News of the World: the key legal players

Tom Crone The News of the World's legal adviser is the man who ensured the newspaper's often explosive, and potentially libellous, stories would not be challenged in court. "Tom is a big presence on the shoulder of the editor at the backbench," said an industry source. He is also the man who asks questions about whether contentious stories can be defended against possible legal action, quizzing journalists about their provenance and ensuring that, if need be, a source would be prepared to sign a statement or give evidence under oath if it proved necessary. However, it was Crone who met with James Murdoch in 2008 to seek his permission to pay Gordon Taylor a six-figure sum to settle a phone-hacking claim he had brought against News of the World. Murdoch implied on Thursday that Crone and the News of the World editor, Colin Myler, may have mislead him about its true purpose. Les Hinton Hinton was the Murdoch consigliere who ran News International until December 2007, when he left to run the Dow Jones-owned Wall Street Journal, then a recent Murdoch acquisition. Famously adept at smoothing ruffled feathers, he twice appeared before a parliamentary committee investigating phone-hacking and said Clive Goodman, the former royal editor jailed for hacking into phone, acted alone. That claim has since been shown to be false. Rupert Murdoch Murdoch has said that if hacking victims had been paid to keep quiet he would have known about it. It did happen, so the key question, which Murdoch has never answered, is whether the 80-year-old News Corp chairman and chief executive was told by his son James that the payment had been made, or whether the truth was hidden from him. Was Murdoch aware of the techniques condoned by the tabloid editors with whom he was in weekly, and sometimes daily, contact?