It seems the Hacked Off lot are trying a new tactic in their campaign this morning, and this time they are on the money. They’re calling for the 17,000 dodgy invoices from over 300 journalists in the Operation Motorman Files to be released to the public. As the graph above shows, this was a Fleet Street-wide problem. Hacked Off chief Brian Cathcart is right to say:

“It names journalists who commissioned thousands of actions which they must or should have known were, on the face of it, illegal. It records dates and payments for these transactions. It identifies the members of the public who were targets of this activity – thousands of them, although only a handful have been told it happened. This secret has been secret too long, and the prevailing situation at the inquiry, of nudge-nudge-wink-wink exclusive knowledge, cannot be justified legally or morally. The only beneficiaries are journalists who have done wrong and their employers, and a public inquiry into press conduct has no business covering up wrongdoing by journalists.”

It sounds to Guido like Hacked Off are very familiar with the contents of the files. They could always leak them? Wink wink…

Boris was in the London Evening Standard’s office on Wednesday to meet Evgeny “Louche” Lebedev and lobbied quite hard for Sarah Sands to get the vacant editor’s desk. His sister Rachel was tweeting yesterday, too:

https://twitter.com/#!/RachelSJohnson/status/177433275516731393

See also: New Standard Editor Runners and Riders

While we are on the subject of “part time Mayors”, Alex Singleton, a former hack at the Telegraph, gets in touch to put Boris’ “second job” in perspective:

“When I edited Boris, he would ring me at 10:45am on a Sunday and we would discuss what had been in the news and he’d be given a green light to write on something. By 2pm, or 2:30pm, he’d file his copy on email. This would worry the hell out of me because his articles came from some random person’s email address – the address of whoever he was having Sunday lunch with. As you can see, the claim that his Telegraph column ate into his working week it utterly untrue. He is paid well because he is a genius writer: the public loves his columns, which sell a lot of copies of the paper.”

Guido wonders how long Ken would spend on his Indy column…

With the rumours being confirmed yesterday that two Sun journos have been hospitailised after attempting to take their own lives, anger is boiling over at Wapping and directed at Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg of the Management Standards Committee.

Though Guido has chased them this morning, the MSC’s spinners refuse to deny that some members of “the committee” were on a skiing trip together on January 28, while four senior Sun journos were being nicked. Having handed over the evidence to the Met, they sloped off, so to speak. No wonder Will Lewis has called in a private security firm for his own protection, as revealed this morning by a man refusing to be silenced…

With the surprise announcement on Thursday that Geordie Greig was jumping to the Mail on Sunday, Sarah Sands has been made acting editor of the Standard. Some suggest that if Lebedev had wanted to give her the job full time he would have just done so last week. Given the long handover time, speculation is swirling about…

Former London Paper editor Stefano Hatfield has apparently been making himself rather visible in the building in the last few days. He’s currently overseeing the “i”…

One theory is that Chris Blackhurst, one time Standard City editor, could return to push the button on the rumoured merger with the Indy. This would explain the decision to only create an “acting editor”…

The other name doing the rounds is Matthew d’Ancona. Currently a columnist on the paper, he would restore their national political clout and oversaw a record rise in circulation at the Speccie. If Guido was a betting man…

One of the Labour MPs at the heart of the phone hacking scandal has called for the police to investigate Mirror editor Richard Wallace’s admission at Leveson that his paper had paid public officials. In a Twitter ding-dong with former Screws Chief Reporter Neville Thurlbeck, who has written extensively today about Wallace’s admissions, Chris Bryant was backed into a corner before eventually declaring that “yes, of course” the paper should be investigated.

Though Bryant immediately backtracked and suggested that there was not enough evidence, there is much more than he had when he demanded the police investigate Coulson and Brooks in 2003. Guido is looking forward to the furious press releases and Bryant popping up on the telly any moment now…