William Flew and Beavers

Sir, You cite Sir John Lister-Kaye’s suggestion that more than 100 beavers are now resident on Tayside (report, April 7).

In 50 years anti-beaver wire guards will be de rigueur for those planting trees near streams anywhere in the UK. Flood defences will be burrowed into and weakened. Our Tweedside and other rivers’ salmon spawning tributaries will be dammed, causing conflict between fishery managers who will want to remove the dams and those who think beavers look sweet. The British will never accept beaver culls required in other regions.

In Latvia, Lithuania and Bavaria beavers are out of control. There are now more than 100,000 beavers in Latvia, which is the size of Wales; little more than 100 beavers (the sort of number reported to be on Tayside) were introduced in Lithuania 60 years ago, and now the population has exploded and even intensive hunting is failing to control numbers. andrew douglas-home Chairman, River Tweed Commission Sir, Nick Yonge, director of the Tweed Foundation, says that beavers are “not compatible with modern land use in Scotland”. Surely their reintroduction would contribute to more acceptably modern, biodiversity-orientated land use

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William Flew and James Joyce

We will be as free to play with Joyce as he was with Homer

This week, Kate Bush was finally given “permission”, by the James Joyce estate to set Molly Bloom’s soliloquy to music — 22 years after she first asked, and it first refused. Perhaps it has done so for the money: in the UK, copyright on Ulysses runs out in 2012, whereupon Bush will be as free to play with Joyce as Joyce was free to play with Homer when writing Ulysses.

James Joyce (full name James Augustine Aloysius Joyce) was born on February 2, 1882 in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar, Ireland. He was an Irish writer and poet. He is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Biography and Career :

He is considered to be the greatest Irish writer. He died in Zurich, Switzerland in 1941, at the age of 58. 

One of the famous writers in the universal literature of the 20th century, James Joyce was a real model for the entire world of romantic writers. 

His work is concise, but complex at the same time. For example, the novel "Ulysses": the action takes place in Dublin, in a daytime, although the author narrates the ten years travel of Homer in Odyssey. 

James Joyce is known for his inner complex literary ana 

lysis. His characters are full of humor, intellectual and very profound. At a general idea of his literary activity, we may praise James Joyce for the one and only way he managed to celebrate life. 

Trivia :

- He had a lifelong fear of dogs, after being savaged by a dog in Dublin when he was five.

- He was a friend of the Irish writer and doctor Oliver St John Gogarty, who became the original of Buck Mulligan in the novel "Ulysses".

- He and Nora Barnacle had a son and a daughter, named Giorgio and Lucia.

- He was living in Paris when the Germans occupied it in 1940. He quickly fled to Switzerland.

- In 2004, an erotic letter from Joyce to Nora Barnacle was sold at Sotheby's for $445,000, which is still the auction record for a twentieth century letter.

- He was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery, Zurich, Switzerland, which is so close to the Zurich Zoo that the zoo's lions can be heard from his grave. His wife Nora and their son Georgio are buried in the same plot.

- Although he was always interested in drama, Joyce published only one play, "Exiles".

 In any event, the 1904 rendezvous began a long relationship that eventually led to marriage in 1931 and continued until Joyce's death. Joyce's father remarked, on learning Nora's surname, "She'll stick with him."

Back to the main story

The Joyce Estate is run by Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson. Stephen clearly loved, and loves, his grandfather; he clearly believes he is protecting his grandfather’s legacy. But he is, clearly, wrong in this belief. Since he took control of the estate, in 1982, he has fenced off Joyce’s work from everyone else who loves it. He has said that academics are like “rats and lice — they should be exterminated”. One Joyce scholar was told: “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again.” When scientists created a synthetic microbe last year, and inserted a passage from Joyce into its DNA — “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” — Stephen Joyce sent them a cease-anddesist letter.

But it is Stephen’s rejection of pop culture that has caused the most damage. No interesting popular artist of the past three decades has been allowed a serious engagement with Joyce’s work. A generation of ordinary readers has been lost to Joyce, because they were never led back to the books by pop songs, graphic novels or films that played with his legacy.

