Named in the Leveson inquiry into press ethics, and mentioned in books on blagging, John Ford speaks out for the first time about how he thought he was working in the public interest for the Sunday Times but now regrets much of what he did

It was a passion that John Ford first cultivated around the kitchen table as a child. He and others in his family were encouraged to try on different accents for fun; a gift for mimicry that set Ford on the path to becoming one of the masters of Fleet Street’s notorious “dark arts”.

He has now come forward for the first time to speak publicly about how he used his skill to obtain by deception the personal financial details of hundreds of targets, from cabinet ministers to publishers, businessmen and celebrities.

In an interview with the Guardian, this self-styled “Beckham of the blaggers” describes in detail his work between 1995 and 2010, the techniques and cons he developed. He worked for private investigators but his principal client, accounting for the bulk of his work, he says, was the Sunday Times.



He tricked call centre staff and company employees, typically using a fake identity, to obtain bank statements, mortgage records, utility bills and ex-directory numbers. He blagged unpublished autobiographies from publishers, emptied the bins of the powerful in pursuit of secrets.

At the time, he did not question the morality of what he was doing. He believed he was exposing stories in the public interest. He still feels pride over some of the stories he was involved in such as terrorism and political funding but is going public out of a sense of remorse over others. “I am ashamed,” he says.

“To my family, I was proudly referred to as John the journalist; the fact that I worked for the Sunday Times was a source of great kudos and respectability. But I was untrained, untutored and I was nothing more than a common thief, even though I tried to dignify my activities as artistry under the catch-all title of blagger,” says Ford, who was first introduced to the Guardian by Byline Media.

Ford worked off the books for the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper, never entering its office, but earned, he estimates £40,000 a year from the title alone. He says he targeted the most powerful people of the era: Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Hague, John Prescott, the former head of MI6 and celebrities such as Paul McCartney at the time of his marriage to Heather Mills.

“It is such a rarified skill only a very few people were any good at it,” he says. He counts himself as among the best, partly because – having been at a private school and university – he could do Home Counties as well as working-class. “I was a posh blagger.” He boasts: “My failure rate was minimal.”

The controversy over newspaper ethics has been raging for more than a decade, focused on phone hacking and to a lesser extent the use of private investigators. Ford’s name has been briefly referenced in both Nick Davies’s book Flat Earth News and at the Leveson inquiry.

But the 52-year-old has never spoken out before, and he believes his story represents something new: “It was about the tabloids, the red-tops. But it was about the posh papers too. This is about the Sunday Times, a paper with an estimable history and heritage.”

Ford was brought up in a family of fairground travellers who gave up the wandering life to settle in south Wales, where his father ran a fruit machine business. In the evenings, when his father came home, one source of entertainment was doing accents. “The children would sit on a bench at supper and dad would say: ‘Do an Australian’. Then Scottish. Birmingham. Manchester. South African. Dutch. French. I had an ear for it,” says Ford.

This led him to try acting, after studying drama and English at Bristol university. He worked for a theatre company and did some standup comedy around London but struggled financially. By chance, in the mid-90s, he bumped into an old university friend who, knowing he was an actor, asked him to help out at an office of a private investigator, making a phone call pretending to be Nigerian. That led to work for another private investigator, based in Croydon. That company was used by the Sunday Times and a professional relationship began.

His first big success for the Sunday Times came in 1997 when he penetrated a blind trust set up for Labour donors by Lord Levy, one of Tony Blair’s main fundraisers. Soon after this, in 1998, according to Ford, the Sunday Times decided to bypass the private investigator’s office and commission him directly.

Ford worked on story after story; invoices show his work was frequent and sustained. He says he penetrated Gordon Brown’s bank and mortgage account in late 1999 as the Sunday Times tried to find out if there was anything suspicious in the purchase of a property by the then chancellor a few years earlier from the estate of the controversial owner of Daily Mirror Robert Maxwell. He found nothing untoward. The newspaper wrote a story in January 2000 about how Brown bought the flat more cheaply than the prevailing market price. “What right did I have to look at the chancellor’s bank account to stand up a non-story?” Ford now says.

Blagging – using subterfuge to obtain private information from banks, mortgage companies or utility firms – is illegal under the Data Protection Act 1998, which came into force in March 2000. But there is an exemption for newspapers if private information is held or obtained for the purpose of journalism with a view to publication and with a reasonable belief that the publication is “justified in the public interest”. Prior to that, with effect from February 1995, a specific offence of obtaining unauthorised access to personal data by deception was added to the 1984 Data Protection Act, which at that time had no exemption for the press.

