The editor of Britain's News of the World Sunday newspaper resigned last night after the paper's royal reporter was jailed for four months following one of the UK's biggest privacy and newspaper scandals of recent years, writes Hugh Muirin London
Andy Coulson stepped down as editor after Clive Goodman admitted colluding with a freelance investigator to intercept more than 600 mobile phone messages left for three senior officials in the British royal household. Mr Coulson said that he accepted "ultimate responsibility" for his reporter's actions.
The ruse, which ended in Goodman's "humiliation and disgrace", involved the casual breach of security arrangements put in place by the main mobile phone companies, yielding information which was then used to produce exclusive stories for the News of the World.
His lawyers told the court that he became desperate for information because he was sidelined on the paper and felt that his stellar career was on the wane. He paid investigator Glenn Mulcaire £12,000 in cash for his role in the eavesdropping - money which was then reclaimed from News International.
However it also emerged that Mulcaire had a formal relationship with the newspaper and a lucrative contract worth more than £100,000 a year to provide "information and research". Mulcaire was jailed for six months.
Palace officials alerted the police when they realised that someone was accessing their voicemails before they had retrieved them.
Mulcaire used similar techniques to eavesdrop on five other prominent figures: publicist Max Clifford, Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, model Elle Macpherson, professional footballer representative Gordon Taylor and sports agent Skylet Andrew.
The sentencing trained a harsh light on the practices and imperatives of some forms of tabloid journalism. Goodman, according to his barrister, John Kelsey-Fry, was "the top royal reporter in the country".
"He was respected, rewarded and commended by his peers . . . but by January 2005 the position was very different. His stories were not considered adequate by his superiors. He was demoted and sidelined and another younger reporter was appointed to follow the royal family. He was under intense pressure to produce and feared for his job."
The key to the deception was obtaining passwords issued by the mobile phone companies to their own security staff. This allowed Mulcaire, having obtained the mobile phone numbers of his targets, to call customer services and obtain the voicemail retrieval numbers.