Paul McMullan – Clown In Denial

He has left the newspaper industry, hopefully never to return. His political career, with UKIP, ended ignominiously after the party ditched him. And his appalling pub does not sell cask beer. But Paul “privacy is for paedos” McMullan is eternally unrepentant, and, more importantly, still willing to give interviews to anyone who will stump up for his bar tab.

Paul McMullan at the Leveson Inquiry

Latest volunteer to listen to McMullan’s tape-loop of self-justification is Vice magazine’s Chris Goodfellow, who has ventured to Dover to find his subject as defiant as ever. “There’s nothing wrong with phone hacking and there's nothing wrong with hacking Milly Dowler’s phone” was his opening gambit, followed by yet more delusional self-justification.

“She was dead, so there's no crime, which seems so heartless. The whole reason why we [the press in general] had to hack Milly Dowler’s phone is because [the police] are so useless that [they] left a mass murderer walking around the country banging women on the head with a hammer”. What he doesn’t say is that the Screws tried to send the Police on a wild goose chase – hampering their investigation.

But McMullan knows who the baddy is – Lord Justice Leveson: “Do I care about Leveson? Yeah, I think so – only because I used to have a surveillance van. I used to be able to pick on targets, to sit outside their house and make a lot of money, and I can’t do it any more. It’s so boring and shit”. Rotten Leveson stopped him stalking and harassing the public. It’s just so totally not fair!

So just how not wrong is all that stuff McMullan and his pals – notably Glenn Mulcaire – got up to? We can put a value on this as, while he was giving the usual spiel to Vice magazine, the Hollywood Reporter was setting out the sums that the Murdoch empire has had to shell out in settling the hundreds of claims made against it for what McMullan called “nothing wrong”.

News Corp has so far settled literally hundreds of claims, either under a compensation scheme (272 cases), or being fast tracked through the courts in order to reduce overall costs and get the claims out of the way (276 cases, with 32 still active). The total amount of money paid out in settlement has been almost £240 million, with over £110 million in the past year alone.

For actions that McMullan claims were “nothing wrong”, that’s an awful lot of dosh to pay out. The reality is that much of what he and his pals at the Screws got up to was very wrong, much of it was illegal, and it caused untold damage to peoples’ lives. All that Paul “privacy is for paedos” McMullan can offer in justification is to say it’s not fair and that he should be able to go right ahead and do it all over again.

What you will not read in most of today’s papers. Pass the sick bucket.