The only thing to surprise me is that the story has got out

The surprising thing is that the chicken media have paying any attention to it, and that the police have finally been forced into taking some notice of it - at the time it happened the News of the World openly bragged about having access to the online phone calls involved, and even talked about them with the police.

From today's Guardian: "The paper made little effort to conceal the hacking from its readers. On 14 April 2002 it published a story about a woman allegedly pretending to be Milly Dowler who had applied for a job with a recruitment agency: "It is thought the hoaxer even gave the agency Milly's real mobile number … the agency used the number to contact Milly when a job vacancy arose and left a message on her voicemail … it was on March 27, six days after Milly went missing, that the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile."

The newspaper also made no effort to conceal its activity from Surrey police. After it had hacked the message from the recruitment agency on Milly's phone, the paper informed police about it.

It was Surrey detectives who established that the call was not intended for Milly Dowler. At the time, Surrey police suspected that phones belonging to detectives and to Milly's parents also were being targeted.

One of those who was involved in the original inquiry said: "We'd arrange landline calls. We didn't trust our mobiles.""

The claim by the then editor of thew News of the World, Rupert Murdoch's favourite side-kick Rebekah Brookes, that she didn't know anything about it is both absurd and an obvious lie.