Mirror hacks are spitting feathers this afternoon as 75 job losses are announced. Given how heavy they have been going on the banker bonus bashing, their own remuneration scheme is coming under attack:

“The total directors’ pay and pensions bill for Trinity Mirror last year was £3.9million – £1.3million of which was cash bonuses. Of that, Sly Bailey’s package of pay and pensions was a staggering £1.7m, including a cash bonus of £660k. However, the share price for Trinity Mirror today is 48p whereas 12 months ago it was 90p.”

The NUJ estimates that more than fifty of those editorial jobs on the line could be paid for with this money.

And the hacks know it.

UPDATE: More news coming out of Canary Wharf. Guido understands that Trinity CEO is currently in Barbados. She left it to Mark Hollinshead to break the redundancy news to staff. When he asked if there were any questions, the entire staff walked out in silence…

After Guido pointed out the inappropriate smearing of Gove and his links to a Jewish antisemitism Charity, carefully timed for Holocaust Memorial Day, the paper has backtracked and apologised. Not with due prominence in their paper, but in a quote to the Jerusalem Post instead:

“The story does not in any way suggest that the funding ofsecurity guards for Jewish schools was inappropriate, only that Mr. Gove should have stood aside from the grant giving process given his relationship with CST. It was scheduled for publication on Thursday but pushed back because of the volume of news that day. We should have spotted the unfortunate timing and regret any offense caused.”

A textbook non-apology, but interesting that they didn’t see fit to say sorry for including a quote from SpinWatch’s David Miller in the same story. The same David Miller who is rather fond of printing neo-Nazi essays and believes in vast “Jewish lobby” conspiracies. Perhaps the Guardian should have had a look through their own archives before giving Miller coverage. Here’s what they published about him in July:

“SpinProfiles and Neocon Europe are projects that, under the guise of academia, are used to carry out campaigns of smear and harassment by creating selectively produced profiles of people and groups with different political outlooks, often ignoring facts that do not support their agenda. This approach characterises both of Miller’s projects, and to treat them as academic endeavours is to do a great disservice to British academia’s long tradition of neutral and unbiased inquiry.”

One of these factors alone can be spun as an oversight. But two…

A confused co-conspirator whispers to Guido that the Guardian have been working on the story they ran this morning about Michael Gove giving public funds to a group they don’t like for at least two weeks. The latest installment of their campaign against the  education secretary claims that he personally made the decision to give taxpayers’ money to the Community Security Trust despite being, along with fifty others, an advisor to their board. A fair point perhaps, but given that the CST “advise the Jewish community on matters of security and antisemitism”, why did they wait until Holocaust Memorial Day to run the story? Odd, at best…

UPDATE: A source to Gove gets in touch to say said: “It is unbelievable to attack any politician for funding the protection of Jewish children. It is even more extraordinary and frankly offensive to do it on Holocaust Memorial Day.”

UPDATE II: The CST aren’t happy either. They note that the Guardian did not even bother to contact them before running the story and have let rip on their own blog.

Guido can’t find Harriet Harman’s “first major speech on the future of the media” trailed in any other paper besides this morning’s Guardian. Apparently Ed Vaizey’s DCMS shadow is declaring that she is “going to be a champion of press freedom”:

Before her first major speech on the future of the media, Harman claimed there was a clear consensus around these principles, and last night challenged editors to put forward practical proposals. “I think it would really help Leveson if newspaper editors came forward with a solution. We have had a good scoping of the issues, but now it is time for the editors to lay their cards on the table. They need to propose the solution, rather than have one imposed upon them.”

All this has come as a bit of a surprise to a source with knowledge of the Shadow Culture brief. Guido hears whispers of a meeting last Monday (January 16) where Harman had to be talked out of  supporting the state regulating the press. Just nine days ago Harman was openly advocating imposing the very solution that she derides today. Add to that her track record of trying to censor the tabloids and Page 3 plus her past support for extreme political correctness suggests the idea of her being some sort of champion for free speech becomes risible… 

Guido’s spiritual mother Madame Popbitch is up at Leveson next week, but that wasn’t the only name on the witness list to catch his eye. The Fake Sheik, Mazher Mahmood, has been recalled. The clue to why is the witness immediately before him on the list – his old boss Roy Greenslade. After Mahmood’s farcical first outing, Greenslade wrote:

It is lucky – for both of us – that I had to listen to his contribution from the media marquee because press and public were banned from the courtroom … because I would certainly have shouted out when he replied to counsel’s question about why he had left the paper under a cloud. He said simply: “We had a disagreement.”

A disagreement? Well, that’s one way of describing it. In fact, it is a euphemistic description of the reality. “We” – the paper and, in this case, me – had a major falling out with Mahmood. I was then at the Sunday Times, running the news department, and I recall the incident well. When Mahmood resigned, he was on the verge of being dismissed for an act regarded within the office as gross impropriety.

Greenslade directly challenges Mahmood’s evidence and the showdown is set for Wednesday. Get the background here and grab the popcorn…

Despite Amelia Hill, his crime reporter, being investigated over her rather inappropriate relationship with a police officer, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger thought it fit to have an undisclosed meeting with Hogan Howe, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner yesterday. We’re making this public today because the Guardian was very tight-lipped about it when Guido put it to them yesterday and refused to confirm or deny the meeting happened. We have now double confirmed it via our unofficial and official sources in the Metropolitan Police.

