Hacks hacked

The you-couldn't-make-it-up element of newspaper phone intercepts continues apace, with the "revelation" that Rebekah Brooks, Chief Executive of Rupert Murdoch's News International, has been told by police that her phone messages were "hacked" more than 20 times by private detective Glenn Mulcaire, when she was editor of The Sun.

The revelation comes in the blog of Sky News city correspondent Mark Kleinman.  (Sky News is this week part of BSkyB, in which Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has a controlling shareholding; later this week Sky News might have a new "independent" constitution as part of a deal with the UK Government to allow a total takeover of BSkyB by Murdoch.)  The blog post is tagged "exclusive"; I can't find the story yet in The Times or Sun, but it has been picked up by the Independent.

Mark's spin is that the majority of the listening-in came between 2005 and 2006, when "Brooks's marriage was experiencing high-profile difficulties". Rebekah was briefly arrested by the police in November 2005 after alleged "domestic" left husband Ross Kemp with a cut-lip; she was released without charge. Kleinman goes on: "Given that that story did not feature prominently in the pages of the News of the World, it suggests (but does not prove) that the hacking may have been conducted on behalf of other newspaper groups".  Rebekah was editor of the News of The World from 2000 to 2003.