Leveson inquiry: Nick Davies, Paul McMullan, Richard Peppiatt - live
Full coverage as the Guardian journalist, former News of the World features editor and ex-Daily Star reporter give evidence
11.32am: Peppiatt's witness statement is now available online.
11.30am: The inquiry is now having a five-minute break.
11.29am: Peppiatt accuses Northern & Shell of trying to smear him in a bid to stop him speaking out against the Daily Star.
He returns to the subject of whether his phone had been hacked and says the person who is intercepting his messages is "not on the payroll of Northern & Shell" but it seems to him "very very likely" that he got this information from Nothern & Shell.
I look at the motive and where is the motive to try and get me to shut up? I know exactly where the motive is.Generally for the last nine months there's been an attempt to blacken me behind the scenes.
Rumours about myself have been fed into the rumour mill of Fleet Street, much of it untrue. It's attempting to discourage others not to speak out 'we will make it as hard as possible to criticise others'.
11.26am: Peppiatt is now talking about a story when Katie Price AKA Jordan appeared in public without a ring on her finger. The story that appeared referred to her "marriage being on the rocks". He said that one fact was all he needed, but when you have to stretch the story to 700 words "you have to draw a lot of inferences, speculate".
11.20am: He did not raise his concerns with Dawn Neesom, the then editor of the Daily Star.
There is no avenue to make complaints. The structure is you are complaining to the very person you are complaining about.
You either take it on the chin or you leave. I do question my own moral judgment and the fact I stayed as long as I di! d, but t here are so few jobs for reporters in the current climate that once you've got full-time work you have to think very carefully about packing it in.
11.19am: Peppiatt is asked what rights he had not to show up at the Daily Star, given that it was such an awful workplace.
Turning to the inquiry's QC, Robert Jay, he says: "The same right as you, I suppose, as a human being with free will."
But he says "it's very powerful organisation who kick downwards at people who are easy targets".
11.18am: Peppiatt says he found Daily Express editor Hugh Whittow's evidence to a parliamentary committee yesterday "callous".
Whittow was asked about libellous headlines about Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies and told the committee that the press had put its hands up after getting it wrong and moved on.
Well Chris Jefferies doesn't move on. His life has been irreparably changed.
11.12am: Peppiatt says he went into the industry with his eyes open.
It's not a nursery school, I'm not complaining. However I think it's useful to the inquiry to know that we are cannon fodder on the front lineWe get the flak because it's our byline about it, but we are just following instructions.
11.11am: Peppiatt suspects his phone was hacked following a strange incident when a friend phoned to tell him he could not make a football match they had arranged to watch.
He couldn't make it and left me a voicemail message. I then received an email an hour later I never got the message. I never got the voicemail. This is circumstantial, but to this day I don't know how I never got those messages.
Peppiatt says that police traced the source of this harassment back to someone "linked to the tabloid world, long established" but he can't name them for legal reasons.
11.11am: Peppiatt says other strange incidents occurred. In the days after I resigned one of the news editors emailed me asking how the doctors went references about my CV and to a sitcom I was working on and to the Guardian reporter Paul Lewis who I'd been working with on this story. 11.09am: He is now talking about the day he resigned. He leaked his letter of resignation to the Guardian but quickly started to get threatening and menacing text messages from unknown quarters. He initially thought that they had leaked his number to the English Defence League, but these people knew where he lived and knew his phone number. The messages included "You're a marked man until the day you die", "RD will get you" and "We're doing a kiss and tell on you". It worried me enough to get my girlfriend move out for a couple of days, because I didn't know where it was coming from and the frequency, all through the night, I thought it was best we wait until this cooled off. 11.04am: Here are two of Peppiatt's made up stories, one about Kelly Brook hiring a hypnotist, the other about "Muslim-only loos". 10.59am: Peppiatt now details how he completely made up a story on a bomb plot. He says the inspiration for the newsdesk was "a line" in the Sunday Telegraph that "Muslims may be wanting to disguise themselves as Sikhs and hide bombs in their headdress". He explain that he then phoned the police. They said: 'Never heard of it, never heard of it all.' How it should work, is that that kills it you can go over to your newsdesk and say, 'Maybe the Sunday Telegraph have got this wrong, I can't stand this up' and you move on. Instead what you do is 'a security source said' and you make up a quote for a pre-ordained line and then you ring Inderjit Singh [a Sikh representative] and add a veneer of legitima! cy by te lling them something you know is not true and get a quote. 10.54am: Peppiatt says there was another casual reporter who expressed disquiet. Bosses then made her life miserable. That's the atmosphere: you toe the line or you get punished. 