Hugh Grant vs Paul McMullan: NotW Phone Hacking Interview

by Jordan Yerman | April 13, 2011 at 08:19 am

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Hugh Grant Interviews Paul McMullan, News of the World Phone Hacking Whistleblower

Hugh Grant wrote a piece for New Statesman on the News of the World phone hacking scandal, in which papers from Rupert Murdoch's tabloids, to the Daily Mail are implicated in a web of illegal wiretapping throughout the UK.

Hugh Grant met Paul McMullan on a country road, when McMullan gave the actor a lift after his car broke down. Turns out that McMullan, now a pub landlord, was one of the whistleblowers in the NotW scandal. Paul McMullan wasn't entirely reformed, though, and was unable to keep from selling the photos he took of Hugh Grant that day.

Hugh Grant returned to McMullan's pub in Dover with a hidden tape recorder, and proceeded to interview the former tabloid journalist about the phone hacking scandal. So, Hugh Grant secretly recorded a conversation about secretly recording conversations. The results are fascinating; click through for the whole thing.

Me But would they [the Mail] buy a phone-hacked story?
Him For about four or five years they've absolutely been cleaner than clean. And before that they weren't. They were as dirty as anyone . . . They had the most money.
Me So everyone knew? I mean, would Rebekah Wade have known all this stuff was going on?
Him Good question. You're not taping, are you?
Me [slightly shrill voice] No.

Him Well, yeah. Clearly she . . . took over the job of [a journalist] who had a scanner who was trying to sell it to members of his own department. But it wasn't a big crime.

Paul McMullan: Corruption Goes Much Deeper than Phone Hacking

My favorite part of this: McMullan says that the reason analog scanners were made illegal in 2001 is because British politicians were tired of getting caught in corruption scandals by journalists hiding outside their homes in vans. Rather than tackle the actual corruption, they went after the means by which that corruption was exposed. Sure enough, reporters were not just going to slink away; they instead found a way to get access to phone records.

As for Rupert Murdoch? Paul McMullan concedes that "we're all just pawns in his game": Britain's political class is pressuring the police to slow down the phone-hacking investigation, so that Rupert Murdoch won't get too upset, and this is compounded by the fact that many UK cops have taken bribes from tabloids to give up dirt on celebrities, so they won't put too much effort into investigating themselves.

(Note that Paul McMullan doesn't have a problem with phone hacking per se: he blew the whistle in order to get more publicity for himself and his pub.)

At the end, Hugh Grant remarked, "apart from the fact that Paul hates people like me, and I hate people like him, we got on quite well."