Hacked off with the whole affair

It was Groucho Marx who said  'I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member'.  How would he have felt about the new club where you get elected without applying, and where there is no membership fee - in fact, if you're lucky, you're the one on the receiving end of a load of dosh.  The membership of this exclusive club is as secret as that of the Bilderberg, although from time to time names leak out.  Yesterday, the actor Steve Coogan was revealed as a member, joining the likes of Sienna Miller, Andy Gray, football agent Sky Andrew, Max Clifford, and Gordon Taylor of the PFA, with others, amongst them Paul Gascoigne and John Prescott, rumoured to be possible future members.

I refer, of course to the Glenn Mulcaire / News Corporation club, where it is alleged that celebrities' phones were hacked into.  According to the Guardian, it now seems that the private detective, Mulcaire, has submitted a statement to the High Court confirming that the suspended News of the World Assistant Editor, Ian Edmondson, asked him to do the hacking, and alleging that several other NotW executives knew about this.  He doesn't, apparently, name names, but if true this would blow a hole in the paper's defence that this was a one-off done by a rogue reporter, the former Royal Editor, Clive Goodman.

As mentioned before http://colinboagsblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/film-stars-tabloid-and-skullduggery.html the scariest aspect of the whole affair seems to have been Scotland Yard's inept failure to act upon paperwork that it seized in 2006.   Yesterday, campaigning Labour MP and keen blogger, Tom Watson, asked the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, whether he was happy that the CPS is giving the government the right advice in this matter.  With the straightest of bats the AG said that it was the police's role to investigate.  It seems that the Met's Assistant Commissioner, John Yates, who has previously said that there was no need for any further investigation of the affair, has now written to the Director of Public Prosecution saying that all the evidence now should be re-evaluated, and the CPS asked for its view.

The political aspect to this is that David Cameron's Director of Communications, was the NotW's editor at the time that all this is alleged to have taken place, although he has consistently and strenuously denied that he knew anything about it.

This is like pulling teeth: slow and painful, but it needs to be done.  It finally looks as though more of the story will come out, and who knows, the club might be revealed to have more new members, and some of the existing ones might find themselves even richer!  As they say, this one will run and run!