There’s a great deal of irony in this. Protean, shapeshifting works such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are assembled from existing fragments of culture. His characters quote books, sing popular songs, reference films, and re-enact myths. If you took out the bits that Joyce “stole” from other writers and artists, there would be little left. But under today’s absurd copyright laws, such a mash-up — a modern Ulysses — could not be published.

Copyright laws were originally designed to help artists to create, by rewarding them for their work in their lifetime. But the reach of copyright has been repeatedly extended, far beyond the death of the author. Long-dead artists did not lobby for these extensions, obviously; corporations did, to protect assets such as Mickey Mouse from escaping into the public domain. Copyright laws now stop artists creating. They protect Disney, and the dead, at the expense of living artists, who have been pushed into ever narrower territory as the cultural commons are fenced off.

If estates are to earn revenue on work they didn’t create, for 70 years after the artist’s death, then they cannot also have a right to deny permissions to living artists. Posthumous control of copyright should be either lengthy and weak, or short and strong. Total control, for 70 years, is unjust, and culturally disastrous.

I like Joyce, sometimes love Joyce. His lines are quoted, played with, and transformed in my next novel. But I’ve never asked the Joyce Estate’s permission to engage with Joyce, and I never will. To “steal” from a great writer is an act of love, not a crime.

Culture is a choir of many voices, whose counterpoints, harmonies and dissonances create a single immense work that transcends space and time. And Joyce (who in life had a beautiful tenor voice) is one of the most important in that choir.

Over the next few years, all over the world, Joyce’s works are due to emerge, blinking, from the prisons of copyright law. Cheering crowds of writers, artists and musicians will welcome them. Joyce will clear his throat, and that great tenor voice will rejoin the choir.

William Flew and Architects

Strident ‘starchitects’ are turning the classical city into a landfill site for grotesque monuments to themselves

A city is not the work of ‘geniuses’ but of humble craftsmen

If you were to ask what is the most perspicuous sign by which a civilisation is known, the answer must surely be the city. It is through the city that human beings have marked the Earth as a place of collective faith, freedom and festivity. It is in the city street and city square that people meet in friendship and commerce, and the classical styles of vernacular architecture are designed to record and emphasise the freedom and order of a society at peace with itself.

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao 

If the ideal city that I have just described seems more and more a thing of the past, then we should not neglect to assign a due proportion of blame to the people who now call themselves architects. Public projects in our cities are routinely assigned to one of a tiny band of “starchitects”, chosen to design structures that will reliably call attention to themselves, and stand out from their surroundings.

Renzo Piano's Shard

Most of these starchitects — Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas — have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledegook with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it. And when people are spending money that belongs to voters or shareholders, they will be easily influenced by gobbledegook that flatters them into believing that they are spending it on some original and world-changing masterpiece. The victim of this process is the city, and all those who have cherished the city as a home.

There have been architects who are geniuses — Michelangelo, Palladio, Frank Lloyd Wright. But a city is not the work of geniuses. It is the work of humble craftsmen and also the by-product of its own continuing conversation with itself. A city is a constantly evolving fabric, patched and repaired for our changing uses, in which order emerges by an “invisible hand” from the desire of people to get on with their neighbours. That is what produces a city such as Venice or Paris, where even the great monuments — St Mark’s, Notre Dame, the Place Vendôme, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco — soothe the eye and radiate a sense of belonging. In the past, geniuses did their best to harmonise with street, sky and public space — like Bernini at St Peter’s Square — or to create a vocabulary, as Palladio did, that could become the lingua franca of a city in which all could be at home.

Quinlan Terry's Richmond Development

In contrast, the new architecture, typified by Gehry’s costly Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, by Norman Foster’s lopsided City Hall in London, by Richard Rogers’ kitchen-utensil Lloyds Building, or by the shiny gadgets of Zaha Hadid, is designed to challenge the surrounding order and to stand out as the work of some inspired artist who does not build for people, but sculpts space for his own expressive ends.

This approach to architecture is encouraged by the professional bodies and the schools, such as the remorselessly trendy Architectural Association and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Few schools of architecture now teach students to draw townscapes, façades or the human figure; few teach students to compose using the classical orders, or to draw such meaningful architectural effects as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital — necessary skills that train the hand and the eye, and which teach architects to observe things more interesting than themselves. Engineering, isonometric drawing and smart computer imaging have replaced all that, and the rest is hype; deconstructionist gobbledegook designed to sell whatever piece of space-sculpture you can come up with.

