During the trial of Tommy Sheridan for perjury in 2010, an offence for which he was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, his defence argued he had been the victim of a plot by News International and that this had involved Sheridan’s phone being hacked.
Evidence presented to the court showed that police had discovered Sheridan’s personal details in the notebooks of convicted phone hacker and News of the World contractor Glenn Mulcaire.
The defence had argued that information gathered from voicemail and a listening device in Sheridan’s car was used to manufacture evidence in the perjury case, including an alleged video tape of him apparently confessing to visiting a sex club in Manchester.
At Sheridan’s perjury trial, advocate-depute Alex Prentice QC dismissed the significance of phone hacking during his summation to the jury, claiming it was irrelevant to the charge and pointed to the testimony of Detective Chief Superintendent Williams. The police officer had told the jury he found “no evidence” that Sheridan’s voicemail had been accessed illegally.
Prentice also claimed that the contents of the McNeilage tape had not been gathered from any illegal voicemail access, and that no evidence existed of phone or voicemail interception.
The advocate-depute’s claim relied on the testimony of a police detective whose investigation concluded that just one person’s phone had ever been hacked by Mulcaire.
Andrew Coulson
At the trial News of the World editor Andrew Coulson testified to having no knowledge of Sheridan’s phone being hacked and that “no culture of hacking” existed at the newspaper. Coulson also claimed he was never in contact with Mulcaire and that he did not even know his name until Mulcaire had been arrested, telling the court: ”I never met him, spoke to him or emailed him.”
Coulson did however admit that the newspaper used Mulcaire’s company, 9 Consultancy, revealing that he had once asked a NotW department head to reduce the amount of money the company was being paid.
The perjury trial was also told by Coulson that his staff did not pay police officers, replying to the defence’s question with: “Not to my knowledge.”
However, the BBC recently reported that “e-mails, which appear to show that Mr Coulson authorised the payments, have been passed to the police”.
Has Coulson committed perjury? Whatever the answer to that question, another more complicated one arises: does it affect Sheridan’s own conviction for perjury?
Scottish legal writer “Lallands Peat Worrier” points out that Coulson was a witness for the defence and not the prosecution, making it more difficult to argue that Coulson’s evidence formed a key part of the Crown’s case against Sheridan.
However, News International employees Bob Bird and Douglas Wight, as well as NotW solicitor Kenneth Lang, were indeed Crown witnesses. All three were questioned in court about phone hacking.
If it also emerges that the Scottish News of the World intercepted voice messages, questions will be raised about Bird, Wight and Lang’s evidence.
Emails
One of the more contentious parts of Sheridan’s trial (as in many other trials) was the process of “discovery” of evidence by the defence.
One example was the claim made by Coulson, Bird and Lang. They all insisted that two years’ worth of email records belonging to News Group Newspapers had been lost when the data was allegedly transferred to India.
But in January, The Independent newspaper reported that those “lost” emails had now been found.
Bird was forced to apologise for, in his words, “inadvertently misleading the court”.
Given that these emails are the source of the new revelations about NotW’s phone hacking activities, Sheridan’s defence lawyers will surely demand to see them?
Conclusion
Crown witnesses during the perjury trial testified that any notion of Sheridan’s phone being hacked was “far-fetched” or rejected the assertion as mere “conspiracy theory”.
While under cross-examination, Coulson himself said that any claims Sheridan’s phone was being hacked can be true in “the parallel universe that exists only in [Sheridan's] mind”.
Now that widely reported new allegations say that NotW, under Coulson’s editorship, hacked so many people’s phones (including one belonging to a murdered child, phones belonging to the families of 7/7 bombing victims and the phones of dead soldiers) is it inconceivable that a politician suing the newspaper for slander would also be having his phone hacked?
More to the point, is it actually believable that NotW would not hack Sheridan’s phone?
If the jury at the perjury trial had been aware of this new information, would the verdict on Sheridan have been different?
One thing is for sure. Serious questions must be asked about Sheridan’s conviction for perjury.
Is his conviction unsound now that even more doubt has been raised about so many key witness?
Strathclyde Police and the Crown Office must now set to work immediately in finding out the truth.
Update
BBC Scotland is reporting:
“Witness statements at the Tommy Sheridan perjury trial are to be probed following new allegations in the News of the World phone hacking scandal.
The Crown Office has asked Strathclyde Police for a “preliminary assessment” and to hand any findings to prosecutors for possible further action.
Those who gave evidence at the trial included Bob Bird, Douglas Wight and former editor Andy Coulson.”
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