The public interest added up to no more than the sheer number of copies the News of the World could sell, he said. Ex-News of the World journalist Paul McMullan shows some of his handiwork to the inquiry. Credit:Reuters "Circulation defines the public interest," he said, which meant that everything was legitimate as long as the public bought the paper. "You have to appeal to what the reader wants. I was simply serving their need," he said, before describing a career of capers justified by the observation: "You just don't go up to a paedophile priest and say, 'Hello good sir; you are a priest; do you like abusing choir boys?' " This, he argued, apparently gave cause for a culture of blagging, surveillance and even phone hacking, although he stopped short of incriminating himself on that one.

In some moments, it was impossible not to admire the bravery and the brio, as McMullan's career flashed before our eyes. McMullan also called the inquiry former NotW editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks were 'scum.' He was sent home from the Gulf War - because it was not interesting his newspaper's readers - and gave up investigative journalism after a lump of concrete was thrown at his head when he was looking into asylum seekers at the Sangatte immigrants' camp near Calais, northern France. But he "absolutely loved giving chase to celebrities. Before Diana died it was such good fun. How many jobs can you have car chases in? It was great." Actress Sienna Miller said she was terrified to be chased by up to 15 photographers, a practice McMullan described as 'sport.' Credit:Reuters

And you could almost believe it, before he made the suggestion that Sienna Miller should have been "cockahoop" because she had 15 photographers outside her house harassing her, because "who's she?" McMullan paid one "rent boy" £2000, then dressed up as another to expose a priest. Having snapped the picture of the reverend in flagrante, the two ran off in their underpants "through a nunnery at midnight". Singer Charlotte Church told the inquiry her family was held to ransom with a tabloid expose of her father's infidelity. Credit:Reuters The hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was not a bad thing for a well-meaning journalist, who is only trying to find the girl. "That under [one-time News of the World editor] Piers Morgan," McMullan said.

Judge Brian Leveson seemed largely content to let this all play out, but it often seemed a bit too graphic for David Barr, the lawyer for the inquiry who nominally had the task of drawing out McMullan. In fact, Barr battled to hold the man back; at one point he tried to dissuade McMullan from holding up a cutting of one his proudest stories - a topless shot of Carla Bruni. McMullan did so anyway. It should perhaps have not come as a surprise that McMullan would defend the decision to hack into the phone of the murdered British teenager Milly Dowler. The police, he said, were "incompetent" and should be "ashamed" they failed to catch Milly's killer earlier. "The hacking of Milly Dowler's phone was not a bad thing for a well-meaning journalist, who is only trying to find the girl, to do," he claimed. "Our intentions were good, our intentions were honourable."

One can only wonder what the Dowler family think of that. As he arrived at court, McMullan asked an ITV journalist for the way in. He was advised that if he chose the side entrance he would be filmed and photographed. The side entrance was the route he chose. McMullan wanted his viewpoint to be seen and heard; after all, he said, he felt that Rupert Murdoch "didn't have a right to close" the News of the World, calling former editors Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks "scum" for blaming journalists for practices he claimed they themselves endorsed. He admitted: "Sometimes I wouldn't have bought the News of the World even though I was working for it," but added that the British public had continued to do so. "There is a taste for it. There is an appetite for it," McMullan said. Asked about the suicide of Jennifer Elliott, daughter of the late British actor Denholm Elliott, McMullan expressed regret about the way he revealed in the paper she was living on the street and working as a prostitute years earlier.

"I went too far on that story," he said, describing her as "someone crying out for help, not crying out to meet a News of the World reporter". McMullan was tipped off by the police about Elliott's predicament in the 1990s. He explained: "I was driven primarily to write the best story I could. When I heard a few years later that she'd killed herself I did think 'Yeah, that was one that I really regret.'" She was found hanged in 2003. But if there was grandstanding, it was still worth hearing every word: here espoused was the end point of the regulation-free, market-driven, anything-goes tabloid morality. Loading

And for it, he was paid £60,000 a year as deputy features editor, and claimed £15,000 to £20,000 in expenses, of which, he added, "£3000 was legitimate". Guardian News and Media