Alan Rusbridger and deputy editor Ian Katz were both at the meeting. Given that it was at 11 a.m. yesterday, alcohol wasn’t a problem, but Guido hopes that in view of the recently issued official advice to coppers on dealing with journalists, that there wasn’t any flirting. The Guardian have had twenty-four hours, but are still not commenting. Just imagine their front page splash if they had discovered that the Sun’s editor Dominic Mohan had met secretly with Hogan Howe…

See also: Ethical Issues Arising From The Relationship Between Police and Media

In his sworn statement the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, tells Lord Justice Leveson that to the best of his knowledge he has never used or commissioned anyone who had used “computer hacking”. Here is the extract from Rusbridger’s witness statement:

Except Patrick Foster on the Guardian media pages. He has twice been caught hacking computers. The latest incident was the disgraceful hacking of the police blogger NightJack’s Hotmail account. The Orwell Prize winning blogger was outed by Patrick Foster when he was on media correspondent of The Times. This was up there with his Oxford undergraduate days when the student rag had to be pulped after he identified the victim of a gay rape. Foster was subsequently fired from The Times on an unrelated matter and now freelances for the Guardian. It is an open secret that Patrick Foster was Guardian Media editor Dan Sabbagh’s nark source at The Times for many “inside Wapping” stories and that The Times’ management eventually figured this out and fired him under another pretext.

Rusbridger really ought to correct his sworn statement to reflect the truth.

Guido is happy to welcome Jacking Ashley into the Don’t Unseat Ed Miliband Association, but he’s not sure she’s doing the cause any favours with this morning’s hysterical hyperbole. While discussing Ed’s critics she compares their behaviour to US Marines urinating on dead Afghans:

“It’s a game that the Westminster village has always enjoyed. Nick Clegg was last year’s victim, now it’s Ed’s turn. If enough pundits treat him as the US marines treated the Afghan dead, and if the public notices and reflects this contempt back through opinion polls, then somehow or other he might collapse.”

They even link back to the Guardian’s own coverage of the incident, just in case you missed this gloriously unsubtle point. Guido is still trying to work out whether the comparison with holding the Leader of the Opposition to account was done with a straight face. He has a feeling it was…

Up in front of the Leveson Inquiry today the Daily Mirror editor Richard Wallace showed a fundamental lack of understanding about how the web worked by suggesting that if Guido signed up to some sort of kite-mark code our traffic would increase. He went on to refer to “out and out cowboys” of the blogosphere who the Inquiry has “had some problems with already“. Guido didn’t break the law publishing Campbell’s testimony, unlike Richard Wallace during his showbiz editor career period…

Leveson has already heard that as Piers Morgan’s showbiz editor, Wallace was up to his neck in phone-hacking. He’s been at the newspaper for twenty years, at a time when they have published mocked-up torture photos and the Trinity Mirror Group used the services of Steve Wittamore more than any other media organisation. During Wallace’s evidence giving Counsel for the Inquiry pointed to 681 invoices from Whittamore to the Mirror, hundreds of those illegal invoices would have been approved by Wallace himself. He admitted today that he has not sacked anyone for illegal activity, like aiding, abetting or procuring illegally blagged information, despite the Information Commissioner making the names available. He clearly doesn’t want another former employee speaking their mind… 

Our story about how the Daily Mirror came to have the Ulrika/Sven story – which was undoubtedly phone hacked – has just been referred to at the Inquiry during Wallace’s evidence (covered here). It was, as he himself admits, Wallace himself who presented it to the then editor Piers Morgan. He has just admitted to the Inquiry counsel that if, as he now claims, he “can’t remember the circumstances” of how the story was obtained, he can’t therefore rule out it was hacked. Even those who quibble about the provenance of the story merely quibble about from whom it was hacked.

More recently the Daily Mirror, under Wallace’s seemingly spotless editorial lead, destroyed the life of Chris Jefferies and paid a heavy financial price in doing so. Without any foundation whatsoever they painted an innocent neighbour of a murder victim out to be the perpetrator. They were also fined £50,000 for contempt of court over their atrociously slapdash reporting of the Joanna Yeates murder case.

Who is the real cowboy Mr Wallace?

Though he’s doing his best to avoid addressing the issue, it’s not just what Miliband would describe as the “right-wing press” that is gunning for him. If anything the lefties are even more vicious. The Indy’s cartoon has him relaunching in a coffin, while their report doesn’t hold back: “For all the good that his ‘relaunch’ will do him, Miliband might as well have spoken in Klingon… If politics is like sex, Ed will never find the national G-spot.”

After a week of gaffes, criticism of Ed’s leadership style has morphed into open mockery, even from those who should be allies. The Mail’s Quentin Letts points out:

“Miss Reeves, whose voice owes something to a Dogger Bank foghorn, said that ‘Ed has got the steely determination’ to succeed. This ignited chortles from certain Left-leaning broadsheet reporters”

It’s not just the Guardian editorials that will make Ed’s spinners wince, even the crossword setter is after him: “Miliband upset in cut vacillation (10).” – Indecision.