Simon Greenberg

In 2000, the Data Protection Act came into force.  In 2000, Simon Greenberg became associate editor and sports editor of The News of The World.  Simon went back to News International at the turn of this year, as Director of Corporate Affairs, and now we have compensation offered to some of those whose phone messages have been illegally intercepted by News of the World journalists, or people working for them.

Timelines are often interesting. Simon studied history at Exeter, then joined the Hornsey Journal in north London in 1991, working on news and sport.  Freelance shifts at the Mail on Sunday led to a full time sports job, ending up as Deputy Sports Editor.  Around the same time, Will Lewis, now also at News International, was working for the Mail on Sunday as a business reporter.  In 1997, Simon moved to become Sports Editor of the Evening Standard.  Thence, in 2000, to the News of The World for two years.

The News of the World style at the turn of century was unashamed.  In June 2000, it published long-lens pictures of Prince William at Eton, under the editorship of Phil Hall, and the Palace went to the PCC. In July, Rebekah Wade became editor, and began naming and shaming paedophiles. In 2001, Rebeka and Andy Coulson made a young hack dress up as Harry Potter.  In January, 2002, the front page story was Harry's Drugs Shame. 

The relationship between newspapers, sources and data at this time was investigated by the police in Operation Motorman, and Operation Glade, and then by the Information Commissioner's Office, which published "What price privacy ?" in 2006.  Here's a diagram from that.... 

Simon was poached back to the Evening Standard in 2002 by Veronica Wadley.  At this time he had a run-in with flamboyant Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan. 

In 2004, Simon joined Roman Abramovich and Peter Kenyon at Chelsea FC - presumably for more than his estimated £200k pa salary at the Standard. As well as embarking on a programme of Corporate Social Responsibility, Simon had to deny that the club had "tapped up" Ashley Cole; had to defend Morinho against accusations of lying to UEFA, for which he eventually received a two match touchline ban; and tried to defend Avram Grant. 

I won't detail Simon's year running comms for the England 2018 World Cup bid. There was quite a kerfuffle when he joined the team, but we didn't win.