Ford says he suggested to the Sunday Times stealing rubbish in the hope of finding secrets. He thought it was an original ploy, unaware that Benjamin “Benji The Binman” Pell was already engaged in a similar operation on behalf of newspapers (including, on at least one occasion, the Guardian). In November 1999, Pell pleaded guilty to five counts of theft when caught trying to take rubbish from a central London law firm, and was fined £20.

Ford said the Sunday Times drew up a hitlist of a dozen prominent figures in the Labour government and they targeted bins in the spring and summer of 2000. He employed a friend, whom he calls George, a student at the time, who helped him in what they refer to as “bin-spinning”. He and Ford would rifle through the rubbish in Ford’s office or living room.

It was Alastair Campbell’s bins that proved the most productive; the refuse yielding a string of memos written by New Labour pollster Philip Gould. “Campbell was a chucker, Gould was a shredder,” Ford remembers. A string of stories followed in the early summer of 2000, such as: “Secret memo shows Labour fear of Hague,” on 28 May and: “Secret memo says Blair is out of touch,” on 11 June. Their true provenance was not acknowledged, Ford says.

Ford says he was tasked – typically several times a week – to obtain information for the Sunday Times. Invoices retained by Ford from the period confirm his work was frequent and sustained; he says he was paid between £80 to £120 for obtaining an ex-directory number and from £120 to £250 to get into a UK bank account rising to £350 for international accounts. There were extra payments for more complex jobs.

Journalists who worked in the newsroom say his existence was an open secret. Junior reporters who wished to use him had to check with the newsdesk for approval and were told never to write his name down or job details on email. Ford said that he wanted to take details of requests only over the phone to keep activities discreet.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ford impersonated William Hague to get into his bank and credit card accounts. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

“In those days, you could get anything. There is one basic law of the blag. And that is to give something to someone. If you ring up and say I want, you don’t get.

When you ring up you say: ‘Hello I am ringing to hand myself in. I am sure I owe you some money. Looking at my direct debits on the 23rd, the money should have gone to you and it has not gone through.’ And they would say: ‘Oh no, it has come through.

“‘What do you mean? From my sort code 20 23 31? Oh,no, sort code 64.’ I would say, ‘From account 5721.’ And they would go: ‘No, account number ...” I would say: ‘Thanks very much.’

“The general sign-off was: ‘You don’t don’t how helpful you been.’ ”

Ford was briefly referenced at the Leveson Inquiry by John Witherow, who edited the Sunday Times between 1995 and 2013. When asked about Ford, Witherow said in January 2012 that Ford was used on “various investigations”. Ford says he never met or spoke to Witherow, who now edits the Times.

At one point, in the early part of the last decade, he impersonated William Hague to get into his bank account and credit card repeatedly over a week following a tip from a Sunday Times reporter. Ford says he thought his Hague accent was good enough to fool people. “I enjoyed being William Hague and the thrill of being William Hague.” No evidence was found to back up the tip, however. “It was grossly invasive, shameful, immoral, wrong and it was not news.”

Ford feels particularly bad about one story in particular. An employee for Mercedes Benz lost his job as a result of one of the blags. Ford obtained the list of prospective buyers for a new Maybach supercar in June 2002 by posing as a German-accented manufacturer of personalised keyfobs, asking to be sent a list of their names so they could be sure the spellings were correct. “The man was sacked, and what happened to him I don’t know. Did he get re-employed, did he get divorced, did it ruin his life?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ford obtained the list of prospective buyers for a new Maybach supercar in June 2002. Photograph: Byun Yeong-Wook/AFP/Getty Images

It was stressful work and gradually took its toll. Ford himself talks about blagging as acting, describing how anxious he would be “before he went on”. He said: “On Tuesday, you feel sick, on a Wednesday and Thursday, you think: ‘I have to do it.’ On Friday you have to just pick up the damn phone. By Friday evening you are flying, you feel like God, you are cycling home. That was the game.”

