Phone Hacking[edit]

In August 2014, Roy Greenslade, a supporter of Hacked Off [5], a group which campaigns to place Britain's press under state-approved regulation, alleged in the Guardian newspaper [6] that Wright withheld important evidence from the Press Complaints Commission when it held its 2009 inquiry into the News International phone hacking scandal. Specifically, he claimed Wright had withheld from the PCC information that The Mail on Sunday had been told by police four of their journalists had had their voicemail messages intercepted by the News of the World, and this would have provided the PCC with evidence that phone-hacking at the News of the World extended beyond 'rogue reporter' Clive Goodman.


Wright refuted this claim in a letter to the Guardian [7] in which he said when the police contacted The Mail on Sunday, a month before Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire's 2006 trial, they gave no indication that anyone else at the News of The World was involved. He said: 'Had it occurred to me, when the PCC was discussing the fresh allegations made by the Guardian in July 2009, that the hacking of our journalists’ phones was anything other than a minor part of the series of offences for which Goodman and Mulcaire had already been convicted, I would happily have shared it with other commissioners. I have never made any secret of it, nor had any reason to – after all, our journalists were victims of these crimes just as much as anyone else.'