NoW boss says record hacking uncommon

The former features editor of the News of the World has suggested to the Leveson Inquiry that getting medical information from NHS staff is more common than going through medical records.

In an astonishing appearance at the inquiry into press ethics, Paul McMullan made candid admissions about the methods he had used to obtain stories but also made trenchant attacks on celebrities, politicians and the police.

At one point, he also suggested there was a difference between accepting or ‘blagging’ medical information and going through records.

The issue came up at the inquiry last week, when actor Hugh Grant claimed that information from his medical records had been leaked - although one of the hospitals he named said it was highly unlikely that information about a visit he made to its A&E department came from its A&E staff.

“There is a difference between answering the phone to somebody that has seen a pregnancy test for some big star and paying somebody to go into the office and flick through the medical records,” McMullan said, adding that he couldn’t recall accessing records.

When asked if he thought there was really an “ethical” difference between taking information from staff and going through records, McMullan indicated that he didn’t mind where information came from, as long as it “caught out people who lie” and were otherwise the legitimate target of stories.

He had no time for the complaints of celebrities like Grant who, he said, should be grateful for the interest shown in them. However, he expressed sympathy for some people caught up in press attention, and described his former bosses, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks as “the scum of journalism.”

He also had no time for a privacy law, arguing that privacy created space for “bad people to do bad things” and arguing that a law would simply raise the commercial value of information.

Although this claim might sound preposterous, a similar point was made by the Information Commissioner’s Office in its seminal report on protecting the privacy of individuals, ‘What Price Privacy?’ in 2006.

The report noted that there was an ‘industry’ devoted to illegally obtaining, buying and selling information, and led to the introduction of higher penalties in an attempt to make the potential risk of engaging in the trade outweigh its benefits.

The report also concluded that blagging was a bigger problem than hacking. It issued advice to NHS and other organisations whose staff might be subject to illegal approaches by journalists, private investigators and others looking for stories or to trace individuals - often by obtaining small pieces of information from many sources.

A copy of the report and its background material has been handed to the Leveson Inquiry.