Diamond ‘targeted by tabloids’ after she confronted Murdoch

BROADCASTER Anne Diamond has suggested that Rupert Murdoch’s editors waged a vendetta against her after she asked the media mogul how he slept at night knowing his newspapers ruined people’s lives.

The former TV-am presenter told the Leveson Inquiry that The Sun – one of Mr Murdoch’s titles – ran an article headlined “Anne Diamond Killed My Father”, offered her nanny £30,000 for a story and infiltrated the hospital where she was giving birth when one of the newspaper’s reporters posed as a doctor.

She also spoke of her distress when the newspaper published a front-page picture of her and her husband carrying the coffin of their baby son Sebastian at his funeral in 1991.

She told the inquiry she put tough questions to Mr Murdoch when she interviewed him in the 1980s. “I did put the point to Mr Murdoch that his newspapers were intent, or seemed to be intent, on ruining some people’s lives and how did he feel about that, and how could he sleep at night knowing that that was going on,” she said.

“I seem to remember Mr Murdoch brushing it off completely and I remember after that incident, being a bit frustrated that I didn’t feel that I had got my point over to him at all.”

She learned earlier this year while taking part in a Channel 4 documentary that Mr Murdoch’s former butler, Philip Townsend, recalled that the media tycoon had “indicated to his editors” that she was “a person from that point onwards to be targeted”.

In 1987, The Sun ran a front-page story with the headline “Anne Diamond Killed My Father” about a road traffic accident in Birmingham seven years earlier in which a man had died, the inquiry heard.

Ms Diamond said she was driving the car but stressed that at the inquest the coroner went to “great lengths” to point out that it was not her fault.

At the time she was on maternity leave having just had her first baby and she felt “terrified”, the inquiry heard.

“It made it look like I was a calculated, cold-blooded murderer, and I know I wasn’t,” she said. “I was sitting at home nursing my baby and I knew I was a good person. And I was frightened to go out from that moment onwards.”

Ms Diamond complained to the Press Council, the forerunner of the Press Complaints Commission, and won a ruling in her favour which criticised The Sun for intruding into grief.

While Ms Diamond was in labour with her first child, a hospital administrator came into her room to tell her that a Sun reporter had been caught impersonating a doctor, the inquiry heard. She escaped the “hundreds” of paparazzi camped outside by fleeing in a hospital laundry van and then getting back into her house via the roof from an adjoining block of flats.

Ms Diamond also described how her former nanny had lunch with a Sun journalist who offered £30,000 for a story about the secrets of the broadcaster’s home life.

The nanny changed her mind, but the paper ran the story anyway and did not pay her, the inquiry was told.

Ms Diamond spoke of the distress of the intrusion of the Press after the cot death of her son, telling the inquiry how photographers and journalists besieged her house within an hour.

“I think my husband had very quickly rung the police, as you would,” she said. “And however it happened we were besieged with reporters and photographers outside the door.

“I actually don’t know whether they came before the policeman did or the police came first.

“But our front door very quickly was surrounded with hundreds of newspaper photographers and reporters literally just sitting there waiting for something to happen, constantly ringing the doorbell.”

She said she and her husband had called a priest that morning, who never arrived, and it later transpired he had been put off by the sheer number of reporters at the house.

The inquiry was shown a picture of Ms Diamond and her husband walking to the funeral parlour in the wake of their son’s death. “We were at our possibly most private moment and we were long lensed at that point,” she said.

She told the inquiry that after witnessing the media “circus” at the funeral of musician Eric Clapton’s son, she decided to write to the editor of every newspaper begging them to stay away from her son’s.

They all did, she said, except one photographer who took photos of the funeral from the road. The photograph, of her and her husband carrying the coffin, was published on the front page of The Sun. “Within a few hours of the funeral the editor of The Sun rang my husband and said, ‘we have a picture, it’s an incredibly strong picture and we would like to use it’.”

She said when they refused, they were told it would be used anyway.