10.48am: Peppiatt tells the inquiry there is an important difference between the legal sense and the moral sense of truth. He says the tabloid press have no interest in the moral sense. If one newspaper pushes the line, everyone rushes to fill the void behind them. I'm sure I'll be lambasted by some tabloid editors for saying that. But I'm sick of [tabloid editors] stepping forward and going 'moral considerations are at the forefront of our mind', because they're certainly not. 10.42am: Peppiatt issues another apology for his work this time to Britain's Got Talent's Susan Boyle. He explains how he had to follow her after she shot to fame on the ITV show. I overstepped the mark with harassment. She was on The X Factor [sic] and she was finding the pressure quite overwhelming. I think she has some sort of learning difficulties and she was not prepared for the huge media ingterest surrounding her She was acting in a bizarre manner and often this was after provocation [by the press] she was lashing out She was whisked away from the press by Britain's Got Talent but this was "like a red rag to a bull", explains Peppiatt, who was then dispatched to Scotland to try and find her. He was told to get a kilt and roses and try and propose to Boyle and this culminated in a mock proposal. Her reaction was "piss off". "Yet again I can only apologise for my part in that," says Peppiatt. 10.38am: ! Peppiatt has issued an apology about the Star's coverage of death of Kevin McGee, the ex-partner of Little Britain comic Matt Lucas. He tells Leveson he wrote about Matt Lucas and his ex-partner after he got a call from a member of the public saying they had information on their breakup, and they couldn't meet up but would have to take his word for it. The Daily Star news desk told him to "just write it up", Peppiatt claims. Matt Lucas later sued for breach of privacy. [I said to the desk] 'Surely I need to meet the man first.' It was 'just write it up', so there was a front-page story about him spending a lot of money on drugs before his death. Certainly there was a [feeling] if he is dead, you can't libel the dead you can say pretty much what you like about him because he is dead. That is the callous perspective on him and I would like to apologise to Kevin McGee's family. I accept responsibility that nobody held a gun to my head and made me write that story. I feel very ashamed. 10.36am: The first two weeks of August there were 40 stories about the Big Brother and the Health Lottery dominated the front pages. This is purely advertising their own stories; it is not about journalism. 10.36am: Peppiatt says Express and Star owner Richard Desmond uses his papers as vehicles to promote his own products including Big Brother which is on Channel 5, the station the Express proprietor now owns. 10.35am: The PCC upheld a complaint about the Muslim-only loos. Peppiatt said he was surprised that it went this far because the PCC does not entertain "third-party complaints". It is certainly a massive flaw in the PCC anyone can't complain. If you are a Muslim and offended by that story they will say 'sorry, I don't see how it affects you directly.' That's pretty disgraceful really. 10.33am: Lord Justice Leveson asks: "These are real headlines?" to which Peppiatt s! ays "yes ". 10.30am: Peppiatt now raises a laugh as he gives examples of Daily Star headlines that he says were made up: Chile mine to open as theme park Angelina Jolie to play Susan Boyle in film Bubbles to give evdence at Jacko trial Jade is back in Big Brother (she was dead at the time) "We've obviously had the Maddy in the freezer story which you have heard of already." Grant Theft Auto Rothbury Brittany Murphy killed by swine flu Macca vs Mucca on Ice Muslim-only public loos The latter, Peppiatt says, "was completely untrue as well". 10.27am: There are certain days he would be asked to do eight or nine stories a day so there was no time for investigations. 10.26am: Peppiatt tells the inquiry that quite often a story would be changed and the line that kept it on the right side of accuracy or truth would be removed by a subeditor who wasn't familiar with the story. Sometimes you would cringe and go, (intake of breath), 'That was a bad line to take out' Don't think just because a reporter's name is on the top of the story that they had any word in how it turned out. 10.25am: Peppiatt on paying for stories: In all tabloids there is what we call 'a come on', it will say we pay for tips and information and a phone number to call. Most of the time it's rubbish but there would be an occasion when good stories would come through. The first thing they would ask is 'How much can I get?' The minute you introduce this incentive people go, 'Maybe I should flam this up a bit.' 10.24am: He gives Leveson an example: a travel story. He may get a press release with statistics on holidays and a company such as Travelocity might get mentioned in the story. 10.22am: Peppiatt on the role of PR agencies: PR is a huge influence. There are more PRs than there are journali! sts. You get into your inbox every day dozens and dozens of press releases from companies all trying to get their brand in the paper, get mentioned. [They are] Incentivised, I had three or four holidays from PR companies in order to get their stories an extra push. 10.19am: Peppiatt on the truth and tabloids: This [the Daily Star] is not a truth-seeking enterprise; much of tabloids are not truth-seeking it is ideologically-driven and it is impact-driven. 'How is the most aggressive way we can package this story and help sell the paper?' 10.18am: Peppiatt on the Daily Star and private investigators: The Daily Star did not really use private investigators. I don't think that's an ethical decision, but a financial one. They've got a smaller budget than their rivals and often they were happy to follow up on stories of their rivals. 