Phone Hacking Trial: Brooks unable to recall how The Sun established Blunkett story – Martin Hickman

Extraordinary amnesia by Rebekah Brooks over the Blunkett lover story – did Andy Coulson who she was having an on off affair herself tell her or not?

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David-Blunkett-010_0 Day 64, Part 2:  Rebekah Brooks was unable today to remember how The Sun established the identity of Home Secretary David Blunkett’s lover hours after the News of the World being edited by her close friend Andy Coulson revealed the relationship.

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Phone Hacking Trial: Brooks and Coulson close at time of Dowler story, trial hears – Martin Hickman

Rebekah Brooks admits she could trust Andy Coulson with ” any confidence” at time of phone hacking.

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Coulson BrooksDay 64, Part 1:   Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson were so close at the time of the Milly Dowler story that he could trust her with any confidence, she told the phone hacking trial today.

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Phone Hacking Trial: Brooks: I didn’t inquire into phone hacking while CEO of News International – Martin Hickman

Further admissions that Rebekah Brooks took no action on phone hacking stories -except to agree a £1m deal with Max Clifford to protect the group’s reputation over his hacking claims.

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News International building in Wapping Day 63, Part 2:  Rebekah Brooks did not inquire into the scale of phone hacking at the News of the World while chief executive of News International despite fresh evidence suggesting the practice was widespread, the Old Bailey heard today.

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Phone Hacking Trial: Brooks knew of potential phone hacking victims in 2006, Old Bailey hears – Martin Hickman

This seems on the surface a significant admission

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prescott30-415 Day 63, Part 1:  Rebekah Brooks knew that the deputy prime minister John Prescott and other high-profile individuals were potential victims of phone hacking in 2006, five years before News International stopped blaming voicemail interception on a single royal editor, the Old Bailey heard today.

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Phone Hacking Trial: Brooks had no knowledge of husband’s stashed bags – Martin Hickman

Extraordinary Rebekah Brooks says she knew nothing about Charlie Brooks stashed bags containing lesbian porn DVDs and a newsletter about pedigree pigs

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Rebekah and Charlie Brooks Day 62, Part 2:  Rebekah Brooks had no knowledge of an attempt by her husband Charlie to hide his bags at the time she was arrested, the Old Bailey heard today.

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Phone Hacking Trial: Tony Blair and Piers Morgan sent supportive messages to Brooks over Dowler story – Martin Hickman

Rebekah Brooks friends revealed.

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Brooks and MorganDay 62, Part 1:  Rebekah Brooks received messages of support from politicians and journalists, and death threats from the public, in the days after the Milly Dowler story broke, the phone hacking trial heard today.

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Clifford Hindley :The damning verdict on the pederast scholarship of a Home Office civil servant

Clifford Hindley: Home Office civil servant with an academic obsession with boy love. Pic courtesy: Daily Mail

Clifford Hindley: Home Office civil servant with an academic obsession with boy love. Pic courtesy: Daily Mail

I am putting up on this blog a link to an extraordinary analysis by Ian Pace, a music lecturer from City University on the academic work of the late Clifford Hindley, the man exposed by Exaro News and the Sunday People this weekend. Currently under investigation by Mark Sedwill, the permanent secretary,for possibly authorising taxpayers’ money to support the Paedophile Information Exchange, his findings are damning.

 He concludes: “This far from exhaustive account of Hindley’s writings in retirement should leave no doubt as to what a central role pederasty played in much of his thought. Beneath a scholarly and deeply learned exterior, steeped in antiquity, lies an obsessiveness and distorted morality which is not so different to that to be found in the more obviously explicit writings to be found in Magpie and other paedophile publications.

“I do not believe we should censor Hindley’s work, by any means, nor that it is without worth. But if the allegations about his having facilitated government financial support for one of the most insidious of all paedophile organisations – members of which have been linked to child pornography and abuse rings and international networks, ritual exploitation of those in children’s homes, and a whole host of cases of sexual predation upon very young boys in other institutions – are proved correct, as looks likely, then Hindley’s scholarly legacy should be afforded a good deal more critical treatment than has hitherto been the case.

“And above all, in no sense should Hindley’s work be seen as representative of wider gay-focused studies and scholarship. There is no more intrinsic link between same-sex desire and paedophilia as there is for opposite-sex desire; both remain minority inclinations belonging to those in desperate need of help before they do untold damage. It is to Hindley’s discredit that he attempted to dissolve such distinctions, and legitimise paedophilia as the most natural representation of same-sex desire, in exactly the manner in which paedophile groups appropriated the language and rhetoric of gay rights to suit their own twisted ends.”

His blog is long and scholarly and also discloses that prior to joining the Home Office he was in India and after leaving he contributed to a legal review to lower the age of consent to 16.

