More insight into Andy Coulson from Clive Goodman over a Royal trip with Prince Charles.
Day 104: Andy Coulson kicked a desk when he found out his royal editor did not want to accompany Prince Charles on a visit to the United States, the Old Bailey was told today.
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A contender getting conviction politicians from Left and Right
While the nation ponders on whether to vote ( or not !) in this month’s European and local elections, an extraordinary unreported by-election is taking place in the House of Commons among MPs.
Up for grabs is the.chairmanship of the House of Commons defence committee, a rather important post as the winner will be responsible for scrutinising the policies and spending of the huge behemoth that is the Ministry of Defence.
The post -because of the division of the spoils for this Parliament – can only be held by a Tory. But the successful candidate has to get the backing of at least five Labour or other non Tory MPs to be able to stand.
The election has turned out to be closely fought with no fewer than eight Tories contesting the post and having to find sponsors from other parties. It was caused by the decision of the present chairman, James Arbuthnot, who is leaving Parliament at the election,to stand down. The MP is an Old Etonian and a direct descendent from King James IV of Scotland.
So far five of his eight potential successors have declared their backers on the Parliamentary order paper producing some breathtaking alliances that defy normal political gravity.
The most extraordinary is the backing for Julian Lewis, a right-winger,life long opponent of CND and in his youth scourge of the Labour left.
His backers to get the job include former anti- apartheid campaigner and former Labour Cabinet minister, Peter Hain; Labour loyalist and former cabinet minister, Hazel Blears, and John McDonnell, the hard line left-wing MP for Hillingdon, who tried unsuccessfully to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership. His other two big supporters are veteran Labour minister, Sir Gerald Kaufmann and Valerie Vaz, sister of Keith Vaz, the home affairs committee chairman.
They have combined with believe it or not, Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary and nearest to a neo-con plus former defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth, former immigration minister, Mark Harper, and Tory backbench MPs from the “awkward squad” including Peter Bone, Mp for Wellingborough, and Charles Walker, MP for Broxbourne. He has the support of Jonathan Evans, chairman of the Conservative Mainstream group, on the left of the party.
Lewis, the Tory MP for New Forest East, has won high level Labour support because he rebelled against the Coalition’s plan to arm the rebels against President Assad in Syria to prevent Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal getting into the hands of jihadists. The rebellion led to humiliation for David Cameron when the government was defeated in Parliament. He also voted against the tripling of tuition fees and against the privatisation of the nation’s forests.
Mr Lewis said yesterday:“ I am very pleased to have the support of conviction politicians on both the Left and the Right who want an independent minded chairman to hold the ministry to account.”
Crispin Blunt: getting strong support from left and right
Another favourite for the job is Bob Stewart, Conservative MP for Beckenham , a former army officer and a UN commander in Bosnia. He has backing from ex Tory fire minister, Bob Neill, Tory backbenchers Robert Halfon and Stewart Jackson. Ex Labour junior ministers, Sir Alan Meale and Jim Dowd are backing him.
The other candidates whose backers have declared are Julian Brazier, Tory MP for Canterbury, James Gray, Tory MP for North Wiltshire , Rory Stewart, Tory MP for Penrith and the Border;Keith Simpson, Tory Mp for Broadland and Tobias Ellwood, Conservative Mp for Bournemouth, East.
Downing Street and the Tory whips while not expressing any opinion are thought to favour Rory Stewart ( another Old Etonian) or Keith Simpson, as “a safe pair of hands”.
What they don’t want is some strong-minded MP that will make waves for an embattled coalition. This makes this election all the more interesting.
So Dan Evans was wrong when he said he played the hacked voicemail from Sienna Miller’s phone says Andy Coulson who can’t remember anything else that happened.
Day 98, Part 1: Andy Coulson today denied hearing a voicemail that had been hacked from Sienna Miller’s phone by one of his reporters, Dan Evans.
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So Coulson’s jibe “Do his phone” is an instruction to check whether his mate Rav Singh was leaking News of the World stories to other papers.
