Ex-Reuters journalist credited with scoring first hit on Murdochs

Rupert Murdoch’s Chinese wife Wendi won the best of the headlines when she slapped a comedian who attacked her husband with a mock custard pie as he testified in the phone hacking scandal, but a former Reuters correspondent is credited with scoring the first hit.

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland tweeted: “It shows that Paul Farrelly is an ex-journo: he knows how to ask precise questions.”

Telegraph blogger Will Heaven agreed. “Compared to the rest of the sleepy MPs on the Commons Select Committee, Farrelly – who was once City Editor of The Observer – is in a different league. He scored the first decent hit with this question: ‘Have you been paying legal fees for Glenn Mulcaire during the course of the civil actions?’

“And when James Murdoch delivered his stock response - not to my knowledge etc etc - Farrelly didn’t give up. He eventually convinced Rupert Murdoch to state that, if these payments were still being made and if there was no contractual obligation to continue paying them, he would scrap them.”

On Wednesday, Murdoch’s News International terminated “with immediate effect” its arrangement to pay the legal fees of Mulcaire, a private investigator at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal. Mulcaire, who worked under contract for the News of the World, was jailed for six months in 2007 for intercepting voicemails on phones used by aides to Princes William and Harry. News International had been paying his costs for an appeal against a high court ruling that he should answer questions put to him by victims of hacking who are suing him and the newspaper.

Rupert Murdoch is a former board director of Reuters. The headline in a report on the pie attack in his flagship British newspaper The Times read: “Crouching Wendi, hidden dragon”.

Farrelly, 49, a Reuters correspondent and news editor from 1990-1995, told The Reuter Society last month he became a journalist because he thought the best thing was to be paid for causing trouble. He was elected a member of parliament in 2001. It was not the first time he had landed a blow on a newspaper man in parliament: last year he punched a newspaper vendor in a brawl outside a House of Commons bar.

PHOTO: Paul Farrelly asking questions at the phone hacking inquiry in parliament. ■