Phone-hacking scandal MP to provide foreword for new book on Tommy Sheridan trial

THE Labour MP who helped to expose the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World is to write a foreword to the latest book being published on former Scottish Socialist leader Tommy Sheridan.

Tom Watson, the deputy chairman of the Labour Party, is to write the introduction to the new book A Parcel of Rogues: The Tommy Sheridan Conspiracy by left wing author and activist Jim Monaghan.

Mr Watson has published his own account of the phone hacking scandal – Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain.

He said he was “delighted” to write the foreword to Mr Monaghan’s book. The Labour MP, who is a member of the Commons culture, media and sport committee, believes that the guilty verdict in the Sheridan trial is “unsound” and that the case “may need revisiting”.

The book is thought to be the first sympathetic account of Sheridan’s high profile battle with News International following two previous critical accounts of the episodes that saw the former MSP awarded £200,000 in damages, before being handed a three-year jail term for perjury.

Sheridan was released in January this year.

Mr Monaghan, a close ally of Sheridan in the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) and Solidarity, said that the new book would be published as an e-book within the next month.

He added: “The book goes way back to the start of the claims that were originally made about Tommy and the battles he had within the SSP, including the split.”

The two previous books were written by Alan McCombes - a former comrade of Sheridan’s who later became a bitter rival – and Gregor Gall, a professor of industrial relations at the University of Hertfordshire.