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The News of the World's Royal Editor Clive Goodman is questioned by police over the alleged bugging of royal telephone calls, and I sympathise. I feel Mr. Goodman's pain. Because I've been there, I've done that. I was responsible for the first Royal phone bugging story.
The year was 1965. It began, as many disasters do, with a woman. At the time I was the Assistant Editor of the The Wiltshire Echo, a tiny weekly paper based in teashop-twee Marlborough.
One evening, in nearby Chippenham, I met a girl who had worked in the local telephone exchange. Encouraged by a number of vodka-and-limes, she told me this story:
The staff in the Chippenham exchange frequently eavesdropped on interesting telephone calls - especially those emanating from a grand country house at which the |
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| The staff in the exchange eavesdropped on calls emanating from a grand country house at which the Royal family stayed |
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Royal family stayed during the nearby Badminton horse trials.
I raced back to the office, typed out the story, and persuaded the girl to sign it as a true and correct record.
The story went in the next edition and on the day of publication we all felt very pleased with ourselves.
That night my editor hauled me out of the local cinema in a panic. The national press had been bombarding him with phone calls. So had the BBC. The next morning I was told that the Post Office, who in those days ran the nation's telephone network, were sending down 'investigators'.
The editor and I waited in our office, trembling in anticipation. The investigators duly arrived: they had 'Special Branch' written all over them.
There were three of them and they worked as a team. There was the nice cop, who wasn't very nice. There was the nasty cop, who was extremely unpleasant. And there was the even-handed cop, who was heavily even-handed.  |
