I was lucky enough to work with Tom Crone, legal manager of the News of the World, long enough to know just how pleased he’ll be with today’s High Court verdict in favour of the newspaper. M’learned friend will be sporting his characteristically modest, rather wry smile after the court refused to grant an injunction to prevent the newspaper from showing a 90-second clip of Max Mosley’s subterranean shenanigans.
The News of the World removed the clip last week, pending the outcome of Mosley’s bid for injunctive relief. It now returns in all its dubious glory, for as Crone puts it: “Given Mr Mosley’s denials as to what we say our film depicts, we are surprised he seeks to stop us giving the public a chance to make up their own minds.”
Mosley is reportedly suing the paper, which promises that it will “vigorously defend” any and all claims brought.
Meanwhile, if you’d like an insight into life as a lawyer for the News of the World, read on – here is a piece penned by Crone for a recent Guardian supplement on Media Law.
It’s often said that buying and selling homes is the most stressful thing anyone can do. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Try spending a couple of weeks as the lawyer for The Sun and the News of the World. I’ve done the job for 23 years and it definitely has its hairy, high-adrenaline moments.
Let’s take a look at a typical working week. Judges tend to be harbingers of doom, but fortunately this wasn’t the case when Lord Scott Baker, the coroner in the Lady Diana inquest, got in touch at the beginning of one week in February. He asked for The Sun’s tapes of Paul Burrell confessing to throwing in a few “red herrings” and “not telling the whole truth” when he was under oath at the hearing. My colleague, Justin Walford, delivered them and the Coroner duly put out a request for Burrell to return to court in order “to explain discrepancies” between the evidence he gave to the inquest and what he said on our tapes.
No doubt, as Irving Berlin’s There may be trouble ahead refrain played in his head, Burrell’s stress levels were pretty high. So were mine a day later, when the police put in a call. They wanted The Sun to give them the full unexpurgated tapes of Amy Winehouse enjoying the kind of substance that would send anyone to rehab. That request is a bit tricky because of source protection issues.
In the same week, seven witnesses who supported Tommy Sheridan’s Scottish libel claim against the News of the World were pulled in by the Lothian and Borders Police and charged with perjury. You may remember that at the end of a spectacular four-week libel trial in 2006 Sheridan was awarded £200,000 over allegations of group sex and visits to a Manchester swingers’ club called “Cupids”. During the Edinburgh trial the judge, Lord Turnbull, predicted that the degree of contradiction between the respective witnesses for each side meant a perjury investigation was inevitable.
How right you were, M’Lud. Since those charged include Sheridan, a former Member of the Scottish Parliament, as well as his wife Gail, his father-in-law and two other former MSPs you can safely say that the trial of Tommy and The Sheridan Seven will be the hottest show in town. I’ll be after a ticket.
The Sun’s week is six days of crash, bang, wallop – a huge newsroom floor that begins the day as quiet as an intensive care unit and morphs hour by hour into a noisy, bustling, rushing and highly professional production line of popular news, gossip, scandal, sport and fun. The lawyer is onstage several times each hour.
The News of the World is different. It spends five days each week gently simmering and reaches boiling point at about 6pm on Friday. It stays scalding hot until at least midnight the next day. Saturdays for the News of the World’s lawyer can be a bit like a forward patrol in Afghanistan’s notorious Helmund province – plenty of incoming, occasional hand-to-hand combat and a high risk of casualties. We get threatened with injunctions at least once a fortnight and fight it out before the weekend judge several times a year. Some stories survive and some perish.
That’s the pre-publication bit of the job – and I love it. But in-house newspaper lawyers also have to sort out the problems which arise post-publication. We get an awful lot of letters from m’learned friends threatening proceedings for libel, copyright, privacy, contempt, misuse of data – you name it, they’ll threaten it. This bit, I don’t like quite as much. I challenge anyone to enjoy spending every working day being threatened and bombarded with demands for apologies, damages and, worst of all (because, yes, they’re usually inflated and excessive) legal costs?
Post-publication work reveals the difference between the journalist and the newspaper lawyer. The former may be overworked and overstressed but what he is doing is looking forward to tomorrow’s great story. By contrast, the newspaper lawyer spends his time clearing up whatever goes wrong with yesterday’s story. Journalists look forward, lawyers look backwards. This can get a little wearisome, but hey, keep smiling – come on, Mr Burrell, Let’s face the music, and dance.
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