For me the only useful fact to emerge from the otherwise immensely tedious Leveson inquiry was this: that messages on the phone of Milly Dowler were not erased by News of the World journalists.
Of course, it would have been a much, much better story if they had been. Eavesdropping on the phone messages of a murdered schoolgirl may be creepy and unpleasant but it is essentially a victimless crime. Actively interfering with those messages, on the other hand, might have had serious consequences. Perhaps false hope might have been given to Milly’s distraught parents. Perhaps the police inquiry might have been jeopardised. We can only speculate, though, on those serious consequences because, remember — contrary to reports in the Guardian — those messages were not deliberately erased.
When earlier this year the Guardian’s investigative reporter Nick Davies went to collect his Paul Foot award I thought that this detail might have been mentioned. In fact, to be honest, I thought it would have ruled him out of contention. Even if it was a genuine mistake — and a newspaper as noble as the Guardian would never sex up a story with blatant untruths, would it? — it was absolutely pivotal to the shocked worldwide attention Davies’s investigation received. Killing Britain’s most popular newspaper — and with it the livelihoods of dozens of journalists — on the basis of a grievous factual error strikes me as a pretty odd way to win a press award.
I didn’t mention this at the time because a) I thought quite enough attention was being given to the dreary Leveson already and b) I began to wonder whether maybe I’d been dreaming. Surely if it were true it would be on the front page of all the newspapers? (Well, apart from the Guardian, maybe.)
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