Ford occasionally worked for other commercial and media clients too. They included the Telegraph, the Express and the BBC. At one point, he indirectly worked for the Guardian. In 2000, he was asked by Ciex, a corporate intelligence firm, to assist in the production of a due diligence report about Monsanto, the controversial GM agriculture company. Although Ford did not know it at the time, Ciex’s client was the Guardian. Ford was asked to target bins of people at Bell Pottinger, the financial PR firm that worked for Monsanto at the time.

Nor was he the only off-the-books private investigator. A private investigator called Steve Whittamore, whose property was raided in 2003, was used by a string of newspapers including the Observer to obtain ex-directory and vehicle ownership and other personal information.

The Observer made 103 requests for information between 1999 and 2003, and an independent review subsequently concluded that “the Observer overwhelmingly used Steve Whittamore’s services in their efforts to expose public impropriety or crime”.

As for Ford, the fun began to go out of the job about a decade ago. He felt trapped by the regular flow of money. He took valium, sometimes in small doses mixed with Red Bull; sometimes more. The job that led to his undoing was his attempt to obtain an advance copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography in August 2010, coming after the Sunday Times had unsuccessfully bid £500,000 for the serialisation rights. Blair had instead said he would donate royalties to the British Legion.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The job that led to his undoing was his attempt to obtain an advance copy of Tony Blair’s autobiography in August 2010. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Ford said he did not initially want to take on the task, but was talked around over several phone calls from the Sunday Times. He was told how much the book was wanted. Describing how he tried to blag the electronic proof, he said: “I stayed up all night. I was in debt. I thought: I’m going to get this fucking book. I rang every Random House office around the globe as the sun came up.”

Email exchanges with a Sunday Times reporter that were subsequently recovered by police detail a desperate worldwide search by Ford for a copy in Britain, Australia, India and elsewhere.

Random House asked the City of London police to investigate the origin of the repeated calls and they traced the blagging to Ford’s property in Somerset. “I think they were surprised to find somebody so well-spoken when they arrested me,” he said. The Sunday Times paid for a lawyer, although Ford did not admit to working for the newspaper. He received a caution two years later, having been paid £2,100 for the disastrous blag.

It was an abrupt end to a decade-and-a-half’s work for the Sunday Times. During that time he was never invited into the Sunday Times newsroom and instead met reporters outside the Sunday Times office in Wapping, at a pub or a McDonald’s. “I never received a byline,” he says and no public acknowledgment of his work. But he regarded himself as part of the team, meeting reporters socially, on occasion attending the Christmas party.

Last night, News UK issued a statement saying: “The Sunday Times has a strong record of investigative journalism over decades and has employed many contributors and researchers to work on stories, or parts of stories.



“The paper strongly rejects the accusation that it has in the past retained or commissioned any individual to act illegally.

“Some allegations related to the research work of John Ford have been aired previously and we cannot comment on the specifics of these new allegations, which all predate 2011.”

After the caution, Ford’s health suffered and he was drinking too much. But he gradually thought about going public, and last year he initially approached Byline Media, a crowdsourced website that had written about some of the fallout from the phone-hacking affair. Byline, after a year’s investigation, in turn approached the Guardian.

Seeking personal redemption, he has decided to become a whistleblower. “It has been a long time coming for me. I am 52. I have three children. I want to be a decent parent. I want my parents to be proud of me. I want to step out of the darkness.” He added: “It is time to tell the truth and make amends.”

Early on Wednesday, the former deputy prime minister John Prescott said he believed he was one of John Ford’s victims over a story about the value of his grace and favour flat.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said: “I certainly felt it at the time, when the various stories were put out by the Sunday Times. Here’s the man who has had a conviction, is a man who said he committed criminal acts paid for by the Sunday Times on what they called fishing expeditions. It is now [called] blagging. Well, I suffered under hacking. I’m now into blagging, so I’m taking legal advice. Are these stories true?”

Hacked Off, the group that has been campaigning for the second part of the Leveson inquiry to go ahead, last week criticised the decision by the government to cancel it. In the wake of the announcement by culture secretary Matthew Hancock, co-founder Brian Cathcart and other academics also criticised the Guardian for endorsing the decision in a leader.

Evan Harris, the executive director of Hacked Off, said on Wednesday: “These revelations show how much illegal data theft has been done by UK newspapers for over 15 years, how much part one of Leveson was never told, and why part two is essential. The government’s decision to cancel it now looks foolish as well as self-serving. If it were any other industry all newspapers’ editorials would demand a public inquiry not applaud a government cover-up.”