Sienna Miller voicemail revealed affair with Bond star Daniel Craig, phone hacking trial hears

Former News of the World newspaper editor Andy Coulson listened in to a voicemail from the actor Sienna Miller which had been intercepted from the phone of Daniel Craig and then organised a plan to conceal its origin, according to a self-confessed phone-hacker giving evidence at the Old Bailey central criminal court in London on Tuesday

Dan Evans told the jury in the phone-hacking trial that the editor had declared the message “brilliant” and later told him to arrange for a recording of the voicemail to be left in a padded Jiffy bag envelope at the front gate of the News of the World’s office so that it appeared to have come from an anonymous source.

The court has heard that Evans has agreed to give evidence for the prosecution in the trial after admitting that he hacked phones over a seven-year period for the Sunday Mirror and the News of the World. He told the jury that hacking was “referred to regularly” at the News of the World.

Coulson sat in the dock with his chin resting on his right hand as Evans described how he had come to hack Craig’s voicemail in September 2005. He said it had been an unhappy time, he had felt quite bullied at work.

At one point, another journalist had “monstered” him in an email, written entirely in capital letters: “If you don’t come up with a front-page story soon then you might as well jump off a cliff.”

He had gone home that weekend, he told the jury, and “hacked every phone I could possibly think of hacking, and that included one belonging to the actor Daniel Craig, who might be better known as James Bond”.