Day 93, Part 2: Andy Coulson’s instruction “Do his phone” was not an instruction to hack a phone, he told the Old Bailey today.The former tabloid editor said that instead he was requesting a check of a reporter’s phone data to see if he was leaking the News of the World’s stories to rivals.
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So Andy Coulson did listen to hacked messages about David Blunkett but didn’t as editor know that phone hacking was illegal. And he now says he was shocked – senior minister having an affair with a married woman. Not something that Coulson would do himself, of course!
Day 92, Part 1: Andy Coulson listened to tapes of hacked phone messages from a Cabinet minister to his lover, believed they were gross intrusions into their privacy, but decided to publish a story based on them anyway, because he felt it was in the public interest and he did not know that phone hacking was illegal, he told a jury today.
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This week – a bit to my surprise – I found myself given an accolade by Press Gazette as one of the 50 top reporters on social media. Given I use to tweets to promote stories on this blog and on Exaro News I was quite chuffed to say the least.
But I was even more pleased that the winner was Peter Jukes who rightly deserved his award for his marathon tweeting of the hacking trial – now over 300,000 tweets- and his persistence and innovation in raising cash to do this through crowd sourcing.
This seems to me an excellent use of Twitter and social media to provide bite sized reporting from the courts of a controversial trial as it happens. It is even more remarkable given the dangers of contempt and the difficulties of producing fast, accurate copy under pressure. So hats off to him!
As for the rest I was in good company with two top awards going to Channel Four News- Alex Thomson and Faisal Islam, one to Lucy Manning at ITN News and one to the hyperactive Paul Waugh, the editor of Politics Home.
It was good to see the spread of the awards – which covered virtually the entire political team at The Sun, to Paul Lewis of the Guardian as well as a bevy of sports reporters from the Guardian to the Northern Echo and Daily Telegraph. and a very interesting runner-up Alexandra Rucki from the London Evening Standard.
Well done Press Gazette for an interesting innovation – the new media is definitely the way forward.
Just when Parliament’s IT boss had promised that their new computer system was up and running again and ready to expand, guess what happens.
It takes just 90 minutes for another crash with a hasty call to IT experts to convene to sort out why so many MPs and peers offices still can’t access the internet.
Full details of the story are on the Exaro News website and in Computer Weekly .They come from the latest leaks from inside Parliament – one general memo to all staff telling them everything is working well and another to the IT team saying everything has started to go wrong.
At this rate it looks as though Parliament with its thousands of internal subscribers is going to join other institutions in Whitehall and the NHS with a system plagued with problems.
Amazing. Rebekah Brooks pa for 16 years Cheryl Carter, says she didn’t know there was a police investigation into hacking at News International until she read Nick Davies Milly Dowler phone hacking exclusive in The Guardian. Really!
Day 78:
Rebekah Brooks’s PA had no idea there was a police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World until the week the paper closed, the Old Bailey heard today.
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The Bath-Knight over my bath :Now working properly after quite a lot of trauma.
We have an old-fashioned roll top bath and our home is part of Grade II listed Tudor coaching inn – still a pub until 1969. Standard aids to get in and out of the bath don’t work.
So it was with great interest when we received a cold call – I’d still like to know who gave the company our ex directory number – from a firm called Care Knight – a British company based in Stoke on Trent – with a solution.
The company make an aid called Bath-Knight, a powered mobility aid with a belt that can gently lower and raise you into the bath – and can easily fit over all types of bath and even be mounted on a free-standing frame – useful for Grade II listed buildings.
So we had a visit from a salesman – David Murphy – who assured us it was easy to fit and would be no problems. ” we had no trouble fitting over roll top baths and we even have customers from stately homes who are very happy with it.” he said.
As a blurb says: “If you have trouble getting in and out of the bath, then a Bath-Knight bath lift can help put an end to all your worries about bathing.”
