Sun journalist found guilty of handling Labour MP’s stolen phone
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Version 0 of 1. A senior Sun journalist has been found guilty of handling a Labour MP’s stolen mobile phone but cleared of misconduct charges. Nick Parker, the Sun’s chief foreign correspondent, was convicted at the Old Bailey on Tuesday of possessing the BlackBerry after it was stolen from Siobhain McDonagh’s car in 2010. However, he was cleared of aiding and abetting Surrey police officer Alan Tierney to commit misconduct in a public office. The Old Bailey heard that Parker accessed the stolen phone to trawl through McDonagh’s private texts, some of which referred to David and Ed Miliband’s 2010 Labour leadership battle. The phone was passed to him by Michael Ankers, 30, who was on Tuesday convicted of theft. The trial heard that Parker made detailed notes of text messages on McDonagh’s phone, including one she received during the Labour leadership battle between the Miliband brothers that said: “I’ll kill myself if Ed wins”. Others referred to “jokes about William Hague having to share a hotel bedroom” and another about “holding out for bribes for hard cash”. It was this latter text message that Parker said he was asked to investigate after being told there was possible evidence of criminality on the phone. The only way to establish this claim was to examine the phone’s contents, he said. As it turned out, the “bribes” text was “obviously a joke” and there was no story in it, Parker added. In his defence, Parker denied doing anything wrong, saying his job as a journalist was to “seek out the truth and focus very squarely on the public interest” and protect sources “at all costs”. His defence counsel, Trevor Burke QC, described the trial as having “all the hallmarks of an oppressive regime” and said Parker was being prosecuted simply for doing his job. He said paying public officials for information was “horribly complicated” and a “very grey area”, pointing out that neither the source nor the Daily Telegraph journalists involved in the MPs’ expenses scandal story were ever prosecuted. Tierney allegedly contacted him with a follow-up tip about footballer John Terry’s mother and mother-in-law being cautioned for shoplifting and a story about the Rolling Stone guitarist Ronnie Wood assaulting his girlfriend. Prosecutor Michael Parroy QC insisted that neither Parker nor the Sun were above the law. He said Parker and other Sun journalists “thought they had an invisibility cloak by claiming that they were able to conceal the criminal activities of their sources and themselves”. Parroy dismissed Parker’s claim that he was simply doing his job, likening that argument to the defence used by Nazi officials prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials after the second world war. “It’s no different in law or common sense to say I was obeying orders from above,” said Parroy. “It’s known as the Nuremberg defence – people saying ‘well I was just obeying the next level of authority from above me, ultimately the Fuhrer’. If it was then his employer could say go off and commit whatever crimes you want.” |