Andy Coulson, then editor of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, instructed a journalist working on a story about a celebrity to “do his phone”, a jury trying Coulson and others for phone-hacking was told yesterday.
The trial also heard that Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, News International, appeared to have given incomplete information to lawyers carrying out an internal inquiry in 2007 which gave the now-defunct paper a “clean bill of health”.
Coulson and fellow ex-editor Rebekah Brooks are the two most high-profile figures among eight defendants in the dock on various charges related to phone-hacking, illegal payments to officials for stories, and hindering police investigations.
They all deny the charges.
After leaving the News of the World, Coulson went on to be Prime Minister David Cameron’s media chief, while Brooks, a close confidante of Murdoch and a friend of Cameron, rose to be chief executive of News International.
The Old Bailey, England’s Central Criminal Court, heard that in May 2006, the paper was planning to run an exclusive story about the private life of Calum Best, the son of former Manchester United football star George Best.
During an e-mail exchange with Ian Edmondson, a former senior journalist who is also on trial, Coulson discussed whether Best might leak the story to others.
“Do his phone,” Coulson wrote in an e-mail shown to the jury. Prosecutor Andrew Edis told the jurors they would have to weigh up what he meant.
Earlier, the court heard that News of the World phone-hacking targets included England football star Wayne Rooney, actors Jude Law and Sienna Miller, and Tom Parker Bowles, the son of Prince Charles’s second wife Camilla.
Other victims included David Blunkett and Tessa Jowell, both ministers in the then Labour government, and Milly Dowler, a schoolgirl who went missing in 2002 and was later found murdered.
The disclosure that Dowler’s phone had been hacked while she was still missing caused widespread public disgust in the summer of 2011, prompting Murdoch to close down the 168-year-old paper.