Closure fails to halt calls for Brooks’s head

FURIOUS politicians and representatives of possible phone-hacking victims have insisted the shock closure of the News of the World must not be the end of the affair and repeated calls for the resignation of News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks.

Dozens of MPs, including Labour leader Ed Miliband, said Ms Brooks must quit having been editor when some of the worst offences allegedly took place, including the targeting of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

Labour MP Chris Bryant, who is taking legal action over claims his own phone was hacked, said the closure “is designed to try to protect Rebekah Brooks.”

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He added: “This strategy of chucking first journalists, then executives, and now a whole newspaper overboard isn’t going to protect the person at the helm.”

Milly Dowler’s family’s solicitor Mark Lewis confirmed the closure “won’t make any difference to anybody’s civil claims”, and said court action will continue.

And he added: “It’s sad that other people have been sacrificed, will lose their jobs, but the people who are responsible are still there.

“There are questions asked about Rebekah Brooks. She was editor of the News of the World at the time the Milly Dowler situation was happening. She is still in her post. So she might be crying at other people losing their jobs, but perhaps she ought to lose her job and let them have theirs.”

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Shadow Culture Secretary Ivan Lewis said he felt sorry for News of the World staff who were “paying for the mistakes of the past”.

Employees were said to be in shock at yesterday’s announcement, with widespread animosity towards Ms Brooks.

Associate editor David Wooding, who joined the newspaper 18 months ago, said: “When I went up into the editorial floor everybody was standing around looking dazed as if a nuclear bomb had just hit. Some people are crying and they are upset.”

Mr Wooding said the people associated with phone hacking had been “driven out five years ago” and described the closure as a “commercial decision”.

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The National Union of Journalists put out a furious statement condemning the action, describing it as “an act of utter cynical opportunism”, and said its members at sister newspaper The Sun had walked out in protest on hearing the announcement.

It was reported last night that staff at both papers, as well as at stablemates the Times and the Sunday Times, had been told last week their respective newspapers were to become more integrated to save on overheads.

Lord Prescott, another alleged victim of phone-hacking, said the decision to close the News of the World was simply “a cost-cutting exercise”. He added: “Cutting off the arm doesn’t mean to say you’ve solved it. I cannot accept for a moment that (people) at the top of the company didn’t know what was going on.”

Senior executives at the firm had over the past five years repeatedly told MPs the scandal went no deeper than a single rogue reporter, Clive Goodwin, who was jailed along with private investigator Glenn Mulcaire in 2006.

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Both the company and the Metropolitan Police, who accepted the firm’s position despite holding thousands of pages of notes taken from Mr Mulcaire, now stand accused of a full-scale cover-up.

Mr Bryant said yesterday: “Everything that’s been announced goes to show there’s been a cover-up, Parliament has been misled, that police have been corrupted.”

But News International chairman James Murdoch said the paper made its statements to Parliament “without being in the full possession of the facts”.

And he added: “I am satisfied that Rebekah, her leadership of this business and her standard of ethics and conduct throughout her career are very good.”

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“Rebekah and I are absolutely committed – and this company is absolutely committed – to doing the right thing. That means cooperating fully with the police investigations into those alleged practices and into those activities.”

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