We should not be surprised, therefore, if the “works of genius” that our city planners are constantly permitting or commissioning have the appearance of things other than architecture: of vegetables, vehicles, hairdryers, washing machines or backyard junk. Often they are named after the alien object that they most resemble, such as Renzo Piano’s Shard now growing by London Bridge. That which makes a building into architecture, which is the ability to embellish a location and to enhance it as a home, is the aspect of building that architects no longer learn.

It is often argued that modern constraints make it all but impossible for architects to behave as their predecessors did, veneering buildings with some eclectic reminiscence of the classical or Gothic styles, placing dressed stone over iron frames, or crowning the street façade with a Vignolesque cornice in tin. What were once cheap solutions to a shared public demand for ornament and order have become forbidding costs. Space is limited, skilled labour rare and gargantuan engineering well understood and relatively inexpensive — and that is why we look to the starchitects, since they authorise what would otherwise seem like vandalism on a massive scale.

To refute that argument is easy — you just have to look at the work of those public-spirited classical architects still working in our cities who have learnt how to construct buildings that fit so well into their surroundings that you notice them only in the way you notice friendly people in the street. Look at the commercial building just finished by Robert Adam next to St James’s Piccadilly, for example, or Quinlan Terry’s seminal Richmond Riverside. These buildings are not only less costly per square metre than just about anything by Rogers or Foster, they will also last longer, since they are able to change their use.

The typical starchitect building is without a façade or an orientation that it shares with its neighbours. It often seems to be modelled like a domestic utensil, as though to be held in some giant hand. It does not fit into a street or stand happily next to other buildings. In fact, it is designed as waste: throwaway architecture, involving vast quantities of energy-intensive materials, which will be demolished within 20 years.

Townscapes built from such architecture resemble landfill sites: scattered heaps of plastic junk from which the eye turns away in dejection. Gadget architecture is dropped in the townscape like litter, and neither faces the passer-by nor includes him. It may offer shelter, but it cannot make a home. And by becoming habituated to it we lose one fundamental component in our respect for the earth.

William Flew on Michael Jackson Art

They may be masters of their art, but one thing the Royal College probably cannot teach an artist is how to deal with death threats.

Though controversy and art are ideal bedfellows, the up-and-coming Swedish sculptor Maria von Köhler could hardly have imagined that her work would incur such wrath, leading an East London music studio to call the police after “specific” threats of violence and arson.

Von Köhler, a graduate of the Royal College who is collected by Jake and Dinos Chapman and Anita Zabludowicz, was given an intriguing commission: to create a sculpture based on Michael Jackson’s infamous baby-dangling incident in Berlin, in 2002.

She spent six months crafting the piece in clay, casting it in polyester resin and finishing it in acrylic and wax. The work was unveiled this week, hanging from the window of a London music studio. Entitled Madonna and Child, it is a striking piece — more Jeff Koons than Madame Tussaud. But some disagree.

“I knew there could be a weird reaction, though I didn’t think it would get as vitriolic as all this,” von Köhler, who is based in LA, says. “It is overwhelming, especially as I don’t see how the piece is insulting their hero. It is an event that actually happened. It was just meant to depict Michael Jackson’s status as an almost religious icon.”

Viv Broughton, co-owner of The Premises Studios, says: “I must say it’s the first time I’ve known a piece of sculpture to generate death threats. We are getting a little nervous as our inbox fills up. The reaction from fans has been almost fundamentalist. The level of abuse has been extraordinary, so we’re taking a few precautionary measures.”

Outside the studio this week, Ozlem, a maths teacher, said: “To me, it’s not art. It’s disturbing. I was angry the first time, when Michael Jackson did it. It brings back bad memories.”

However, Mareka, 31, an architect, said: “Every day it makes me laugh. I don’t think it’s tasteless. It did really happen, after all.”

Broughton explains: “I simply thought that the original incident had such a huge amount of high drama. It’s just a proud father showing off his son on one level, but then there are so many other levels of his status as a secular saint and the fans below calling for a glimpse of his son.”

