HART ATTACK
BBC Bias Scandal Over Phone Hacking Film Fixer's Secret Deal
At precisely 3.47pm on 12 January 2017, two exasperated men in a central London hotel bar congratulated themselves on finally signing a confidential agreement with a private investigator to buy her cache of documents.
The private investigator was hawking invoices for work she had done for national newspapers.
To the men at the Park Tower Hotel in Knightsbridge these documents were potentially worth a lot more than the five figure sum they had just agreed to pay her.
The cache could open up a new seam of lucrative legal claims for celebrities and damage two of the UK’s most powerful right-wing tabloids in the process.
But who were these two men and whose interests did they represent?
Dr Evan Harris became a relentless press reform campaigner after the Lib Dem MP lost his Oxford seat in 2010.
At the time of the hotel encounter he was executive director of Hacked Off, an opaquely-financed alliance of aggrieved celebrities, lawyers, activists and media types variously looking for relevance, remuneration, rehabilitation and revenge.
Next to Harris sat a twitchy scouser firmly in the relevance, rehabilitation and remuneration business.
Graham Johnson’s corruption knew few limits. He had fabricated stories and fitted up people for fame and fortune as a tabloid reporter.
Johnson generously calculated that he was only “fifty percent corrupt” back then, and now bent on exposing the misconduct of others. Harris and Hacked Off had firmly embraced ‘Fiddy’ Johnson and his sudden moral awakening.
Sitting opposite this odd duo was Christine Hart, a private investigator (PI) with a troubled past and present.
Her phone had stopped ringing when the hacking scandal erupted leading to the closure of The News of The World in 2011, prosecutions, a public inquiry and an avalanche of legal claims against the tabloids for unlawful information gathering.
Hart, a middle-aged single mum, was offering to sell copies of invoices for private investigation work she’d done for the tabloids in the Nineties and Noughties.
She knew her value in the lawfare between the supposedly pure Hacked Off firmament versus the toxic Goliath of Fleet Street media barons.
Hart did not buy into this narrative. Her motivation was cash and revenge for being “used, abused and spat out” by Fleet Street.
Only the wilfully blind can spend time with Hart and not notice her vulnerability and volatility.
In any event, by the time of the hotel encounter with Harris and Johnson she had authored two books alleging child rape and beatings in foster care, the suicidal teenage years that followed and her moth-to-flame infatuation with hard men and serial killers.
Hart believes this past “shattered” her into two personas. There was Christine, the “people pleaser” with chronic low self esteem and a need to be accepted; and Joanna, an alter ego, who was the ambitious, fearless investigator that drank with Fleet Street’s finest, partied with Irish paramilitaries and used charm and her body as “a weapon” to land stories.
Harris and Johnson weren’t fussed if it was Christine or Joanna who signed the fucking agreement. It had been a turbulent month of back and forth in the company of both Harts.
They had already shelled out £5000 for renting a fancy riverside flat near Windsor for Hart and her pre-teen son, only to be accused of a Watergate-style break in to steal invoices.
“Just my laptops and the invoices are missing”, she had told Thames Valley Police a few weeks earlier, insisting Hacked Off was a potential suspect for the break in.
Harris and Johnson told her their hands were clean. No arrests followed and the episode should have given both sides pause for thought about getting into bed together.
But Hart was as desperate for money as the other side were desperate to get their clammy hands on the remaining dog-eared invoices she had stored elsewhere.
So much so, Hart was being offered £16,000 for the cache - a considerable sum for someone who’s alternative way of making ends meet was as a psychic.
The details of the confidential agreement are revealed here for the first time and could impact on a super claim against The Daily Mail currently making its way through the High Court.