Greg Miskiw, head of news at tabloid paper, said voicemails of former England football captain were accessed ‘routinely, all the time, over and over again’

The former England captain David Beckham’s phone was hacked by News of the World journalists, the paper’s former head of news has admitted for the first time.

In an interview with Channel 4 News on Friday, Greg Miskiw said Beckham’s voicemails were accessed “routinely, all the time, over and over again”.

Miskiw also spoke of his regret at the hacking of murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone and described the culture at the now-defunct newspaper – saying that failure to “get the story” would soon be followed by the sack.

And he said that hacking had gone on at other newspapers, which had thus far not been brought to light. He made similar revelations in an exclusive essay with the Byline Project.

“We hacked David Beckham’s phones routinely, all the time, over and over again,” Miskiw said.

But he added that one of the paper’s most high profile stories – when it claimed that Beckham had had an affair with his assistant, Rebecca Loos, a claim he has always denied – had not come from hacking Beckham’s phone.

“The [Rebecca Loos] story, we had to track all these phones. From recollection, I don’t think we got anything of any significance from doing Beckham’s phones [for it],” he said.



Beckham has long believed that he was a victim of phone hacking and, in 2013, News Corporation, which owned the News of the World, settled a case with the former footballer’s father out of court. But no one connected to the company had hitherto publicly admitted that Beckham’s phones were hacked.

Miskiw, nicknamed the “prince of darkness” because of his connection to the so-called dark arts, said he was “devastated” when he heard that his colleagues had hacked Milly Dowler’s phone.

“I was in Florida at the time and I lay down on my bed and stared at the fan for a couple of hours thinking: ‘How awful.’ It was like a scene out of a movie. I was just absolutely devastated.”



Asked what he would say to Milly’s father, he said: “What could I say other than that I am terribly sorry it happened? It was more than a misjudgment, it was an appalling thing to do.”

But Miskiw insisted that he was not responsible for the closure of the News of the World, which was shut down by management in 2011.

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The paper, he said, had “brought itself down. Or News International [News Corporation’s former UK arm, now called News UK] brought itself down by reacting the way they did.”

He added: “If they had decided from day one to grasp the nettle and say ‘Right, there is a handful of journalists who are doing this, we are going to get rid of them,’ the News of the World would still be running now.”

Miskiw was a news editor at the paper, an influential job that required him to coordinate its news coverage and to be responsible for its news reporters. He was also responsible for bringing the convicted phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire to the paper.



“You were in a bubble at the News of the World, where the objective was very simple: just get the story. Just get it. No matter what, no matter how. That is what was expected of you.

“And, if you did not and you did not do it once, or twice, or three times, and you failed, you would be out of the door,” he said.

Along with the paper’s former chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, Miskiw was jailed for six months in July 2014 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to intercept voicemail messages. The pair served 37 days each in total.

Spokespeople for News UK and Beckham declined to comment on Friday.