Man found dead. Relax, it was just suicide. Maybe.

Sean Hoare

Curiouser and curiouser. So far  it's been strictly skeletons tumbling out of the News International cupboard; now a dead man has fallen out. Sean Hoare was a showbiz journalist with The News of the World and he was the first person to blow the whistle and accuse Andy Coulson of arranging phone hacking. Coulson of course denied this. So who would you believe if you had to choose: a guy who'd been editor of The News of the World  and later the director of communications for 10 Downing Street, or a showbiz hack who had a drink and drugs problem? No-brainer: obviously you'd accept Coulson's word. And you'd have been dead wrong.

The question now is, did Hoare's death have anything to do with the phone-hacking scandal? Or more bluntly put - and it's the thought that's racing through the minds of ninety per cent of those who've heard of Hoare's death - was he killed? Well, let's not rush to judgement. The police say his death warrants investigation but that the circumstances of his death are not suspicious. That is, he wasn't killed by someone else but he may have killed himself. Who said that? The police, and you can't get much more objective than...Eh? The Metropolitan police? The police force whose head Sir Paul Stephenson (who as a commenter above points out, was a sub-divisional commander of the RUC here during the early 1990s) and his assistant Ian McPherson have just resigned/were pushed by Big Bad Boris? The police force that apparently took money from journalists at all sorts of levels, and who hired people who had links with those they were supposed to be investigating? That's the force that tells us Sean Hoare wasn't killed by somebody else but more likely killed himself? Mmmm. Give me a minute to think what I think about that.

I have. I think it smells of ancient fish. Like Dr David Kelly's death (remember him?),  highly convenient. But do you know what smells even more? This phone-hacking trail has led , inside a matter of weeks, to the door of No 10 Downing Street. That's because some people listened in on some other people's phone conversations. So then wouldn't you think, if you were a Martian or something, that a situation where people were murdered by forces of the state, or those with links to the forces of the state, in instances such as Bloody Sunday or Pat Finucane's death, would surely lead to the door of No 10 with similar speed? Ha. Ha bloody ha. It's a long way from here to Finchley, and what matters to people here doesn't matter a damn to those across the water.