Les Tricoteuses part three

[Terribletriplets]

maj

what are they going to do if he breaks it to shop the lot of them?

I imagine the courts would take a dim view of a confidentiality agreement put in place to cover up illegal activity

(like the Graham Taylor settlement)

(the hole the Murdochs are in is getting deeper by the day...)

I just get twitchy about the 'sympathy' thing for Mulcaire. He has 'the dirt' on a lot of people v. probably, but he only got this dirt by being dirty in a very inter-personal sense, invading people's privacy when they were most vulnerable in order to make money out of them. No-one 'made' him do it - just personal advancement. And he would be still doing it if he wasn't caught.

Yes, he is guilty, but so are they, & he's been clobbered for it & they haven't.

The sympathy is for the scapegoat

well ok, he isn't a scapegoat as such, because they are by definition innocent.

But ykwim.

yes I think IKWYM!

I hope GM doesn't have a sudden sticky end. Yep, Ponders, I suppose the confidentiality clause counts for nothing in a criminal trial.

Good God
www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/world/europe/30letter.html?_r=3&hp
And why still the NYT?

'In one e-mail, from 2003, the paper?s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, complained to the top editor, Andy Coulson, about a management push to cut back on cash payments to sources, saying he needed to pay his contacts in the Scotland Yard unit that protects the royal family. In another e-mail, Mr. Goodman said that he did not want to go into detail about cash payments because everyone involved could ?go to prison for this,? according to the two people who described the e-mail?s contents.
The two people also said that in the exchange of e-mails, Mr. Goodman requested permission from Mr. Coulson to pay £1,000 for a classified Green Book directory, which had been stolen by a police officer in the protection unit. The book contains the private phone numbers of the queen, the royal family and their closest friends and associates ? a potentially useful tool for hacking.'

'Mr. Chapman is expected to testify that while he noticed the e-mails in question, he did not realize that paying the police was a criminal offense, the former official said. He is expected to testify that Mr. Goodman?s e-mail mentioning prison seemed to him to be in jest.'

Mr Chapman being head of the legal dept for NI. FFS

Is because RM owns the rival Washington Post?
And reporters on there aren't hedging their bets in case they might someday apply to work on a Murdoch title, as many journalists here are?

\link{http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/protection-officers-sold-private-details-of-royal-family-to-notw-2312098.html\it was in the Indie on the 12th} just after Goodman was re-arrested - is probably in others too, I thought I'd heard about the Green Book payment before.

The NYT isn't covering it in anything like the depth of our broadsheets so maybe this is new to them?

I think another terrible aspect to this is that the police had the private investigators files when the royal hack went down and still did nothing. This is a huge blot on the Met that they have yet to explain satisfactorily.

that's because they didn't actually look at them, jo - they clearly subscribed to Cameron's ethos of what you don't know can't come back & bite you in the bum

let's hope they're all wrong!

(one of the senior police officials who resigned (Yeates, possibly?) said something along the lines of having better things to do with his time than wade through 6 bin bags full of bits of paper...)

If they had really looked at them they would have revealed everything which would have stopped the nice little arrangement they all had financial and otherwise. And tbh they would have been exposing themselves so why would they?

noddy - I'm just surprised the evidence in Met's possession lasted so long. Police are really good at 'losing' evidence when it suits.

it's a bit like the Nixon "expletive deleted" tapes

Ponders - I remember hearing those whenI was 12 at the time on the news, and asking my dad what 'expletive deleted' meant. He claimed to not know.

According to wiki it turned out to be mostly "goddamned"

which is a bit disappointing really (but not at all surprising, Nixon was a God-fearing SOB)

There is a very interesting article in the australian herald about the camilla gate tapes etc. Considering there were never any culprits brought to justice and yet the palace never doubted its authenticity it seems this sort of thing has gone on forever

So Louise Mensch has apologised to Piers Morgan has she... He's an odious odious man, but after her utterly obnoxious behaviour during their little spat on CNN, I found myself siding with him. The spat if anyone missed it, it's really toe-curling stuff from Mensch unfortunately.

she was always going to have to apologise, & leaving it as long as she did just made her look even more pathetic

Agree completely re both his odiousness & her obnoxious behaviour, sayanything!

Actually I find Piers to be a sanctamonious twerp, Mensch may not have come out of the cnn thing well but to be fair Piers is as guilty as hell of a lot of stuff which will deffo come out.....and boy will I and many other readers of Private Eye savour it. Mensch has braved the big bad murdoch machine -good on her, if she were a man I would say she had balls!!!!!

I also like her. I can't wait til he gets his comeuppance but in her position she shouldn't have based her argument on hearsay as I am sure there is plenty of gossip and rumour about PM in those circles but until its proved she looks daft.

has she braved the big bad Murdoch machine? in what way?

Same question as Ponders. Mensch has been the one focusing on who else was guilty of hacking, taking pressure off the Murdochs. And then hid behind Parliamentary privilege.

Having said that, can't wait for Morgan to get his.