Paul McMullan considered calling his book Accidental Murder, since he thinks it is possible that his activities as a tabloid journalist contributed to the deaths of up to five people. In the end he settled for the mantra he first articulated when giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry in 2011: Privacy is for Paedos.
McMullan—known affectionately as “Mucky” by his former colleagues at the News of the World—is today running two pubs in Dover. But in his heyday he and Rebekah Brooks ran the features department of the News of the World (NOTW). And he’s happy to admit the work wasn’t pretty.
“In the 90s we were brutal and horrible to people—we destroyed them, you know, we turned everybody over. We’d offer people huge amounts of money, get their life stories and then not pay them—just told them to fuck off.”
One of those he concedes he may have hastened to their graves was the actress Jennifer Elliott, whose chief interest to the NOTW was that she was the daughter of the distinguished character actor, Denholm Elliott.
The paper had paid a policeman for a tip that Jennifer was a heroin addict. McMullan was assigned the story.
“Yeah, I really went too far—she was begging because she had a heroin addiction. And that was enough, but I had to offer 50 quid for a shag. No, I think I changed it to 20 quid and she accepted that—got all this on tape.
“So not only do I expose her as a beggar and a heroin addict, I now expose her as a bloody prostitute, which she wasn’t, you know.”
“She was found hanging a few years later in Ibiza. She hanged herself, committed suicide. And I thought, you know, I went too far on that one.”
It’s a horrible story, and one he’s told before. But in the past, he’s expressed regret. Now his attitude is harder to pin down.
He begins the interview with a note of some defiance about the work of his old newspaper. “I'm not ashamed of any of the things…I’m of the view that I was helping keep the nation safe.” The fact that the NOTW was forced to close in the wake of the phone-hacking revelations in July 2011 means bad people can now do things with impunity, he says.
“What do you know about Keir Starmer?” he asks out of the blue. “You know what, if the News of the World was still here you’d know everything about him—you know, his mistresses, whether he wears women’s underwear, anything, you know. I think the public has a right to know about their leaders’ peccadilloes.”
This was said by way of illustration. There is, in fact, no whisper of scandal around the new prime minister. But it is a reminder of a different age where a clutch of newspapers saw it as their role to go in remorseless search of dirt. They used any means—fair or foul—to dig it up. And when it didn’t exist, they were not beyond fabricating it.
It’s an age that will be recalled on Thursday in a two-hour long ITV primetime documentary, Tabloids on Trial, which includes an interview with one of the victims of tabloid intrusion, Prince Harry. It also features McMullan, who published the last supposedly scandalous story about Harry’s mother, Princess Diana, before her death. It was a trademark News of the World story: salacious, ruthless—and untrue.
McMullan was at the time working for Rebekah Brooks, then features editor of the paper and now chief executive of News UK, which includes the Times. The news had broken that Diana had accepted an invitation to holiday in St Tropez with Dodi Fayed, the playboy son of the controversial Harrods owner Mohamed Al-Fayed.
McMullan was dispatched to get the inside story of the “love boat” on which Dodi and Diana were supposedly romancing. In his telling, he struck lucky in buying up the boat’s first mate for a promised £10,000—paid through a drunken intermediary who he suspects pocketed most of the money.
There was one problem: the first mate didn’t give McMullan the story he wanted—“about the Love Boat rocking and shagging.”
The source told a different story about the couple. “They weren’t shagging—it was all a front, as far as I know. And so I wrote that and filed it to Rebekah, and her deputy shouts at me ‘What the fuck’s this? We sent you to write about the story about the love boat and shagging.’”
“So basically, she sent me all the pictures of them kissing and said, ‘Take them back to the first mate and then get his quotes so it looks like they’re shagging.’”
It was time to get inventive. Or, as McMullan puts it in his book: “It was essentially a lie.”
“We completely fucked this guy over as well, destroyed his life. Because he said, ‘look if anyone knows I’m talking to you I’ll never get another job.’ So we had a photographer hiding in the bushes and then we put his picture in the paper as well, talking to us," he says.
The story came out just a few days before Diana died in Paris after fleeing the crowd of reporters and photographers in St Tropez.
“I’m not saying I accidentally murdered Diana but that kind of media intrusion led to the fatal car chase.”