For those who want to find out how a very intelligent and scholarly man educated at the best universities in the country used his academic abilities to twist and justify his obsessive interest in young boys this is a must read.

Phone Hacking Trial: ‘Toxic’ NOTW closure mooted month before Guardian’s Milly Dowler revelations – Martin Hickman

So The Guardian cannot be blamed for closing the News of the World over Milly Dowler. There already was plan to close it as part of the move to take over BSkyB.Interesting admission.

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News-of-the-World-006 Day 61, Part 2:  Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper group considered closing the News of the World a month before the Guardian disclosed it had targeted missing girl Milly Dowler, the phone hacking trial heard today.

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Phone Hacking Trial: Brooks knew ‘rogue reporter’ hacking defence was shaky, Old Bailey hears – Martin Hickman

So Rebekah Brooks did know 18 months before it became public that Clive Goodman was no rogue reporter and was prepared to offer a deal to Max Clifford to save News International’s reputation.

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Rebekah Brooks at the Old Bailey in March Day 61, Part 1:  News International’s chief executive Rebekah Brooks knew that the company’s lone “rogue reporter” defence against phone hacking was “shaky” a year and a half before it changed its public position, the Old Bailey heard today.

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Revealed: The civil servant in the Home Office’s PIE funding inquiry and his academic articles on boy love

 

A former top civil servant who later went on to write academic articles on the love between men and boys in  ancient Greece and in Benjamin’s Britten’s operas is at the centre of a Home Office inquiry into whether he sanctioned taxpayers’ cash to fund the Paedophile Information Exchange.

Clifford Hindley, who died some five years ago, was head of the Home Office’s Voluntary Services Unit from at least 1979 until 1983, which is now under investigation after a former civil servant has alleged there may have been a ” cover up ” over a grant  re-application from PIE.

 Reports in Exaro News and The People reveal today that the Home Office inquiry  under permanent secretary. Mark Sedwill is examining  recollections from the whistleblower that when he raised questions about why the Home Office should fund such an organisation Mr Hindley brushed  this aside and asked him to hand over the paperwork. This happened around 1979 and 1980.

This has raised the question  – as the whistleblower thinks it was a re-application  -whether the  Callaghan Labour and Thatcher Conservative governments actually funded PIE just at the time when the National Council for Civil Liberties was also supporting the organisation, Such a decision  would be far worse than the present row going on between the Daily Mail and Harriet Harman, Labour’s deputy leader, over her role at NCCL. It would mean that taxpayer’s cash has been given to fund paedophiles.

The whistleblower  originally contacted Tom Watson MP who passed him on to the Home Office.
Last night Tom Watson said: “It’s a remarkable state of affairs and the Home Secretary must make sure a ­report is presented as soon as possible.

“If the allegations are true, it shows how insidious an organisation PIE was that they could even convince the Home Office to give them taxpayers’ money.”

 Investigations by Exaro revealed that Mr Hindley, an assistant secretary in Whitehall, holds degrees in classics and philosophy from Oxford University and a degree in theology from Cambridge.

Exaro has also found articles  and book contributions written by  Clifford Hindley after he retired  for academic and music magazines – all entirely on same sex relationships between men and boys.

 His contribution to the Cambridge Companion on the composer Benjamin Britten is entirely on  emphasising the love relationships between boys and men in his operas – a view that is challenged by other experts on Britten. as too extreme.

 He has also written articles on the Greek historian and pupil of Socrates, Xenophon,  again entirely on love between men and youths – either in the army or in society.

Ian Pace, a lecturer in music at City University, where he is head of performance, and a researcher said: “It is very hard to deny that there are pederastic themes in some of Britten’s operas, most obviously The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice (mirroring such themes in the original literary works of Henry James and Thomas Mann respectively); and arguably also in Peter Grimes and Let’s Make an Opera (The Little Sweep). 

 “Some of Hindley’s writings on Britten certainly show a strong interest in such pederastic elements.”

An example is his description of the relationship between the ghost Quint and the boy Miles in  the Turn of the Screw.

 Hindley writes: “‘Quint is not a monster but one who opens fascinating new opportunities to the imaginative boy. Also fundamental is the fact that their relationship is one of homosexual love. It is presented as an emotional and mutually responsive relationship, in which the physical element is barely hinted at. It is nevertheless a bond of the kind rejected by conventional society’.”

The Home Office were not giving anything away about the inquiry – though it sounds as though documents – particularly from the Thatcher era – appear to be missing on anything to do with PIE.

At the moment a search is on to find out whether  a dead man files will disclose a highly damaging fact that the vile organisation the Paedophile Information Exchange was actually funded by the government.