Glenn Mulcaire secretly filmed talking about hacking

Confronted on his own doorstep by a woman whose private details he obtained and released to the press, Mulcaire was recorded by a hidden camera. Asked “Who might have been the person who asked you to do it?”, he responds “I can’t answer that because again it was by committee.” His lawyer later emphasised that Mulcaire was using the phrase to mean more than one individual, not a formal committee set up to manage him.

The revelation that more than one person directed his activity is significant because the News of the World insisted for many years that the commissioning of voicemail hacking had been the work of a single rogue journalist, the paper’s former royal editor Clive Goodman. Mulcaire was jailed in 2007 along with Goodman for intercepting voicemail messages of the Royal family, as our home affairs correspondent explains in this special report.