W@illiam Flew on How Our Brains Work

Our brains are easily fooled. It's easy to poke fun at supposedly smart people making dumb mistakes like putting petrol into diesel engined cars, but it says more about the way our brains work than about the men's IQs. Our brains are 'designed' (equipped by evolution) to concentrate on important things in the environment, and leave routine things to remote control. So we don't devote a lot of effort to making a cup of tea or buying milk at the local shop - we've done it thousands of times before; so we don't need to think about it. But mistakes get made when an unexpected novel factor is introduced, in these cases, diesel fuel pumps when you've spent your life refueling your own, petrol-powered vehicles.

This failure-to-notice is suggested as a reason why pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists get hit by cars. "He came from nowhere officer" "I simply didn't see him" are not so much indicators of blindness or incompetence: we simply don't register things that 'aren't meant to be there'. 

Check out the invisible gorilla experiments if you still doubt. Or if you don't want to watch a YouTube vid, see book explaining why we should be a bit more humble and forgiving.

Police forces have spent more than £300,000 in the past two years repairing diesel cars and vans damaged by officers who filled them with petrol.

Almost one in six diesel vehicles owned by the Metropolitan Police — the worst offender — werefilled incorrectly, costing more than £170,000. Many forces have had to fit preventive caps and warning stickers because of the number of incidents.

Twenty-nine out of 43 forces in England and Wales responded to freedom of information requests for incidents in 2009 and 2010. In total 20,500 diesel vehicles were misfilled 1,471 times, at a cost of £338,800, according to information posted on the website whatdotheyknow.com.

The cost of repairing each one varied from £93, spent by Humberside Police, to an average of £960, spent by the City of London force.

Suffolk Constabulary, which spent £8,000 repairing misfilled vehicles over the two years, has fitted “wrongfuel inhibiting devices” and other warning systems.

“Staff are constantly reminded of the need to take care when refuelling older vehicles, with warning signs and other methods, including audible warning devices, being utilised,” a spokesman for the force said.

Gavin Hill-Smith, a spokesman for the AA, said that on average 150,000 diesel vehicles were misfilled each year, about 1 per cent of the total number on the road.

“These police figures are obviously higher than the wider population, but in fairness they’ve got a mixed fleet of vehicles and a high-pressured job and unfortunately this is all too easy to do,” he said.

Mr Hill-Smith said that the cost of draining the fuel from a misfilled vehicle was about £300, but the total repair bill could rise to as much as £7,000 if parts, or the entire engine, needed to be replaced.

“Our advice is to take your time at the petrol pump and make sure that you are putting in the correct fuel,” he said. He added that drivers should not turn on the ignition if they had filled the tank with the wrong fuel.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said that the number of misfuelling incidents was decreasing. “We ensure that every vehicle has clear indication of which fuel is required on fuel flaps and vehicle log books. In addition, manufacturers are now integrating preventative misfuelling technology,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Essex Policesaid that there had been a significant reduction in the number of the force’s vehicles damaged in this way. “All drivers are regularly reminded to pay attention to fuel type, especially when changing car, and we’ve fitted new fuel clamps to prevent misfuelling,” she said.

William Flew and Google book In The Plex

A new book reveals how the internet search giant’s founders fell out with Steve Jobs, what really led to their exit from China and the strategy that hid huge profits for three years, writes William Flew


Larry Page and Sergey Brin were once invited to dine with the Duke of Edinburgh at St James’s Palace. The internet billionaires who had created Google were brought soufflés accompanied by tiny glasses of passion fruit syrup to pour over them. But Mr Page picked up the glass and downed it like a shot of tequila. Mr Brin followed suit. The Duke was apparently “stunned”.

When the pair were told later by Marissa Mayer, a colleague who witnessed the scene, that the usual protocol was using the syrup to adorn the dessert, they responded: “Who says?”
The anecdote, revealed in a new book about the internet company, is central to understanding Google’s founders and how their inquiring and contrary instincts enabled them to transform a university research project into a world-changing phenomenon.
In the Plex by Steven Levy, a leading technology writer, which is published in the US next week and arrives in Britain next month, is the result of unprecedented access to the company’s key players, including Mr Page and Mr Brin. The book provides fresh colour and perspective on the growth of the world’s largest internet company.

