A former Daily Mirror reporter has said he would work for the Sun only if his children “were starving”, a court has heard. Graham Brough told jurors he considered the Mirror, traditionally a Labour-supporting paper, completely different from its market-leading, traditionally Tory-supporting arch-rival.
He is on trial at the Old Bailey along with three Sun reporters in relation to allegations of unlawful payments to public officials for stories and tip-offs, charges that all the journalists deny.
Brough, who was nicknamed “Special Agent” at the Mirror because of his reputation for scoops, said he had never come across another reporter who “flouted the rules”, and said he had no friends who worked for the Sun. “I don’t want to be divisive or controversial, but I did frequently say I would never work for the Sun unless my children were starving,” he said. “I didn’t think there were very nice people working there, particularly the way it was governed.”
Brough previously said that he knew it was wrong to pay public officials for stories. He told the court on Tuesday: “It is ingrained in all reporters that you don’t pay police officers or a public servant or press officer. They could lose their jobs, and if they lost their job, I would lose my reputation, no one would ever speak to me.”
The court heard how, when he was asked to come in for a police interview about payment of public officials, Brough told an officer that he had bought dinner for the head of the Prison Officers Association, Brian Caton: “There was talk of the Bribery Act, and I wondered if buying them dinner counted.”
Quizzed on Wednesday about a prison contact, Brough told jurors he that believed the man was lonely and looking for a friend when he rang up offering stories to the Daily Mirror. He said he did not press the source on his job after wrongly assuming that he was not a serving prison officer.
He told the court: “I have to be careful not to sound judgmental, but I thought he was a lonely person, very unhappy in whatever job he was doing, and I thought he was exploring a career as a freelance journalist.”
Brough said he “didn’t have to establish trust with someone if they were going to be a tipster, only if I wanted them to be a regular contact”. He added: “He never achieved that rank, function, or grade in my journalistic career. It never occurred to me he might have been lying, it seems ridiculous to make out you are a [prison officer] and then deny [it].”
Asked if any “warning signals started flashing” when the prison guard appeared to suggest he worked at Pentonville Prison, Brough replied: “They never did, because of the untimely and low-grade nature of the information. It only made two stories over the course of the entirety of the relationship with him.”
The court has heard that £250 cash was withdrawn under the contact’s name with the reference “Brough crime special”. Brough said the contact had not asked him for money and he could not remember ever handing him cash in their two meetings. Asked why he requested the money, he said: “I was anticipating, given that was the way journalism was going, that I might need it. My intention in getting the cash out was it should be used in the course of trying to get news.”
Asked if this left him open to an accusation of having a “slush fund in your drawer”, Brough said: “I’m acutely aware of that. I think I had a particularly senior role at the Mirror, and the editor would often say, ‘You know a lot more about this than I do.’ I think I stayed too long, and perhaps I should have been an executive by that time.”
The trial continues.