Phone-hacking trial: Prosecutor tells jury to 'see behind the mask' of Brooks and Coulson
Court: Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson
After a delay while legal matters were discussed, the jury in the trial of Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson and four others took their seats just after 11am to hear Andrew Edis QC, the lead prosecution barrister, begin his closing argument. Edis began by asking the jury to "think about phone-hacking", reminding them that three senior executives at the News of the World had already pleaded guilty to intercepting voicemails, all of them heads of the newsdesk, "the engine room of the newspaper".
"The three people you are trying," he went on, "are even more senior executives of the paper, whose job it was to work hand in glove with the newsdesk editor and supervise what they were doing." The barrister told the jury there was a "rotten state of affairs" at the paper and if the editors did not know about it, "what was their job, what did they do?"
Edis asked the jury to consider "are these people incompetent", adding that the three defendants had all brought character witnesses to court and none had said "this person is careless and useless". "If you had a murder and three people had been in the house all weekend and claimed 'we spent the whole time in the kitchen and didn't know a body was there', that would be very suspicious," the QC suggested.
The prosecutor then moved on to the issue of emails and asked the jury to accept that "when business people write emails to each other they generally mean what they say", pointing to the "palace cops" messages between Clive Goodman and Andy Coulson. "We have been here for months going through things in refined detail, but sometimes refined detail is not where the truth is to be found," he added. Edis asked the jury to consider the phone records from the original police investigation in 2006. "It was like someone turned on a light," he said, adding that the hack of the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler was another moment were the "light was switched on". In only 191 days between 2005/2006 alone there were 1,450 hacking calls, he said. "There was a lot of hacking going on," Edis suggested. "Was it the position, as stated by Dan Evans, that even the office cat knew?"
Edis then asked the jury to consider that phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire had his "bumper contract" renewed annually every year between 2001 and 2006 and this had been approved by the editor or managing editor on each occasion. "That is the gap in the defence case," he suggested. "What did they think he did?" he asked the jury to consider, pointing out that there was no evidence that Mulcaire did anything other than "phone work".
The prosecutor then asked the jury to note that this case "was not an attack on the freedom of the press, or the tabloid press, they have a duty to hold the powerful to account". However, Edis went on: "The ultimate protection of democracy is the rule of law," and he asked the jury to consider the evidence against each defendant carefully. He then asked the jury to consider the motives of the defendants, suggesting: "Young, charming, clever and ambitious people decided they did not care what happened, they just wanted the story." He suggested that one of the first actions of Brooks on becoming editor of the News of the World in 2002 was to bring Greg Miskiw back from New York. "What did he have to offer?" the prosecutor asked, apart from his link with phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire.
Edis went on to suggest to the jury "these are an unusual group of criminal suspects, unusually talented, unusually articulate, these are gifted people". The prosecutor asked the jury to consider that the evidence of Rebekah Brooks was a "a carefully constructed, carefully choreographed performance" which not every defendant could carry off. "You have to see behind the mask and the cleverly constructed little jokes, if these people wanted to spin you a lie they are capable," Edis said.
The prosecutor then told the jury he would give them a "thumbnail" of each charge. On count one, he said: "There was phone-hacking and each of the defendants was in a position to stop it, they did not because they knew it was going on". Edis went on: "Count five is another conspiracy charge," telling the jury that "the agreement is the crime" and in this case the agreement was to pay a public servant for information. "It was corruption, public officials are not supposed to stuff their back pockets with cash. If you cant trust them on that, what can you trust them on?"
On count six, the prosecutor said, it was a question of "plain English". The boxes removed from the archive were marked "Rebekah's notebooks" and, he suggested, that is what they were, adding: "Mrs Carter would not have done anything without Rebekah's approval." On count seven, Edis asked the jury, was the hiding of the computers ahead of a police search "a spontaneous act, or is it a plan? If you agree it was a plan they are guilty," he said, adding: "That is very, very high risk activity under the eyes of the media of the world, there is no reason for anyone to take that risk unless it matters." Edis suggested to the jury that there must have been "damaging material" that had to be concealed unless "they wanted to get themselves arrested for no reason at all".
The court then rose for lunch.
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