Claiming an exclusive, the Guardian reports that three senior Liberal Democrat politicians, Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Norman Lamb, are
suing the publisher of the Sun and the defunct News of the World, claiming that their phones were hacked for stories or to “exert political influence”, including when Rupert Murdoch was seeking approval for a takeover of BSkyB.
Journalists working at Murdoch’s newspapers are said to have unlawfully targeted the former business secretary Vince Cable as well as Chris Huhne, a former energy and climate change secretary, and Norman Lamb, a whip and sometime adviser to the then deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.
The purpose of the attempts to access the men’s voicemail messages during their time in coalition with the Conservatives and to carry out other “unlawful information gathering” had been to source stories about them in order to “sell newspapers”, but to also influence political events, according to the claims lodged at the high court, which have been denied.
The report goes on to say that Vince Cable claims that between 27 July 2004 and 31 December 2011, a total of 383 calls were made by journalists at the Wapping headquarters of the Sun and News of the World, "the overwhelming majority of which he will infer were made for the purposes of unlawfully intercepting his voicemail messages".
I don't suppose any of these gentlemen entered politics with the intention of becoming rich, but if the case against the Murdoch Group is proved to the satisfaction of the Court, I hope they are awarded substantial, life-changing, awe-inspiring damages. And I don't want to hear any nonsense about "giving substantial sums to charity" or anything like that.
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