This morning’s Indy front page looked better than the usual polar-bear-on-a-melting-ice-cap stories, it promised exposure of 8 years of dirty work for Fleet Street by a blagging private eye, Stephen Whittamore. We actually learn nothing really new from the article. Despite having access to the Information Commissioner’s Operation Motorman files, Ian Burrell and Mark Olden don’t name a single journalist shown to have commissioned a “blagging” – the procuring of information illegally.

Journalists face two years jail time for each offence. Some 389 journalists were identified by Operation Motorman. None are named by this lamest of lame investigations to ever make a front page. Chris Bryant MP says they are not being named for legal reasons. You will note how he never mentions Andy Coulson. This is absolutely ridiculous, The Telegraph published the evidence of MPs wrong doing which led to arrests and jailings of MPs. Why won’t the Indy publish the evidence of journalists wrong doing? Be in no doubt, when Guido gets the files, he’ll publish them all, naming and shaming…

See also: The Met Widens Net

Guido always welcomes competition, but he barely noticed the Heffington Post slip onto the radar this morning. Clearly not willing to share Guido’s nominative pearls of wisdom, the Heff has gone with Right Minds as the name of the latest multi-author comment-fest. See what they’ve done there?

The other name put about was “Running Commentary” which could, pre-Olympics, have been mistaken for an athletics blog. Mail Political Editor James Chapman has been given a blog on the platform. Guido would like to congratulate him on being awarded the title of “Britain’s Best Political Blog” after just two posts, which reminds him of what Simon Heffer said about the internet in 2009: “while being possibly the greatest invention of my lifetime, is also a means of purveying rubbish.” Heffer’s wisdom once again standing the test of time.

Cruelly nicknamed by one hack as ”the Fired From the Telegraph Club”, the Mail have certainly rounded up some big hitters for the project. It does however just seem a bit like all the comment from the Daily Mail has just been put in one place…

The Guardian are reporting that Johann Hari is expected to be treated leniently by the investigation into his intellectual fraud led by former Indy editor Andreas Whittam Smith. Guido doesn’t think this will go down very well, but what do you reckon?

Hari is almost certain to lose the Orwell Prize, leaving the Indy on very thin ice…

Sky News is reporting that the Guardian reporter Amelia Hill has been questioned under caution after the arrest of police officer in regards of phone-hacking leaks to the paper.

If any of his journalists are charged, Rusbridger will have to walk.

Unless he’s less scrupulous than Coulson…

So another good day for Labour Uncut, with a second round of leaked extracts from Darling’s “Back from the brink: 1000 days at No 11“ this morning. Guido’s literary eyes-and-ears, who have seen a copy of the book, reckon yesterday’s snippets were bang on the money and deserved the follow-up coverage that they got. While yesterday there was silence from the BBC, today they have leapt all over one line about bankers:

“My worry was that they (the bankers) were so arrogant and stupid that they might bring us all down”.

Search as he might, Guido’s man can’t find this quote anywhere in the book. There could well be some Beeboid red faces next week if it turns out to be nonsense. Guido isn’t sure how lifting a blog story fits in with their triple sourcing lock, but they wouldn’t want anything to get in the way of a good banker bashing now would they?

Their print cousins also seem to have got things a little wide on the mark. Compare their article from November with their one yesterday:

Don’t believe everything you read in the papers…

UPDATE: The BBC get in touch to point out they did run the Darling story yesterday. On the website…

They also say that they checked out yesterday’s quotes with the publisher. But are “attributing today’s to Labour Uncut”. Read into that what you will…

The bank-holiday weekend has obviously taken its toll over at the Guardian - it seems they have taken to recycling old stories. Their splash that Gove directed money to the New School Network in order to aid the free school program sounds very familiar…

The NSN charity was set up by Rachel Wolf, a former Gove adviser and housed his current SpAd Dominic Cummings when Coulson initially vetoed his appointment in May 2010. It’s all very cosy, but as Paul Waugh points out, the Guardian already reported the half a million taxpayer bung to the charity back in October. As the first free schools prepare to open their doors, are the Guardian’s going to just rehash all of their stories about them as a last ditch fight?

In an effort to be helpful, Guido has today written to the Mirror Group’s Legal Director, Paul Vickers, who is conducting an internal investigation into allegations of Mirror Group hacking and blagging. So far Vickers has discovered nothing, not a single bit of wrongdoing. Mirror Group CEO Sly Bailey will be so disappointed. Maybe this will help him:

How much hush-money did the Mirror Group pay David Brown to buy his silence about widespread hacking of celebrities and politicians done from within the Mirror’s newsroom? Tom Watson and the DCMS Select Committee don’t seem very interested in hacking when it was done by Mirror journalists under Piers Morgan. Perhaps Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry will take a harder look…

UPDATE: Trinity Media’s press office confirm that David Brown left the business on April 5, 2006. So it would be more precise to say in the above letter that the settlement, rather than the sacking, was in 2007. The Press Gazette covered the story and the threat of an imminent industrial tribunal immediately after the sacking.

Last night’s Pesto phone-hack flap was over the fact that Coulson had his severance pay “Compromise Agreement” strung out such that there was an overlap with when he started spinning for Dave. It looks bad to be still taking the Murdoch shilling when you work for the man who wants to be Prime Minister.