10.17am: Peppiatt tells the inquiry that as far as he knows the Daily Star did not use private investigators. However he recalls a day when there was a rumour that Steven Gerrard had got a 16-year-old pregnant and he was sent up to Liverpool to establish the truth. He needed some assistance and he called up "a senior person" and they came back with a list of addresses and phone numbers to call. He admits there may not be anything illegal about this but claims the list of addresses and numbers was more than typically available on a service like Tracemark, which aggregates information publicly available on telephone directories and so on. 10.13am: Peppiatt says that the PCC code was not discussed. It was just not something that's brought up in reference to stories. There are implicit considerations - you don't go barging into hospitals - but certainly there was never a discussion that I remember on 'how should we run this story in relation to the PCC code?'. The Daily Star is a rightwin! g tabloi d you must try and adhere to that ideological perspective. If there is a government report out with statistics, any statistics that don't fit, you ignore them. If knife crime has gone up and the rest of crime has gone down, you just do knife crime There is an overwhelming negativity and it runs throughout the press. A story is not a story unless it is knocking someone or knocking an ethnic group, whatever it may be. 10.12am: He says there was nothing said about the Press Complaints Commission guidelines, nor were they included in the terms and conditions of his contract. 10.11am: He tells Leveson that being a freelancer at the Daily Star was quite typical of the industry. He was paid on a daily rate and a weekly rate. He was paid 118 a day for an eight-hour day. For any hours over that, he might get paid extra - 136 for nine hours and 140-plus for 10 hours.Anything over 12 hours was double pay. Occasionally he would get a bonus, he says. 10.09am: Peppiatt is now running through his journalistic career. He started at Splash News in Los Angeles and returned to the UK and went to university and did the NCTJ journalism training course. He was a freelance reporter on the Mail on Sunday, sometimes working for a week, sometimes for a day. This lasted for four or five months in 2008-09. He then worked for the Ferrari news agency for six months and finally got a job with the Daily Star, where he worked as a freelancer for two years. 10.01am: Richard Peppiatt is now giving evidence. 10.01am: Associated Newspapers has submitted a written undertaking aimed at protecting its employees if they choose to give anonymous evidence to the Leveson inquiry. In a document on anonymous evidence published by the inquiry yesterday but which appears to have got lost in the flurry of interest around Charlotte Church and Anne Diamond the counsel Associated, Jonathan Caplan QC, writes: "...nothing which ! any empl oyee of ANL provides to the Leveson Inquiry by way of evidence, whether orally or in writing, will be used in subsequent disciplinary proceedings against that employee or against any other employee of ANL". However, the undertaking has some important caveats: it does not apply when allegations of misconduct arise that are "so serious that it would justify dismissal for gross misconduct" and is also exempted when the witness is charged with misleading the inquiry. So, Associated Newspapers retains the right to sack or discipline employees whose evidence raises serious allegations of gross misconduct against them. 9.59am: Richard Peppiatt, the Daily Star reporter is up first, James Robinson tells us. 9.58am: Dan Sabbagh, James Robinson and Roy Greenslade will be following proceedings down at the Royal Courts of Justice. Your follow him them on Twitter at @dansabbagh and @jamesro47, while Lisa O'Carroll - @lisaocarroll - and Josh Halliday - @JoshHalliday - will be live blogging. 9.43am: While we're waiting for the inquiry to begin at 10am, here's video of Steve Coogan's memorable clash with Paul McMullan as they discussed phone hacking on Newsnight. 9.40am: Welcome to day nine of the Leveson inquiry when the journalist who has been central in exposing the level of phone hacking at the News of the World gives evidence. The Guardian's Nick Davies revealed in 2009 that the paper had secretly paid nearly 1m to the Professional Footballers Association chief executive Gordon Taylor and two others in relation to phone hacking. Davies and Guardian colleague Amelia Hill also revealed in a July article that Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked, giving hope to her parents that she was alive. Also up today is the former features editor of the News of the World, Paul McMullan. He was the journalist who Hugh Grant secretly recorded for an interview the April issue of the New Statesman magazine edited by his! former girlfriend Jemima Khan. Grant asked him about hacking and he replied that "it was quite routine". Despite being one of the few journalists on the paper who have made disclosures about illegal activities, McMullan isn't popular in all quarters. In a memorable edition of Newsnight in July, Steve Coogan pranded him "risible" and "morally bankrupt". Also appearing today is Richard Peppiatt, the former Daily Star journalist who claimed he was routinely asked to make up stories on the paper. Please note comments have been switched off for legal reasons.
She was given every anti-Muslim story to write for about two weeks, so as a result of that she quit. I'm deeply ashamed to this day that I didn't walk out with her.
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