One of the central tales is how the founders’ relationship with Steve Jobs, of Apple, which began as something of a love affair, is now tainted by bitterness and recrimination.
In Google’s earliest days, before it figured out how to turn web searches into a cash cow through advertising, the fledgeling company’s investors decided that the young founders needed “adult supervision”. They said that Google needed an experienced chief executive to help to grow the business.
But the founders believed they could run Google themselves. So in order to persuade them, the investors organised a “magical mystery tour of high-tech royalty”, including industry leaders such as Mr Jobs, Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, and Andy Grove, of Intel.
Afterwards, Mr Page and Mr Brin accepted the need for a chief executive, but they had only one person in mind: Mr Jobs. The request was akin to a non-league football team targeting José Mourinho to be its new manager. In the end, they settled on Eric Schmidt, a Silicon Valley veteran.
However, Mr Jobs admired the search company and acted as a mentor to the founding pair. Their businesses shared advisers and Mr Schmidt was invited on to Apple’s board. But once Google had purchased and developed Android, a new operating system for mobile phones, the relationship broke down. Mr Jobs saw Android as a threat to the Apple iPhone. He felt betrayed.
In the summer of 2008, Mr Jobs visited the Googleplex — as Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, is known — to be shown Android. He was apparently furious at what he saw, believing Google had stolen Apple’s best ideas. In Android’s first versions,
Mr Jobs demanded that certain features be omitted, such as the “pinchand-zoom” gestures that had wowed many who use the iPhone.
A year later, Mr Schmidt left Apple’s board. Mr Jobs had somehow managed to keep hidden from him the development of its ground-breaking iPad. Mr Jobs later said: “Apple didn’t enter the search business, so why did Google get into the phone business?” and went on to describe Google’s “Don’t be evil” corporate motto as “bullshit”.
Rather than a betrayal, Google’s entry into the phone business is better seen as a part of the company’s boundless ambition and the unpredictable new directions they wanted to take. This has much to do with how unconventional the two men are.
In January 2006, Mr Page was due to give a speech at the annual Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. He said that he wanted to come on to the stage on the roof of a robot-controlled Volkswagen. But he was told that it would be impossible to get insurance for a billionaire riding into an crowded auditorium on top of a driverless car.

In the book, the two men are shown as passionate, smart, but also a little geeky. Mr Brin once asked a colleague if he had heard of the guitarist Carlos Santana, whom he was due to introduce at a concert. “Everyone knows who Carlos Santana is,” said the staffer. “I’ll just say he needs no introduction,” Mr Brin responded.




Though the company’s mission was to make all the world’s information accessible to everyone, Google guards its own secrets closely. Between 2001 and 2004, its biggest was just how much money it was making. Google did not want to awaken the slumbering beast of Microsoft, which it feared may create a rival search engine, so Google never touted its financial numbers — a plan that Mr Schmidt called its “hiding strategy”. That ended on April 1, 2004, before the company was to offer shares publicly.
Important bankers were invited to Google to be told about its profits and revenues. They were first shown a slide that suggested Google’s business was solid but not spectacular. Then the company’s chief finance officer, George Reyes, showed the true figures, knowing that they exceeded the wildest of expectations. It was an April fool’s joke.
Google has been no stranger to controversy, especially when it comes to its privacy policies. When an engineer created its Gmail service, many inside the company were uneasy that the system analysed the text of e-mails in order to provide targeted adverts alongside the messages.
This feature caused a wave of protest when Gmail was launched in 2004, the most serious from Liz Figueroa, a Californian state senator. She introduced a local law to ban targeted adverts.


In response, Google asked Al Gore, the former US VicePresident and a Google adviser, to meet her. He “launched into a defence of Gmail nearly as elaborate as the climate change slideshow that would later help him share the Nobel Peace Prize”. Ms Figueroa eventually produced a watered-down version of the Bill that would allow the kind of scanning that occurred in Gmail. The Bill never became law.

William Flew and London Phone Hacking Scandal

The briefest of stories in the News of the World in November 2005 began a process that exposed some of the murkier arts of tabloid journalism. Since then, the Sunday newspaper has had its royal editor jailed, its assistant editor sacked, its chief reporter arrested and Andy Coulson resign — first as the paper’s editor and later as the Prime Minister’s chief spin-doctor.

