Last month, the Sun’s
non-bullying political editor Tom Newton Dunn was incandescent with rage, after
discovering that the Police overreach via misuse of the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) could actually involve journalists other than
those at the deeply subversive Guardian,
who were a bunch of rotten and traitorous lefties who didn’t really count.
Who are you calling a sleazebag?
As Dominic
Ponsford at Press Gazette told, “Newton Dunn ... refused to co-operate with
officers, even though he was himself threatened with arrest for aiding and
abetting misconduct in a public office. The case against him was thrown out by
the Crown Prosecution Service. He refused to give any information which might
identify his source”. Dead right he did. But that wasn’t the end of it.
“The Met Police
nonetheless successfully applied for Newton Dunn’s mobile phone records in
order expose his source. The Met also successfully seized call data to The Sun
newsdesk in order to expose a second alleged police source ... Press Gazette
has asked the Met for clarification, but it appears the records were released
by Newton Dunn’s mobile phone network” [no comment].
Yeah, snooping is clearly A Very Bad Thing. Misuse of Police
powers is equally bad. I mean, they already have all that information on the
Police National Computer (PNC), don’t they? Well, after today’s
revelations by Press Gang, we
know that Newton Dunn knows rather more about what’s on the PNC than he might
have previously let on. And he’s not averse to a little snooping himself.
Here’s the story: “Documents
obtained by Press Gang implicate him in a ‘dirty tricks’
campaign against a Tory politician. At the time Newton Dunn was working for
Piers Morgan at the Daily Mirror ... The politician targeted was Adrian
Flook, Conservative MP for Taunton between 2001 and 2005 ... The former
MP was a member of the Commons Culture Media & Sport select committee
when it investigated press invasion of personal privacy in 2003”.
Newton Dunn’s name is clearly visible in an extract from
Steve Whittamore’s “Red Book”, in
which he noted requests for information from the Mirror titles. The note specifies Flook as the target, and contains
the acronym CRO, which means a Criminal Records Check – which needed access to
the PNC.
Whittamore charged £500 a time for a CRO; this reflected the
degree of difficulty, as a search required the services of a suitably bent
individual with access to the PNC. Yes, when it came to involvement in The Dark
Arts, Tom Newton Dunn was as unprincipled a sleazebag as the rest of them.
The Sun’s
appallingly righteous political editor, like so many of his contemporaries, is
a stinking hypocrite with a short memory. He
is therefore ideal Sun material.
2 comments:
Perhaps, like another journalist on the NOTW, he was trying to get his late tackles in early?
If they laid all the journalists, guilty of using the dark arts illegally, end to end there wouldn't be much chance of rainwater reaching the drainage system?
It does suggest a chain of investigation and intimidation of the Media select committee whenever they chose to look in the general direction of the Tabloid world
Post a Comment