Private eye privacy?

The private eye at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal must reveal who his client was.   A High Court judge yesterday ruled that Glenn Mulcaire could not refuse to reveal the name, even if doing so would incriminate him.

Mulcaire, who has 'previous' for invading people's privacy - he was jailed in 2007 for intercepting voicemail messages - has fallen foul of Section 72 of the Senior Courts Act which says that certain commercial information has to be given, irrespective of the risk of self-incrimination.  Mulcaire will be asked questions such as: "Did Ian Edmondson (the news editor of the News of the World)  ask him to investigate Max Clifford's assistant?"  A range of people and organisations, including News International, and the former NotW employee, Andy Coulson (now the Prime Minister's media adviser) have strenuously denied that the NotW asked Mulcaire to tap phones.

At the same time the judge ordered the Metropolitian Police to disclose paperwork seized when it raided Mulcaire's home in 2005: it is thought that some of that paperwork refers to Clifford's assistant, Nicola Phillips.  When Clifford sued the NotW last year for breach of privacy, Scotland Yard was told to disclose paperwork that might identify the senior journalist who ordered Mulcaire to do the voicemail hacking.  However, Clifford settled out of court after the NotW paid him £1M - withdrawing the action removed the need for the paperwork to be disclosed.

The judgement also affects a raft of legal actions being brought by Mulcaire's alleged victims, including John Prescott, the former Met Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, Sienna Miller, and Andy Gray.

It isn't known whether Mulcaire will seek leave to appeal against the judgement, so we may not be that much closer to getting towards the bottom of this affair.  As they say, this one will run and run.