In the Pugin Room, Prescott is happily reliving the story of his unsatisfactory interactions with Scotland Yard. Prescott is something of a court jester and street brawler. When a protesting farmer appeared at one of his campaign rallies in 2001 and threw an egg at him, Prescott threw a punch back. A former ship’s steward and trade-union activist, he revels in his northern accent and his outspoken and brusque persona.

Prescott’s barrel chest puffs out as he sips his tea. He leans back, his legs splayed. For nearly two years, ever since The Guardian published a story revealing that his name had appeared on a list of public figures in handwritten notes belonging to Glenn Mulcaire, Prescott and his lawyers had been asking the police if they had any evidence of his voice mails being intercepted. He had received multiple letters in response, and gave me photocopies of them all.

When I look through the pages, I see that early letters informed him that the police had not uncovered “any evidence to suggest his phone had been tampered with.” The police wrote that they had referred the matter to the mobile-phone companies, which would “take appropriate action,” if warranted.

Prescott persisted, and continued to be told that there was no evidence to indicate that Goodman and Mulcaire had attempted to intercept any of his voice messages. And yet, in some of those same letters, the police told Prescott that in Mulcaire’s files they had found two invoices from News International Supply Company, a subsidiary of News Corp., to Mulcaire’s private-investigation company, for more than $400 each, with references such as “STORY: OTHER PRESCOTT ASSIST-TXT.” Scotland Yard added, “We do not know what this means or what it is referring to.”

When I look up at Prescott, he nods back. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you bloody open them up and see, and then we’ll know whether it is tapped. That’s what investigation is about!’ They still refused to do an investigation.”

“Coulson Had to Know”

Sean Hoare has a smooth and relaxed voice over the phone. He speaks slowly, almost with a drawl, and it seems as if he might chuckle at any moment. He sounds young. It’s hard to square his voice with the man who greets me at the train station in the working-class town of Watford, outside London. Hoare’s face is covered with broken blood vessels, and he walks stiffly, with a limp. He apologizes multiple times for the inadequacy of the restaurant we walk to for a coffee. Hoare is unemployed, though he takes occasional jobs around town. His days as a reporter have clearly taken their toll. “I was paid to drink and do drugs with rock stars,” he tells me, by way of explanation.

Hoare has agreed to talk to me about phone hacking at the News of the World, where he worked for more than 10 years. He is cagey on specifics, worried—as he needs to be—about the legal implications. What seems to offend Hoare more than anything is the fact that the practice of phone hacking, and digging into people’s private lives in general, was so widely encouraged by the paper’s top brass—and yet, when Goodman was found guilty of hacking into phones, he was abandoned by his former colleagues.

Hoare had worked closely with Andy Coulson for a long time. He described an enormously competitive tabloid culture: “Your brief, above all else, was to deliver.” The advantage of phone hacking, Hoare said, was that it provided verification of rumors. Once a journalist had confirmed a story through phone hacking, he could take the tidbit to the celebrity’s publicist and begin trading. “You’d say, I’ve got this detail. I don’t want to fuck over your client, but what do you have for me?” Then the publicist would offer an alternative story, and Hoare would back off, all the while knowing he had the initial piece of information if he ever needed it. “It’s not really about journalism,” he said. “It’s negotiation. It’s basically like Wall Street with words.”