"It wouldn't have covered the costs but it would have taken the sting out of what I'd spent," he says. "And this idea that for every 20 stories they do about a pile of shit, they do one story that has some sort of nobility to it – I don't buy it."Ĭoogan says News Group, the News Corp subsidiary which owned the paper until it closed in July, had offered to settle his case. But it's not through any moral imperative. Sometimes they might sting someone who deserves it. "It's like blaming a scorpion for not being moral. The tabloids operate in an amoral parallel universe where the bottom line is selling newspapers. "It serves certain people's commercial interests to characterise what's happening as an attack on the freedom of the press and it's not," he says. Nor does he accept the argument that curtailing the media's freedom to write about the peccadilloes of the rich and famous is tantamount to censorship. I don't go round saying I'm a paragon of virtue, so that is clearly not in the public interest." "What happens in my private life is none of your fucking business," he says. We'll learn about all the details of that in the inquiry."Ĭritics might argue that the story about the dancer also reveals much about his own character, but Coogan insists tabloids have no right to delve into his personal affairs. The point is that this is the kind of thing he does. This is not illegal, but it shows you the character of the man. "He had this dancer in his office once that I'd spent the night in a hotel with … calling me to try and get me to admit to various things. He says that Coulson personally orchestrated an unsuccessful attempt to trick him into admitting he had slept with a woman, which was foiled after Coogan was tipped off by the News of the World's former showbusiness editor Rav Singh. "Is it part of a sort of personal vendetta? That's certainly what motivated me in the first place, I won't deny that." He concedes that view is coloured by his own treatment at the hands of the News of the World and some of its rivals, which have written stories in the past about his drug use and sex life. "Hacking into a victim of crime's phone is a sort of poetically elegant manifestation of a modus operandi the tabloids have." "We all know it's not one rogue reporter but it's not even an aberration," he says. He believes the hacking affair is symptomatic of a wider malaise afflicting the tabloid press, and believes now is the time to tackle a culture of what he calls irresponsible journalism. So it may be that certain people haven't committed crimes, but there's a cultural culpability." "The culture of the people on the shopfloor is reflection of management," he says. If so, it will provide the most compelling evidence yet that the News of the World's "rogue reporter" defence was a ruse designed to disguise the true extent of phone hacking at the paper.Ĭoogan says News Corp's senior executives must be held to account for that. Mulcaire was forced by the high court to write to Coogan's legal team revealing who at the title ordered him to hack into mobile phones belonging to a group of public figures in the middle part of the last decade, including the fashion model Elle Macpherson, the politician Simon Hughes, the publicist Max Clifford and a football agent, Sky Andrew.Ĭoogan is barred by the terms of the court order from discussing the contents of the letter, but it is widely expected to reveal that Mulcaire took instructions from more than one person at the NoW. As Coogan developed his own case, he obtained some crucial evidence about related hacking activities undertaken by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator employed by the tabloid. His legal battle has played a pivotal part in the fight to uncover how widespread the practice was at the NoW, giving him a leading part in the revolt against tabloid excess. Over lunch in New York, where he is filming an adaptation of a Henry James novel, Coogan says: "Two years ago I rang my publicist and said 'Look, there's some information that my phone may have been hacked.' I was told: 'That story's gone away, it's not going to come back and Coulson's at the heart of Downing Street now, he's surrounded by a ring of steel.' "ĭespite the warning, Coogan started legal action, becoming one of a handful of celebrities to do so.
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