“The foreign paps….I mean, if you get a picture of Diana and she's got a hand on some bloke’s knee, it’s not just Ferrari money. It's a house in the country and a Ferrari in the garage money. So they would go through any red light, go down one way streets the wrong way. 120 through the Pont de l’Alma—easy, no problem. So yeah, Diana was hunted totally.”
Does he regret his behaviour now? “Well, I really liked Diana, you know, I bumped into [her brother] Charles Spencer in the BBC and I thought he was gonna punch me, but he didn’t. He held out his hand and said, ‘thanks for telling the truth.’”
We move on to further victims of McMullan in his prime. One was Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of Australian rock band INXS, who was being pursued by the Sunday Mirror.
“We paid the Mirror news desk to leak all their stories,” McMullan says. “So I was able to nick that story, publish it—all about Hutchence being caught shagging some hot South African blonde while his partner [Paula Yates] was at home looking after their baby. So that’s the story,” he says of his feelings at the time. “I’m really happy, I’m really pleased. “
He calls it “privacy, beautifully invaded.” He adds in his book that “some of the stuff we put in the paper about his private sex life was breathtakingly invasive, crass and offensive.”
McMullan now admits he did not consider what turmoil or pain the stories might have caused the couple.
“But all we know is three months later he is hanging from a cord in a Sydney hotel room, and then a little while after that Paula’s dead as well. And you just think ‘oh well, carnage. Has it got anything to do with us and what we wrote, or nothing?’”
Again, I ask, no regrets?
“I was just thinking about all the people who didn’t make it to the end of the 90s because it was a pretty brutal decade for unfeeling and sensitive reporting. And, yeah, so I just tot it up: five people, including Diana, who never made it out of that decade and all the things that I’d written about them. And just wondering if I played a part in the accidental murder. That nearly became the title of the book.”
Three times I ask him what regrets he now has, and three times he avoids answering. In essence, his response runs as follows: millions of people loved reading the stories. If they bought the News of the World they, too, were culpable. It was a machine which ate people up and spat them out. It entertained people. It kept politicians honest. And it made lots of money.
“I mean, who needs privacy, to do good things?” he asks. “People want privacy to do bad things, I think that’s a fundamental truth.”
“I just think journalists being pilloried for listening to a few messages is bollocks.”
He reserves real venom for his old boss, Rupert Murdoch. “Murdoch turned into a right little shit. I mean, I used to hero-worship him, literally. I just thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi. He is the master.’”
“And then he gave all of the information to the cops. So fuck you. Fuck you. We made you rich. The Screws [as the NOTW was known] was the big cash cow, gave you enough money to launch Sky. And then 10 years after we've made you this fortune, to just say ‘it was them, not me. Here’s all their emails. Here’s all the incriminating evidence…’ I thought ‘blow the whistle, fuck you. You knew exactly what we were doing.’”
“Fleet Street is now dead apart from 1,000 new lawyers’ offices. I mean, the billion Murdoch’s paid has been stuffed into the pockets of a lot of lawyers.”
The ITV documentary is bound to revive the debate about whether it was right for the previous government to rescind David Cameron’s promise to set up the Leveson Inquiry in two parts, with the second part looking at criminal behaviour within Fleet Street.
At the moment the cases are being tested in the civil courts, with Prince Harry among the most determined claimants.
McMullan was approached by police investigating the original phone hacking charges but was, he says, somewhat surprised that they did not pursue him.
“I’m still not ever admitting I’ve ever hacked anyone. Some other people did that. But I wrote a few features from phone calls, from recorded messages. I don’t know if that makes me guilty of anything.”
But “of course people knew [about phone hacking],” he admits. “The very first question in editorial conferences was ‘Where did you get it?’”
McMullan is occasionally approached by claimants in hacking cases and says he is happy to cooperate if he has personal knowledge of a case. He was approached to write his book by the former NotW reporter-turned-whistleblower Graham Johnson.
“A couple of years ago I got a phone call from Graham, offering £10,000 to write 80,000 words about ‘all the bad stuff you did at the News of the World, all the illegal acts, all the immoral acts.’”
Privacy for Paedos is the result. A salutary reminder of an unlovely period in Fleet Street, which—15 years and a billion pounds later—refuses to go away.