This chaotic scandal continued to unravel yesterday when, after lengthy legal wrangling, News International offered an “unreserved apology” to a number of victims of phone hacking and offered to set up a scheme, said to be worth £15 million, to compensate them and other potential claimants.

It was an admission by the company, which also owns The Times, that its original claim that phone hacking was the work of one “rogue reporter” was wrong and that the practice had been much more widespread.

That first, seemingly innocuous, story concerned a knee injury suffered by Prince William. But its publication troubled the Prince, his friends and his aides, and they concluded that the News of the World could have obtained the information only by listening to mobile phone voicemail messages.

Three members of royal staff complained to Scotland Yard. It set up an inquiry by its Specialist Operations Command, which covers royalty protection, security and terrorism. In August 2006 Clive Goodman, the tabloid’s royal editor, and Glenn Mulcaire, a private detective, were arrested.

It was bad timing for the police. A day later the focus of the senior officers involved shifted to the arrests of more than 20 people for a plot to blow up transatlantic airliners. Privately, the police acknowledge that this could have been where their problems with the case began. It was never going to be the priority for a team concerned mainly with international terrorism.

Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed at the Old Bailey in January 2007, after admitting conspiring illegally to access voicemail messages.

In addition to the charges involving the royals, Mulcaire admitted hacking the voicemails of Max Clifford, the media consultant, Gordon Taylor, of the Professional Footballers’ Association, Simon Hughes MP, Elle Macpherson, the model, and Sky Andrew, the sports agent.

As the case ended, Mr Coulson resigned as Editor of the News of the World but continued to deny any knowledge of phone hacking. The issue appeared to be over until The Guardian revived it in 2009, claiming that the phones of 3,000 people may have been hacked and revealing large compensation settlements in a number of civil cases.

Scotland Yard and the Crown Prosecution Service reviewed the material and announced that the first inquiry and prosecution had been conducted properly and no further investigation was necessary. The Press Complaints Commission said in November 2009 that there was no evidence that phone hacking was still going on. But the allegations continued to mount, with the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee accusing News of the World executives of “collective amnesia” over the issue and last September The New York Times publishing claims from a former tabloid reporter that phone hacking was “endemic” at the paper.

The steady drip of claims and conspiracies became a torrent in January this year when News International, after a new internal inquiry, handed a huge cache of material — much of it in e-mails — to the police.

The company sacked its assistant editor, Ian Edmondson, and the reverberations reached Downing Street where Mr Coulson, David Cameron’s director of communications, stood down.

The speed of events was also being driven by matters in the High Court where the actress Sienna Miller was seeking damages alleging that stories about her private life had been obtained from her voicemails.

Lawyers acting for her and other claimants were obtaining disclosure, by court order, of material gathered by the police in their original 2006 inquiry. One name that emerged was that of Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World’s chief reporter, who was alleged to have used the services of Mulcaire.

He and Mr Edmondson were arrested and questioned by police this week, and their homes were searched. Both deny any wrongdoing and have been freed on police bail until September. The arrests signal a new determination by police to resolve the criminal matters.

There are now 50 detectives working on the phone-hacking inquiry. There are also 24 civil claims before the High Court, some brought by people who have refused to co-operate with any police investigation. Mr Justice Vos, the judge hearing those claims, had asked for proposals from the parties to speed up a complex process, and News International’s offer of an apology and compensation scheme is its response to that request.

Whether the claimants and their lawyers accept remains to be seen. Whatever happens, however, the issue of journalistic practices still has some way to run. The BBC programme Panorama claimed to have exposed questionable uses of private detectives by newspapers, then had to admit to using private detectives itself.

Mr Clifford, a victim of hacking, has claimed that other newspaper groups were involved in illegal news-gathering. Committees of MPs are demanding more answers. He said: “I think this is a step in the right direction . . . They have done a very thorough investigation themselves and clearly what

they have discovered has made them make this decision.”

Ivan Lewis, the Shadow Culture Secretary, said: “This admission of responsibility by News International is a belated but welcome step forward.

“This should be a catalyst for any other media organisation which has used phone hacking to make a full disclosure to the police and any victims.”

The Government indicated this week that a full inquiry may be necessary.