results were often chaotic. Jimmy Weatherup would send out a reporter to cover a story. Ian Edmondson would call the reporter and send him somewhere else. A reporter would come up with a story idea and tell it to Edmondson, who would take him aside and tell him to keep the idea quiet for a week – ‘Jimmy’s off next week, and I’d like to have something good for myself.’
Weatherup was older and more experienced than Edmondson and he, too, was capable of playing the bastard. He used to like ordering young reporters to go and knock on the door at a particular address, warning them that the man who lived there was notoriously vile-tempered and often physically violent. This was just a trap: the address didn’t exist, and if the reporter claimed to have been there and found nobody in, Weatherup would dump ordure on them. But Weatherup was no kind of street fighter. He appeared to be stuck in a 1970s time warp, playing the Travolta part in Saturday Night Fever , tall and slim and with a great deal of preening in front of the mirror. His hair was surprisingly dark, and Edmondson regularly accused him of dyeing it. He wore expensive suits and special gloves for driving and he had a well-known tendency, at the first sight of a sunny day, to turn up in the office in tight-fitting white tennis shorts; and an equally well-known tendency to slide up behind the young female reporters and massage their shoulders or even kiss their necks. He was known as Whispering Jimmy partly because of his smooth, oozing style on the phone and partly because he was so obsessively secretive. Some colleagues knew Weatherup as ‘Secrets’ and Edmondson as ‘Lies’.
All this created a regime in which the naturally intense rivalry between a mass-market newspaper and its competitors was made all the more furious by the back-stabbing tension between the two news editors. Coulson managed to raise the friction still higher by aggravating the long-standing competition between the news desk and the features department. The two sections rarely spoke and frequently fought, hiding their plans from each other, constantly attempting to outdo each other.
The features editor, Jules Stenson, was tough, clever, an unrivalled expert on TV soap operas and widely seen as most likely to succeed Coulson in the editor’s chair. He was also aggressive, particularly with Clive Goodman, with whom, according to one colleague, he had a relationship of mutual loathing. Stenson’s relationship with Ian Edmondson was just as bad. One of the journalists who worked there remembers the news desk in April 2005 trying to buy the story of a woman in Yorkshire who had admitted helping her seriously ill husband to die. She had been cleared in court, and the news desk sent a reporter to offer her £5,000 for the intimate close-up tale of her husband’s death, but the reporter found that she had already been offered £6,000 by somebody else. The news desk bid higher; the rival went higher too. At £14,000, the news desk pulled out and then discovered that they had been bidding against Jules Stenson.
Andy Coulson kept his hands close to the steering wheel. He chaired the daily conference when the heads of all the editorial departments – news, features, sport, showbiz, royal, politics – would pitch their ideas. He liked to show that he was on top of stories. During the spring of 2005, for example, he personally oversaw a project to snatch an interview with the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was serving his time for the murder of thirteen women. This was kept very secret. The reporter on the job was instructed not to tell colleagues. For maximum discretion, Edmondson could have managed the job himself, but Coulson liked to think he knew how to run an investigation and he duly authorised the payment of a hefty fee to Sutcliffe’s brother, Carl, and also the purchase of a camera and recorder which were specially designed to trick
Weatherup was older and more experienced than Edmondson and he, too, was capable of playing the bastard. He used to like ordering young reporters to go and knock on the door at a particular address, warning them that the man who lived there was notoriously vile-tempered and often physically violent. This was just a trap: the address didn’t exist, and if the reporter claimed to have been there and found nobody in, Weatherup would dump ordure on them. But Weatherup was no kind of street fighter. He appeared to be stuck in a 1970s time warp, playing the Travolta part in Saturday Night Fever , tall and slim and with a great deal of preening in front of the mirror. His hair was surprisingly dark, and Edmondson regularly accused him of dyeing it. He wore expensive suits and special gloves for driving and he had a well-known tendency, at the first sight of a sunny day, to turn up in the office in tight-fitting white tennis shorts; and an equally well-known tendency to slide up behind the young female reporters and massage their shoulders or even kiss their necks. He was known as Whispering Jimmy partly because of his smooth, oozing style on the phone and partly because he was so obsessively secretive. Some colleagues knew Weatherup as ‘Secrets’ and Edmondson as ‘Lies’.
All this created a regime in which the naturally intense rivalry between a mass-market newspaper and its competitors was made all the more furious by the back-stabbing tension between the two news editors. Coulson managed to raise the friction still higher by aggravating the long-standing competition between the news desk and the features department. The two sections rarely spoke and frequently fought, hiding their plans from each other, constantly attempting to outdo each other.
The features editor, Jules Stenson, was tough, clever, an unrivalled expert on TV soap operas and widely seen as most likely to succeed Coulson in the editor’s chair. He was also aggressive, particularly with Clive Goodman, with whom, according to one colleague, he had a relationship of mutual loathing. Stenson’s relationship with Ian Edmondson was just as bad. One of the journalists who worked there remembers the news desk in April 2005 trying to buy the story of a woman in Yorkshire who had admitted helping her seriously ill husband to die. She had been cleared in court, and the news desk sent a reporter to offer her £5,000 for the intimate close-up tale of her husband’s death, but the reporter found that she had already been offered £6,000 by somebody else. The news desk bid higher; the rival went higher too. At £14,000, the news desk pulled out and then discovered that they had been bidding against Jules Stenson.
Andy Coulson kept his hands close to the steering wheel. He chaired the daily conference when the heads of all the editorial departments – news, features, sport, showbiz, royal, politics – would pitch their ideas. He liked to show that he was on top of stories. During the spring of 2005, for example, he personally oversaw a project to snatch an interview with the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was serving his time for the murder of thirteen women. This was kept very secret. The reporter on the job was instructed not to tell colleagues. For maximum discretion, Edmondson could have managed the job himself, but Coulson liked to think he knew how to run an investigation and he duly authorised the payment of a hefty fee to Sutcliffe’s brother, Carl, and also the purchase of a camera and recorder which were specially designed to trick
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