Dates do not match with statements, witness told at News International phone-hacking trial
Witness Dan Evans challenged by barrister for ex-editor Andy Coulson over inconsistencies in evidence relating to hacked messages between Sienna Miller and Daniel Craig
Former tabloid editor Andy Coulson was not even in London on the day he supposedly listened to an illegally intercepted voice mail in the east London office of the News of the World, a jury at the Old Bailey heard on Thursday.
Dan Evans, a former Sunday Mirror reporter, who admits hacking phones over a seven-year period, told the central criminal court in London he played Coulson the message – on which, he claimed, Sienna Miller was heard declaring her love for Daniel Craig – in the paper’s features department on Tuesday 27 September 2005.
In bruising exchanges, Timothy Langdale QC, barrister for Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World and one-time director of communications for Prime Minister David Cameron, said: “Mr Coulson was not in the office at all that day. He was not even in London that day.”
Evans said that had always been his memory. “If you are saying that he definitely wasn’t there and he was in a different part of the country, then my memory must be flawed. Maybe it was the next day, but my memory has always been that it was the same day. It doesn’t alter the fact that the playing of the tape, and the remarks made, happened.”
Asked whether he was saying the incident could have occurred on the Wednesday or Thursday instead, Evans replied: “It might have been. My feeling is that it would have been the Wednesday, the earlier date, although clearly my recollection hasn’t been perfect on the day that it happened. But happen it did.”
“I’m not here to make things up. This isn’t a fun experience for me.”
The clash came on Evans’s fourth day in the witness box at the phone-hacking trial, as Langdale challenged details in his account of the Craig voicemail.
