Okay.

When you had the seminars, sir, there was talk there about press practices in the 1970s and how they've improved greatly because of the regime that's been put into place by the PCC. One of the examples that was given was the theft of photographs, and I think ...

Yes, there is one thing.

Well, I mean, when I was at the Daily Telegraph, I did a large number of investigative stories in a slightly odd climate, because if you'll recall, the Telegraph at the time was owned by Conrad Black, Lord Black, current address Cell Block H somewhere in Florida. He was ...

Well, it's an intrusion, firstly. They have no right to do that. It's appalling that it should happen. I had a large number of really quite sensitive business contacts that -- where it would be both embarrassing and potentially awful for my business if this information leaked out and ...

Yes.

Mm.

Yeah. I mean, Alan Rusbridger when he was here, the editor of the Guardian, was talking about how the culture of phone hacking was ingrained at the News of the World, and you know, the intelligence is that that is not the case elsewhere. However, it now beggars believe that ...

Indeed, yes.

Yes, Mr Jay, you have. In a nutshell, during 2002, 2003, I was working quite a lot for the Mail on Sunday, I'm that shadowy beast, the Mail on Sunday freelancer about which much is written and very little seen, quite often. Because of the nature of -- they hired ...

Thank you. The reason I'd have a large amount of perfectly ordinary, innocent traffic coming through is that subeditors on the Times would quite properly and naturally ring me up and ask me points of fact, whether in fact you spelt Robert as in Robert Jay with an R ...

Indeed, but -- yes, I understand that, but in relation to the actual phone hacking element, I mean when Mr Grant was here, you, Mr Jay, were quite rightly looking and picking him up on the difference between supposition and fact, and the only facts that you have in relation to ...

Well, I mean, I think you have a problem, sir, which is -- which you've mentioned and alluded to many times, which is that you're trying to have a very broad Inquiry that is necessarily based on a very narrow evidential base, and the evidential base is essentially the ...

-- but it is the same number and it's a mobile number, which is quite because the technology exists to add a mobile phone to an office PBX system -- PBX stands for private branch exchange, it's the technical term for what's going on here -- but it's always ...

I'm not going to tell you what the number is --

Can I interrupt you, actually? Can I just explain how call logging works? I think it might be helpful to you if I did so. A call logger is essentially an audit of what an office telephone system does. It tells you which extension inside a building or organisation a ...

No, I mean these -- there were two specific events that were highlighted by the Metropolitan Police Service, and they said to me that these indicated the caller had gone right the way through the mailbox and had got to the point that somebody was listening through the calls and they ...

I do remember that in your own very excellent introduction to these proceedings, you did point out that on the cases that had been settled by News International, the most prolific piece of hacking that had gone on was Mr Skylet Andrews, and I believe you said there were 19 ...

And that it was a very bizarre pattern. It was hard to understand how anybody could make calls on the regularity that had been made. There was nine in one day.

That there was a long series of telephone calls that started in 2005 and went through to mid-2006 that went through to my voicemail, that went through to the code that got through to speaking -- or listening to the actual calls there.

Yes, indeed.

Mr Jay, it might be helpful if we talked about the unredacted ones that I got yesterday, because there's a substantial and terribly important difference between the two.

No. I didn't. I saw the phone logs of News International, which were referred to as the phone logs of the News of the World at the time, but it was a redacted version.

I decided that I needed some legal help, so I phoned Chris Bryant, the MP, up, and asked him if he could possibly tell me who his lawyers were, who knew something about phone hacking, and from that I got into this process and I was anxious to participate in ...

Yes. I was informed by letter by first of all the telephone company, T-Mobile, that they had reason to believe that my voicemail had been intercepted, and then subsequently by a letter from the Metropolitan Police.

Yes, that is the case.

Yes, indeed.

And I then became the chief executive -- I was offered the job of being the chief executive of an Internet company, and then about 2001, I went back to journalism and I -- freelance, principally for magazines, for the Times, for the Sunday Times, for the Mail on Sunday and for ...

Yeah, I've been a journalist for 30 years, since the 1980s. I started as a technology writer writing about computing and telecommunications. I was the chief reporter on Electronics Times, which was the weekly newspaper covering the technology sector. I went on after that to work for the Daily ...

Yes, but it does say in here that there were 60 and in fact there were 100.

Yes. Can I just say before we go any further that there is actually a matter of fact that has changed in this. Two days ago the Metropolitan Police Service released an unredacted version of the call log from News International and the number of calls is actually 100 and ...

The 9th day of November 2011.

Yes, there is.

Quite right, sir, I don't deserve to be in the same category.

Thomas Hardy Rowland.

Can I take my jacket off?