Gary Jones once worked for the News of the World and the Daily Mirror. Today he edits the Daily Express. Will he figure in the report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, out next week? Brian Cathcart considers the evidence
One person who may be awaiting the report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel with more than usual interest is the editor of the Daily Express, Gary Jones – and not just because he is hoping for a good story for his newspaper.
Jones is personally relevant to the Panel’s business. As a senior reporter at the Daily Mirror he was a leading customer of Southern Investigations, the firm of illegal information gatherers at the centre of the whole Morgan affair. And some of what Southern was supplying to him was not legal.
How do we know this? Most conspicuously from the unwitting testimony of Jonathan Rees, the senior partner in Southern whose conversations were for a time secretly recorded by anti-corruption police. It is remarkable evidence, and a story worth telling.
On Tape
On 6 July 1999, those police recordings tell us, Rees rang Gary Jones, then a senior reporter at the Daily Mirror, to say he was faxing through invoices totalling £16,991 for work done by Southern for Mirror papers over the previous five months.
‘When it comes through you’ll see the invoices with lots of stars next to them and roughly billed at about £300-odd, which is print-outs,’ Rees explained. There would be 19 invoices of this kind, marked with the initials of the reporters who ordered them – ‘G.J. being you,’ he told Jones.
So about a third of the total, perhaps £6,000, was accounted for by jobs that involved Southern providing ‘print-outs’. Rees spelled this out on the phone because the invoices themselves were worded vaguely.
Later that day Jones called Rees back to say the accounts department wanted more detail in the invoices. Rees became cross, at which point the reason for the vague wording became very clear.
‘This is tiresome, fucking tiresome,’ he said. ‘We are not going to put the numbers in there because what we are doing is illegal, isn’t it? I don’t want people coming in and nicking us for a criminal offence, you know.’
It is quite an exchange. Rees, who later that year would be jailed for attempting to frame an innocent woman by planting cocaine in her car, is caught telling a journalist who has since been promoted to the editorial chair at the Daily Express: ‘What we are doing is illegal, isn’t it?’
Other evidence indicates that the ‘print-outs’ in question were lists of numbers called from particular phones, acquired by Rees at the behest of Mirror journalists. This kind of information is difficult, if not impossible, to acquire lawfully.
You may not have heard of this bugged exchange before (it has never, for example, been reported in the Mirror or the Express), but it is no secret. It was quoted by Nick Davies in his 2014 book Hack Attack, by Alastair Morgan and Peter Jukes in their 2017 book about the Daniel Morgan murder, Untold, and at fullest length by the investigative website Press Gang in a series of postings relating to Piers Morgan in 2014-2016.
Davies wrote (p 93) that police involved in the covert operation subsequently sent files to the Crown Prosecution Services about alleged illegal information gathering, including evidence relating to Jones and two other journalists. Anyone familiar with the pattern of events in the Daniel Morgan case will know the result: no prosecutions followed.
Perhaps next week something will change. Perhaps the pattern will be broken.
The terms of reference of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel include a requirement to examine ‘the incidence of connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media and alleged corruption involved in the linkages between them’.
A recorded conversation about illegal activity between a private investigator and a Mirror journalist certainly seems to fit that description. And it is not the only evidence relating to Gary Jones that the Panel would have been able to consider.
A Cesspit
Davies called Southern Investigations a cesspit, and it is easy to see why. Rees was, for many years, a suspect in the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan, who was his business partner. After the murder Morgan’s place in the firm was taken by Sid Fillery, a former police officer who had been a detective in the first investigation of the case who was later convicted of possessing indecent images of children. Rees and Fillery have always denied involvement in the murder.
As we have seen, the Panel’s remit goes beyond the murder to cover wider corruption, and there is no shortage of proof that the chief speciality of Southern Investigations under Rees and Fillery was the use of corrupt police officers and other officials to get hold of secret or confidential information.
Gary Jones was an important customer. According to Davies, it began when Jones was at the News of the World and worked with Alex Marunchak, a senior executive who was very close to Rees and Fillery and made extensive use of their services. After Piers Morgan moved as editor from the News of the World to the Daily Mirror in 1995, Jones followed him across, and he brought with him the connection to Southern Investigations.
So what kind of work did Southern do for the Mirror – and in particular for Jones? We have clues, because the covert police operation in 1999 (called Operation Two Bridges) didn’t just bug Southern’s office, it also seized documents, including invoices, some of which have since found their way into public view.