The News of the World ran stories on Amanda Holden that displayed a remarkable knowledge of her phone calls. And then it hired her to write it a column
I'm afraid there's sad news for those of you who emailed asking whether we could have another journalism masterclass from News of the World journalists Dan Wootton and Tom Latchem, whose pious pronouncements on the ethical responsibilities of the fourth estate were highlighted here last week. As the paper's showbiz and TV editors, you may recall, Dan and Tom had frothed themselves into complete indignation at journalist Johann Hari, and used the exposure of his quote-lifting to dispense all manner of furious 140-character lectures on journalistic standards and what it means to be a "proper journalist". Naturally, we all hoped this could become a weekly symposium, and I'd loved to have brought you their always-trenchant views on any trifling media stories that may be drifting through our transoms this week. But what can I tell you? They've suddenly clammed up, bar a moronic statement from Wootton on Thursday, in which he claimed "I do NOT work for the newspaper you are reading about." Well he doesn't now, but doubtless he'll be in the same job at the Sunday Sun, or whatever the amusingly cynical News of the World replacement will be called.
Still, there are always the News of the World's archives, should we be in need of intrigue. Stephen Fry once said reading Harry Potter was like "swimming in chocolate", so Lost in Showbiz will leave you to extrapolate what reading through some of the News of the World's output from the phone-hacking era feels like.
Earlier this week, you see, I wondered idly about that "exhaustively thorough" News International investigation into phone hacking, which you will recall turned up absolutely zero incidents of potential wrongdoing. Having a few minutes to spare, I decided to conduct my own painstaking investigation into possibly suspicious stories, by doing a cuttings search. The search terms I chose were "phone" and "messages" ? I do hope you can keep up with the tech wizardry ? and I limited the trawl to the 12 months after Milly Dowler was murdered.
Now, the Guardian's archive system is rather creaky (they doubtless have state-of-the-art over at News International), so it took a full three seconds before my search revealed the story making specific reference to the details of a message left on Milly Dowler's voicemail, along with a slew of other articles. That Milly voicemail story carried the byline of Sarah Arnold, who also wrote the now-notorious interview with the Dowler parents, in which they spoke of their (falsely nurtured) hope their daughter was still alive.
And now for a moment of bathos. Scanning the article list, I noticed another byline for Arnold, concerning actor (and now Britain's Got Talent judge) Amanda Holden, who had been partying at new year in Barcelona. There, she had apparently texted and called her former lover Neil Morrissey "18 times in one day".
One really does have to marvel at the precision of that figure ? but a perfectly innocent explanation is provided by a handy anonymous source at the same party. "When we realised it was Neil on the other end we started keeping count of the calls as a bit of a joke," says this beady-eyed onlooker. "We got to 12 and she must have made half a dozen before that."
Mmm. Alas, that would not be the first time that Amanda's call volume and timings were laid bare in bizarre detail, with the archive yielding references to her and another man making "almost 100 text and phone calls ? sometimes 10 a day", and to the fact that she had been "constantly phoning" Morrissey during the period her then husband was in the Celebrity Big Brother house. "As soon as Les [Dennis] was out of the picture Amanda was on the phone," we learned, "and the calls became more and more frequent while he was on TV". It goes on. In fact, week after week, the level of detail is remarkable ? in fact, you really couldn't do better if you were sitting with a print-out of her phone records in front of you.
This is all immensely low-level compared to the Dowler horror, you'll be saying ? and it most certainly is. But since 2009, Amanda has actually been contracted as a columnist for the News of the World. Following a break after a tragic miscarriage earlier this year, she had been due to return to the paper imminently and with much fanfare. A call to her agent seems necessary.
Has Amanda been contacted by Operation Weeting and informed that her phone may have been hacked, Lost in Showbiz asks? She has, confirms Alison Griffin; about seven weeks ago. Was she surprised? On this, alas, Alison cannot comment.
But Lost in Showbiz has spoken not to an invented "onlooker", but to a genuine source close to Amanda's management during those years, who insists that she was aware of constant hacking of her phone, but like many celebrities of the time felt completely powerless to stop it. Whether she eventually resigned herself to the violation as a cost of doing business is hard to say.
But for Lost in Showbiz, it would be a sadness if she continued to be fed by the hand that bit her, as it were, as it would imply that despite all this, there will endure a frightened, defeated co-dependence between public figures and the tabloid press ? the precise compromised relationship that initially made so many people assume, quite wrongly, that phone-hacking didn't matter if it was only celebs being hacked, as they didn't really count.
Far be it from this column to go completely gooey over the entertainment industry, but celebrities do count, and while there are wildly varying degrees of collusion between them and the press, no amount of that negates their right not to have their most private interactions illegally monetised by Rupert Murdoch.
So let's hope Amanda resists invitations to sign up to any future incarnation of a Murdoch Sunday tabloid ? and they'll be begging the likes of her to legitimise it, you can be sure ? without provoking the catastrophic assault on her reputation that would have been standard in days gone by (ie last week). And as a recovering Murdoch employee itself, Lost in Showbiz can assure her that every day feeling clean(ish) and serene(ish) is a total positive. Let this column be your sober sponsor, Amanda!
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