Looking Deep in The Mirror

I began my career in the murky journalism cloud of phone hacking. Fortunately, I got out. But how does an experience during that time on a national newspaper sit with you 22 years later?

Willkomen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

Firstly, I’m pictured above with Gwyneth Paltrow (and my chins) way back when in 2001. And that, dear readers, is where our story begins…

The great thing about being 21 and fresh out of journalism school is you’re fearless.

I didn’t come from a family line of journalists. I didn’t want to be a hard-hitting journalist. I wanted the glitz and glam and razzmatazz of the celebrity world.

I had no clue who anybody was when I stepped onto the Daily Mirror floor in that grotty, dated and unstable tower in Canary Wharf. A tower which nowadays makes the hairs on my arms stand on end when I spy it across the London skyline.

Piers Morgan was the editor and sure, you felt your butt clench a little every time he approached the desk during the day to see what “showbiz” was doing. But I wasn’t intimidated by him. I knew he was an incredibly supportive editor to all staff, was thoroughly liked but was also a proper part of the ‘boys club’. You know, sexist and occasionally homophobic jokes and there was a joy in bringing people down from their celebrity pedestal and building them back up again. It came with the job at a red top.

But I didn’t consider Piers to be a bad person. I was 21. I didn’t know who I was at that age.

Truth be told, I’d gotten myself into the Mirror by endlessly pestering Matthew Wright by calling the showbiz desk - and the 3am desk following his departure – and he’d taken a punt on me. Truthfully, I couldn’t write for shit and I’d failed all my journalism exams. Law, public affairs, and my shorthand was way below what it needed to be for a job on a National.

I did a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stint on the Sutton Guardian at the start of my career. There I was just focused on my escape route to landing a job on a national gossip column. I’d interview all the local celebs on my patch, review local plays and generally gravitate towards anything entertainment wherever I possibly could. Within eight months I left for the Wharf.

There must have been something there. Something people saw in me. I lived and breathed celebrity. The glamour. The adoration. The star quality. I had been obsessed since the early days. Madonna, Kylie, Jason, Smash Hits, Party in the Parks – I wanted to be part of it all. And as I couldn’t sing, dance or act, I floated perfectly into the best part of the industry I could get too - journalism.

I remember covering Pride of Britain in that first year of shifting as a work experience and I’d gotten chats at the party from Sir Paul McCartney and Beckham. The desks were impressed, and Kevin O’Sullivan cleared it with Piers to offer me a full-time position.

“But what about my exams?” I’d said.

“Fuck your exams, you’re at the Mirror now – go quit that silly little job in Sutton and see you Monday,” barked Kevin. Hell yes!

Back then, in 2000, celebrity was in a real phase of growth. Reality television was just emerging, celebrities were selling millions of newspapers and generally no matter what class you were from, gossip was huge news. It was the days of affairs being exposed, esteemed columnists tearing down people for fun and millions of people being lead and swayed by what the newspapers wrote. A far cry from today where the supersonic rise of social media is overshadowing all forms of media.

It was also a time where another way of getting a story was extremely prevalent. Phone hacking. Journalists across all forms of media would call a celebrity or politicians number at the same time and using their password (usually a simple DOB) gain access to that person’s phone and rinse the personal and private information from that message. It would be turned around into a story and be emblazoned upon the front page the following day.

Everyone was hacked. Celebrities, friends of celebrities, relatives of celebrities…

“Turn those numbers over and see what you can get.”

“You might get something from ****** - maybe go back and check – they’ve just got back from lunch.”

“No, I haven’t got their number,” they’d say. “Well, if you get it, we can run it and check.”

It was just part of the conversation back then. A semi-open dialogue. I’d sit there wondering why there were a handful of journalists with three sets of phones on their desks. To start with, the yarn began as: “Oh, we have lots of readers calling in, so we have separate numbers for each.”

But by the end of my run at the Daily Mirror before a stint at the Sunday People, it was obvious phone hacking was the most integral form of garnering a story for showbiz. It was often the way the ‘splash’ (front page exclusive) was achieved. And more than often, stories that were found from ‘the phones’ were the stories leading the conversation of the nation and winning awards.

Endless affairs. Endless politicians caught out. Royalty exclusives. They all fell within splash territory. All captured thanks to the power of the hack.

Numerous people have told me to stay out of this conversation and stay away from the drama. “You don’t need to get involved with that,” they’d say. “Oooooooh no, stay away from all that.”

Well, at one point I agreed with them. Until I became sick of everyone staying silent. I’ve had a change of heart. You see, I managed to get out of the tabloid newspaper world ten years ago. I ended with four years at the Sunday Mirror where I had a column under my own name. Hacking had supposedly stopped by then. I was proud of that column, and it was a career highlight. From then on, all the celebrities I’d become great friends with (who were always trying to stop me working at the papers anyhow) were helping me as I set up my small one-man-band PR company. Some came across as clients, and others just supported me as I shook off the tabloid world, I’d become synonymous with.

But coming out of the showbiz world and those years of witnessing what I saw was like a dark murky cloud hanging above my head. In some ways it felt like a form of PTSD.

You see, the more I eradicated myself from the tabloid world and the people I’d worked alongside, the more I thought about the things I’d been asked to do.

“Call Kylie and ask her if she’s pregnant – here’s her number.” (I did it and to this day am mortified by this fact.)

“Fancy a spa weekend, Deano? We are going to bug a bunch of flowers and you’re going to deliver them to Tracy Shaw at Champney’s. We’ve booked you the room next door and you’re going to write down everything that happens – you’ll have an earpiece with the feed.” (I point blank refused to do this and resigned from the job weeks later.)

