Former tabloid reporter Graham Johnson believes he helped cost the publisher of The Sun £500m.
Johnson came forward to police in 2013 and admitted to hacking phones when he was investigations editor of The Sunday Mirror.
Since his conviction in December 2014 he has written multiple articles about tabloid criminality of the 1990s and 2000s, contributed to documentaries about the subject and published more than half a dozen books on the subject via his company Yellow Press.
He says that the seeds of £500m worth of legal claims against News Group Newspapers were sewn over dinner with former News of the World news editor Greg Miskiw at a restaurant in Warrington in July 2015.
Miskiw, who died in 2021, had served 37 days in Belmarsh after pleading guilty to conspiring to illegally access voicemail messages at the News of the World between 2000 and 2006.
Over steak and prawns at The Grill on the Square, Miskiw revealed that his involvement in illegal newsgathering extended far beyond his time at the News of the World.
Johnson said: “If it wasn’t for Greg it would be very unlikely there would be any Sun-only litigation.
“He was the first key witness and he also brought documentary evidence. The Sun litigation only started around 2014 and the cases were highly speculative. He led to a whole new set of litigation against The Sun and the News of the World and that was worth £500m.”
Johnson initially planned to use Miskiw’s evidence as the basis for a documentary with BBC Panorama but he ultimately wrote it up for the website Byline.com.
Those articles then led to Miskiw helping Sun litigation claimaints directly.
Today Johnson continues to work as a freelance journalist, publishes books and also works as a legal researcher – mainly assisting claimants in the ongoing litigation against the Mail.
Prince Harry, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, Liz Hurley and Sir Simon Hughes are set to take the Daily Mail publisher to court in January 2026 in Prince Harry’s third major legal showdown with UK tabloids.
Johnson said: “The Mail litigation is almost entirely based on the stories I published on Byline about five years ago. It’s the same evidence. It is based on Miskiw, Mulcaire, Whittamore, documents and other witnesses who came forward.”
Glenn Mulcaire is the private investigator who was convicted of hacking phones for the News of the World. Steve Whittamore is a convicted blagger who was widely used by a range of newspapers including the Mail titles.
Asked whether working as both a journalist and legal researcher presents Johnson with a conflict of interest, he said: “Not with the Mail, because I don’t tend to write many stories about the Mail litigation now and that is one the reasons why. I don’t think there is a conflict.
“With the lawyers who work for the Mail, I’m not going to work for them for free because it is very time-consuming.”
Harry fought against settling but took up to £15m from Sun publisher
Johnson believes the recent Prince Harry and Tom Watson settlement with Sun publisher News Group Newspapers will have been worth between £10m and £15m and was a global settlement (meaning it is now for the lawyers and claimants to work out how the money is divided up).
Asked whether he was surprised Harry settled the case, Johnson said: “I knew he would settle.
“The High Court is a very narrow form of justice, it is about dividing money between people and dividing a very discreet number of rights. That is all it is.
“You’re not going to get that kind of cathartic justice every time. You can’t run a personal campaign for that sort of justice, you just have to think what am I going to get out of it – I am just going to some money.
“Over 1,000 cases have come against NGN and they have all settled. There is huge pressure on the claimants to settle: Hugh Grant brought up the issue of adverse costs.
“I know Harry was fighting against his lawyers to the last minute, but he has to follow the advice of his lawyers. You also have the insurers who are saying that in this settlement if you’re being offered an admission of unlawful information gathering, what is the point of going to trial? They could pull the insurance, then the potential costs are stacking up for Harry.”
Asked what he thinks the outcome of the Mail case will be, he said: “Both sides will want to go to trial, I suspect they will settle.”
He added: “It is a matter of public record they were commissioning private investigators up until 2007 when [editor] Paul Dacre said there is now a ban on commissioning these unless there is special circumstances, which is an admission they were used.
“The key issue for someone like Paul Dacre is he told the Leveson Inquiry on oath that phone-hacking didn’t go on at his papers while he was the editor and up until he gave evidence in 2011. How does he know that reporters weren’t phone-hacking without his knowledge?
“How can you make a statement like that? It is like a headmaster of a school saying pupils of my school don’t take drugs. How can you know that?”
Hacking books don’t sell, but the rights do
Books published by Johnson’s Yellow Press include Shadow Man by Glenn Mulcaire, Master of the Dark Arts by Greg Miskiw, Privacy is for Paedos by former News of the World journalist Paul McMullan and The Scum I’ve Become by former Sun royal reporter Duncan Larcombe.
Johnson said: “I thought they were good stories, I knew they wouldn’t sell well. But I didn’t want to waste all that work. I wanted to make sure that people like Duncan and Greg got something back out of this.
“Duncan has been through a terrible time, been falsely accused, gone through a long-running trial at the Old Bailey for bribing public officials, been on bail for four years, lost his livelihood and business.
“I thought it was important to make sure his story was told.”
The second part of Larcombe’s memoir, titled My Royal Scandal, was delayed for legal reasons until the Harry trial was concluded, and will be published in April 2025.
Johnson emphasised that his book publishing, journalism and legal work are all financially separate activities.
He said: “Duncan is not a witness. His story contradicts what the claimants allege. I wanted to make sure there was both sides of the story.
“Everyone who has written a book, if they’ve given statements it was a long time before they wrote the books.”
Yet more books are to come from Yellow Press, including a memoir by Steve Grayson – a former security services contractor in Northern Ireland in the 1960s and 1970s who went on to provide surveillance services and photography for the News of the World. Two more books are also planned about News of the World investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood. Johnson said: “And then I think that will be it for Yellow Press”, as far as the hacking scandal goes.
Johnson said film and TV rights are often more lucrative than book sales and he says his own memoir “Hack” has been optioned several times by film and documentary companies.
Murdoch’s missed opportunity to stop £3bn scandal
Looking at the hacking scandal broadly Johnson said: “I think it’s unlikely there’s going to be any more big revelations and its unlikely that there’s going to be police investigations. There are lots of documentaries being made that are going to come out in the next year or two and then it’s going to fizzle out.”
The downfall of the News of the World and subsequent wave of legal actions all largely stems from Max Mosley’s decision to sue the title for breach of privacy in 2008 and then wage an expensive campaign against the Murdoch empire. Mosley bankrolled legal actions and gave a job to Glenn Mulcaire in exchange for him telling the truth about his work for the News of the World to The Guardian’s Nick Davies.
Johnson believes Mosley reached out to News of the World owner Rupert Murdoch via Bernie Ecclestone before launching his crusade: “He said if you want to settle this privately before I start this campaign, if you want to acknowledge that the story you write is wrong and apologise, we can shake on it and have a cup of tea. Murdoch ignored the message.”
He added: “The value of the hacking scandal to NGN has been put at about £1.2bn but I think it’s more than £3bn. That’s what I have been told by some of the lawyers involved, in terms of the total value of the 1,000 legal cases, the compensation scheme, the reputational damage, the cost of closing down the News of the World, the costs of setting up The Sun on Sunday. I’ve been told that all of that cumulatively cost them £3bn – by good sources.”
The fallout from hacking continues to tarnish the reputation of British journalism. According to the 2023 Reuters Digital News Report The Sun was the least trusted news brand in the UK, distrusted by 63% of those surveyed.
Johnson said: “Whatever trust there was between the punters and the papers, it eroded a lot of that and that has played a part in the downfall of tabloid newspapers.”
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