‘If it hadn’t been so sad, it would have been funny’

Mr Lewis told the Leveson inquiry News of the World journalists wrongly concluded that Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) chairman Gordon Taylor was having an affair after hacking his phone.

Mr Lewis said the paper’s reporters misinterpreted a voicemail message from a woman thanking Mr Taylor for speaking at her father’s funeral.

The solicitor rejected the explanation offered by the News of the World’s lawyer, Tom Crone, that the story derived from legitimate journalistic inquiries. “It just wasn’t a proper legitimate investigation. It was a phone had been hacked in order to get that story,” he said.

Mr Lewis told the inquiry that a photographer working for the News of the World took a picture of Joanne Armstrong, then the PFA’s in-house solicitor, having lunch with Mr Taylor in the mid-2000s.

In a way, I feel sorry for the News of the World. Mark Lewis

The lawyer wrote to the Sunday tabloid ordering it not to publish the photograph and threatening to apply for an injunction. He said Mr Crone replied saying the paper would not run the story and refusing to pay damages or costs because it was obtained through “proper journalistic inquiries”.

No other explanation

Mr Lewis said he believed that the News of the World incorrectly thought Mr Taylor was having an affair after his voicemails were illegally intercepted.

The PFA chairman had spoken at the funeral of Ms Armstrong’s father and she left a message on his phone the next day saying “Thank you for yesterday, you were wonderful”, the inquiry heard.

Mr Lewis said: “The tabloid journalist who knew of that message added two and two and made 84. They couldn’t possibly conceive of any other explanation.

“If it hadn’t been so sad, it would have been funny.”

Widespread

Mr Lewis also told the Leveson inquiry that hacking the phones of celebrities and other people in the news was “too easy to do” for journalists.

He suggested that reporters, at least initially, thought of the practice as no worse than driving at 35mph in a 30mph zone. Mr Lewis said the News of the World was the paper caught out hacking phones because its private detective, Glenn Mulcaire, kept such detailed records.

He told the inquiry: “In a way, I feel sorry for the News of the World, or certainly the News of the World’s readers.

“Because it was a much more widespread practice than just one newspaper. It was just simply that their inquiry agent, Glenn Mulcaire, had written things down and kept the evidence.

“The fact that evidence doesn’t exist in written form doesn’t mean to say that the crime didn’t happen.”

Mulcaire was jailed along with the News of the World’s former royal editor Clive Goodman in January 2007 after they admitted intercepting voicemail messages left on phones belonging to royal aides.