It was almost a vintage phone-hacking day. Pesto got the leak, Guardian got cross and finally Tom Watson wrote a letter to someone. Apparently there must be a full investigation into all of this, however it seems these sort of delays are nowadays not so uncommon. Despite what Brillo and Yelland are saying about their respective terminations:

My original NI editor contract said if I resigned I was entitled to nothing. #hacking—
Andrew Neil (@afneil) August 23, 2011

When I left NewsCorp I didn't sign or have any 'compromise agreement! I just left.—
David Yelland (@davidyelland) August 23, 2011

Brillo and Yello stopped taking the Murdoch shilling a decade or more ago. Guido can reveal that right now those journalists dismissed from the News of the World last month have similarly had their payments subject to a delay which means their own “Comprise Agreement” severance payments will not be settled until October 6. Certainly one way of keeping mouths shut until after Conservative Party conference…

Cynics might think that yesterday was a good day to bury a little bad news for News International. But that would be casting aspersions on Pesto’s independence from his mate Will Lewis, News International’s general manager. He surely would never leak anything to Pesto, his friend of two decades…

Incidentally, whilst we are on the subject, Coulson walked for the illegal activities which happened on his watch. Will the Guardian’s Rusbridger do the same if his journalists get nicked?

“Tea with Tony Blair at No. 10. He was yawning a lot and drinking endless cups of tea. I tried to wake him up a bit.”

The above is Piers Morgan’s own diary dated March 26, 1997, taken from his 2005 account of his days in newspaper journalism, The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade.  Those of you who are political insiders will realise that John Major, not Tony Blair, was in Downing Street in March 1997. Morgan just lies and lies. As this example shows, he isn’t even a good liar.

Nevertheless for some reason the DCMS select committee isn’t planning to recall Piers to explain his claims to them, in the light of subsequent evidence uncovered, that he cleaned up The Mirror and should be congratulated for the same. He claimed:

“If there are particular grievances about how the Daily Mirror has behaved, and I say that our record in this area is exemplary, exemplary. I don’t say this because we somehow got away with this, I say this because we operate the [PCC] Code of Practice effectively and seriously.”

Yet we have by his own written admissions the clear implication that under his editorship hacked voicemails from Sven-Göran Eriksson to Ulrika Jonsson as well as  from Paul McCartney to Heather Mills were the basis of stories. Data from “Operation Motorman” also reveals that the Mirror Group paid private investigators some £442,878.73 to illegally procure personal data like tax records, DVLA records, medical and phone records. 65 invoices for criminal transactions can be traced back directly to Piers Morgan’s Daily Mirror during his time as editor, a time when he told the DCMS he should be “congratulated” for cleaning up the paper and operating the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice “effectively and seriously”. His claims of exemplary behavior are not just an exaggeration by Piers, they are the exact opposite of the truth, he lied to the parliamentarians to their faces.

During the last hearings James Murdoch was asked if he was aware of the term “wilful blindness”, in not knowing or choosing not to know what was going on at the News of the World. The committee plans to recall him as a result. The ongoing failure of the DCMS Select Committee’s chairman John Whittingdale to recall the second most prominent procurer of blagging and hacking, besides Andy Coulson, is unfathomable. In fact it is bordering on “wilful blindness”…

UPDATE: DCMS Select Committee member Louise Mensch tweets in response:

@GuidoFawkes Cttee looking at prior testimony from witnesses, wouldn't be appropriate to discuss any specifics.—
Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) August 23, 2011

Guido has often highlighted the magpie tendencies of Mail columnist Andrew Pierce. He has been known to shamelessly lift content from this blog, now however after regular highlighting of this habit, he has stopped. It seems however that Andrew has found new pastures for “inspiration”. Pierce writes today:

The excellent BBC Radio 4 series The Reunion brought together five past pupils of The Courtauld Institute Of Art, whose most famous director, Sir Anthony Blunt, was sensationally exposed as a  Soviet spy.The former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures was unmasked by Margaret Thatcher’s government as a member of the notorious 1950s Cambridge spy ring. Blunt’s pupils told listeners that they were worried Blunt would be remembered not as an  art historian but as a spy. Most people, surely, will remember him for what he really was — a traitor.

Which strangely reads just like a letter from yesterday’s Telegraph:

The Blunt fact

SIR – A group of worthies on Radio 4’s The Reunion were concerned that Anthony Blunt may be remembered not as an art historian, but as a spy.
They need not worry. Although his Soviet controller was indeed a spy, Blunt himself was not.
He was a traitor.

Jon Ball
Dronfield, Derbyshire

At first Guido thought this was just a coincidence, but then he had a look at some of the other snippets that would have been filed after lunch yesterday. Pierce writes:

The ludicrous Sally Bercow has entered the Big Brother House. What are the odds now on her husband soon being evicted from the Speaker’s House?

A good point, well made, in Saturday’s Telegraph:

Housemates

SIR – Sally Bercow has entered the Big Brother house. The smart money is now on her husband being evicted from the Speaker’s House.

John Axon
Petts Wood, Kent

As a previous Assistant Editor of the Telegraph, Andrew should know about the audience crossover with the Mail…