thing but most of the time there was clearly little public interest (not to be confised with things the public find interesting) and so it’s quite another thing altogether.
*Asking Jemima Khan to be a “guest-editor” is a gimmick but with this article at least something useful has come of it.
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