“Just follow Gareth Gates to the sex club. He’s a virgin. We can get a splash out of this.” (God, poor Gareth… I obeyed orders.)

Then you must think about those that fell along the way. How we appeared to lick our lips with relish at the public downfall and addiction issues of Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Katie Price. How we would build up female stars in the most dramatic way to garner newspaper or magazine sales. Remember Jade Goody? The last few years of her life were miserable thanks to the press. But when she died, she was a saint. It was all so two-faced.

Then there was Caroline Flack. Hounded to suicide a decade later in an age where she struggled with the speed of celebrity and was deeply affected by social media. The papers rinsed her falsely. ITV failed to support her publicly for the job she loved and had worked so hard for - but supported Ant McPartlin days later when he nearly ran over a child whilst driving his car drunk - and she just decided hastily that life wasn’t for her and took her own life. Suddenly the papers and ITV praised her and supported the #BeKind movement. Weeks later, they’d find a new victim. Hardly anything has changed. Just look at Schofield this week. Fresh meat.

Anyway, then we get to the actual hacking itself and why I’m sitting here enraged by the whole situation. It made me insanely uncomfortable knowing what was going on and how people’s privacy was being invaded. Mainly because today, I’ve got extremely good friends whose lives were genuinely thrown into huge turmoil because of the hacking.

I’ve got a friend in the public eye who was married at the time, and together, she and her husband blacklisted his own father for over seven years because they insisted he’d been leaking private stories to the papers. It wasn’t the ageing granddad - it was the papers hacking his phone continually for years. Others have had private medical procedures leaked into the public domain. Pregnancies, miscarriages, and illnesses.

The thing that truly angers me to the point of Vesuvius is that there is a mammoth group of people who won’t admit they hacked, and they caused such damage to so many. And literally everybody is staying schtum on what we all knew was a huge proportion of all story-getting at the tabloids. It’s tarnished the industry I grew up loving so much. Damaging people’s mental health without any care. Changing the course of some people’s lives.

I was genuinely not surprised one iota recently to see Prince Harry saying his relationship to Chelsy Davy had essentially gone down the pan because the papers hadn’t allowed the pair an ounce of privacy. There’s no denying the past few years for that man have been hard. But the reality of this situation is he’s been a marked man by the British media since he was born. His entire life. Can you blame him for wanting to leave the UK, fall in love and have a life away from the Royal family and the attention? No.

Then there’s the huge elephant in the room. Piers Morgan. I never saw Piers hack a phone – there were minions for that. I’ve had numerous calls from the Mirror group lawyers over the years trying to get me to stand up for them. They’ve given me a list of names of celebrities who are going through the motions with legalities. I replied saying I hoped those celebrities won their cases against the paper and not to contact me again. But did Piers know about it? From what I witnessed - yes. Did I see him and top-tier editors stand behind a reporter (there were only a handful of reporters that were ‘allowed’ to hack on the Mirror) and tell them to “run numbers”? Yes, I did.

It’s got to the point where these lies need to stop, and people need to accept they messed up and their moral compass is indefinitely tarnished.

Am I able to write this with a clear conscience? Well, just. I categorically never phone hacked. Was never asked too and I’m glad nobody put me in that predicament. I wouldn’t have done it. But did I visibly see it going on every week? Yes.

The thought wouldn’t have crossed my mind if I had been asked to as part of my job. I was old school. I hit the showbiz circuit. Talked to people. Made proper sources. And developed relationships that last to this very day. Hell, I was basically being paid to snoop around nightclubs and couldn’t leave until the competition (The Sun) had gone home.

Do I struggle with this knowledge about hacking? Yes. I know that sometimes, when I went on holiday, the editors placed stories they could’ve got from phone hacking on my column or within the news pages, with my name in the byline.

Sitting on the fact I’d witnessed so much on the Mirror for all these years has been something I’ve had to deal with. Watching Levison and all the editors speak under oath was like watching a terrible soap opera. For some reason people believed it.

I remember one very funny occasion where a reporter was asked to get into Amanda Holden’s voicemail. The reporter began dialing the numbers and for whatever reason a mistake was made and all we all heard was a whisper from Amanda who had picked up the phone and worked out what was happening. She snarled: “I know what you’re doing and one day I’ll fucking get you.” I genuinely hope she got a pay out from it all. Amanda’s life was the property of the papers for close to a decade and she had to just ride it out – many wouldn’t have coped with the level of intrusion that she did. Rather annoyingly, her current husband Chris Hughes still believes I phone hacked him or her and it resulted in an article. I didn’t. A story about Amanda must have been given my name as a byline.

The hilarious thing about the fickle world of showbiz is the fact Amanda was essentially hacked by Piers’ paper for years and she ended up alongside him on the Britain’s Got Talent panel. I guess that’s showbiz and sometimes you must think of the money.

I read Meghan and Harry’s mouthpiece Omid Scobie discussing the fact he was taught how to hack as a freelancer at the Mirror. I doubt it happened like that. It was a Stealth like conversation that only full-time staff were privy too during my years.

The remarkable thing is none of the names involved want to accept a shred of responsibility for their part in it all. It's ridiculous for anybody to think it would just be a tiny amount of people that knew about phone hacking. The whole newsroom in every department knew what was going on - but it wasn’t widely discussed. The exclusives came flying in thick and fast. At an impossible-to-keep-up speed. It was like some weird Harry Potter “don’t say it out loud Voldermort” scenario whereby everybody knew what was happening.

My final thoughts, journalism is a career and a business I fully believe in. But journalists are supposed to be the seekers of truth, and in the process, they themselves need to be honest. Honest about the way they gather information, honest about the way they present that information, and then they will be the force for good that we desperately need right now.