Freedom, Responsibility, and the Phone Hacking Scandal

"Most of the victims of phone hacking are not celebrities... There are a lot of people who are in some way connected with stories that break in the press who are just ordinary people."

In 2006, my phone and those of my family were targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the Fleet Street phone hacking scandal, due to my friendship with Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, who were then going through a very painful and public divorce. Handwritten notes seized by Scotland Yard and reproduced in that investigation list my full name, address, mobile numbers, voicemail direct‑dial numbers and PIN codes, along with those of other friends of the McCartneys. There followed a court case in which I received damages from the News of the World.

Phone hacking is not, for me, an abstract problem of “media regulation”; it is a direct assault on privacy, trust and the rule of law. It involves deliberate deception to obtain intimate information—voicemails, call data, locations—and then laundering that material into “stories” under the guise of journalism. As the wider scandal and the Leveson process showed, this was not the work of one rogue reporter but a system in which unlawful intrusion became normalised as a commercial tool.

I believe passionately in a free press. But with freedom of the press comes an equal measure of responsibility. Those freedoms are not a blank cheque to break the law, to damage peoples' lives for profit, or to turn citizens into quarry. If newspapers and broadcasters wish to claim the privileges of a free press, they must also honour the ethical obligations that underpin those freedoms: respect for truth, legality, and basic human dignity. I believe that until the British press accepts that responsibility, our democracy—and our privacy—will remain at risk.

To watch an interview with me and other non-celebrity victims of phone hacking, click here