Phone-hacker witness says he was caught up in News International 'conspiracy'

Former newspaper editor Andy Coulson’s lawyer confronted self-confessed phone-hacker witness Dan Evans at the Old Bailey in London on Wednesday, repeatedly questioning the reliability of his evidence that included allegations that the now-closed News of the World was involved in crime when Coulson was editing the Sunday tabloid.

Timothy Langdale QC challenged Evans at length over a false witness statement which he had made in a civil action and over the history of his attempts to secure immunity from prosecution in exchange for giving evidence.

The jury in the phone-hacking trial have been told that Evans has pleaded guilty to four offences, including perverting the course of justice by swearing a false statement in a civil action brought by the interior designer Kelly Hoppen, whose phone he hacked in June 2009.

Questioned by Langdale, Evans said: “I did lie. I was upholding a conspiracy … I’m saying there was an enormous conspiracy which I’ve been caught up in. I was toeing the party line, the company line.”

He said that in April 2010, when the News of the World’s managing editor first asked him about Hoppen’s complaint that her phone had been hacked, he claimed he was not able to remember the incident and had mentioned that, as a result of a spilled drink in a pub, his phone at the time had “sticky keys”.

“This phrase was seized on,” Evans said. “By the time it got to my first meeting with News International lawyers, it had already been drafted into the statement. There it stayed. I went with it because I was extremely frightened.”

Asked if he was blaming the lawyers, identified in the Old Bailey central criminal court as Farrer & Co, he said: “I bitterly regret that I didn’t take a braver course of action at the time.” He agreed that when he had been arrested and questioned by police in August 2011, he had given them a prepared statement which repeated the same line. “It was cobblers,” he told the court.