But it was not to be. The first sign of a problem came when they came to install it. The installer,Chris,had to abandon it because he had not noticed he had to move the waste pipe from the bath when he drew up the specifications. As he had cancelled the plumber he had to make a new appointment. And that is when the real trouble began.
Both Chris and Martin, the Polish plumber, came to fit the installation and moved the bath to reroute the waste pipe which did not take too much time.
The next day I had a bath. When I came back two hours later water was pouring into cellar, dripping from the ceiling into the hall, and running down the wall to our main staircase.
I called Bath Knight and they sent the Polish plumber back the next day. It turned out to be an all day job with no water. What the installer had done was fracture the copper piping to the bath and they had to replace the piping.
That should have been the end of it. But when my wife used the Bath Knight and found the angle on the belt was too steep. She felt unsafe and worried she would slip off particularly when trying to get out of the bath.
I contacted Bath Knight and their initial response was tardy – Chris the installer insisted it was correct – but it wasn’t and the customer care manager, David Reiter,stopped him coming to see us.
I sent a letter to the chairman,Mrs Annette Greenwood, threatening her with a pretty critical blog about their product.
Mr Reiter did a U-turn and came down from Stoke on Trent to Berkhamsted, to see us. He not only found that the angle was a little on the high side but that the frame which holds the robust aid moved when it shouldn’t.
To the company’s credit things got better. Martin, the Polish plumber, who was the most helpful of the lot, came and redecorated our hall. A new frame arrived and it is working better.
But there was a further sting in the tail. I wrote and asked for a reduction on this most expensive kit, it costs over £2000. I got no reply, instead just bill reminders from the accounts department, ending up with a threat of legal action. I complained to Mr Reiter and finally got £250 off the bill.
What should have been an extremely simple process became a nightmare. I have published this to warn people that the elderly may find the product a little unnerving because of the slope.
But also I wonder that if I were not a savvy journo whether we would have had a different outcome. Care-Knight charge a lot for their product – which I must admit is robust. Most of their clients are elderly and vulnerable and may literally not be able to stand up for themselves if faced with such an equivalent mess. I would warn people to be wary – and also ask how they got your address, Care Knight do pay for such information.
Tried to email your MP? Waiting for a reply from their office? Before you blame our public servants for being lazy, it may just be that their tools of the trade are on the blink.
As I report on the Exaro News website Parliament’s computer system is getting and all singing, dancing upgrade so MPs can get super access to the internet.
Only the subcontractors installing it have made one big mistake – they have programmed the system to get LESS access to the internet. The result: furious MPs, bad tempered office staff as the system regularly crashes and can’t cope.
How do we know this? Well the mother of all democracies has not made the usual public announcement.. Instead it has used its private email; system to tell its 7500 users that they have got it wrong and issued a private apology.
Details of the email from Joan Miller, director of the parliamentary IT service, are on the Exaro website.
She wrote:“The problems may have shown themselves in freezing or slowing down of your web browsing, video via the web, slower delivery of e-mails sent outside Parliament, use of [Microsoft] Office 365 and other internet-dependent systems.
“I know that this has been very frustrating and inconvenient for those affected. I therefore wanted to write to you to apologise for the ongoing problems and for any difficulties caused, and to tell you about what we have been doing to fix the problem.”
She admits:“We therefore commissioned work to upgrade and expand our links out of the estate to the internet. Unfortunately, in January, one of our suppliers involved in this upgrade inadvertently introduced an error into the supporting software. This had the opposite effect of that intended, that is, it reduced the capacity of the access to the internet.”
Officially Parliament says it is OK. A spokesman said: ” “The company that provides this fully managed service made an error, which it has rectified at its own cost. This caused some disruption to parliamentary services.”
“We are working with the supplier to ensure that the services remain resilient in the future.”
But today one of my sources says it is as bad as ever. More cover ups?
Since the publication on Exaro and on my blog the story has been taken up by Hugh Muir in the Guardian diary -with a typical wry commentary
Westminster Confidential 