I think the latter. My kind of guess is that his daughter's death made his profile much, much higher and so they got interested in him, and once they got interested in him, they got interested in me, so I suppose I was kind of collateral damage.

No. I don't think there should, and I think that's a real problem. When I first started out as a journalist, I wasn't particularly aware of any codes of ethics, but I knew why I'd become a journalist. I mean, you know, in a kind of ...

I don't think so.

No, I don't think it does work. I'm very opposed to any idea of state regulation and I'm completely opposed to the idea of licensing of journalists. I think broadly there are two things that need to happen. One is about regulation, the other is about culture ...

Because I've been writing, since the 1990s, about the mistake I think that celebrities make of putting too much of their private life in the public domain. And of course, I didn't doorstep them, I didn't ring them up, I didn't ask them about their private ...

Yes.

Oh, because I -- I've seen too many versions of press regulation in this country, the Press Council and then the current PCC, and I don't think that they are adequate bodies to deal with this kind of problem, and by the time -- by the time you complain to ...

No, it never even crossed my mind.

I didn't know you could be secretly divorced. I thought you had to go to court and that it was listed and so on. I think there is a quite interesting confusion there between secret and private. I think Dennis probably -- I don't want to speak for him ...

I think it's the confusion of -- the old confusion of not understanding the difference between what interests the public and what's in the public interest. I think that private life has become a commodity and there are lots and lots of -- I mean, I wrote a whole book ...

I think it -- it depends entirely on the context and it seems to me that there is a difference between somebody who is in the public eye, like a politician, say, who makes, you know, what I would call traditional family values a part of his or her political platform ...

I do think there is a sort of wider lesson to be drawn from it, which -- I think I mentioned this at one of Lord Justice Leveson's seminars, that it seems to me that tabloid culture is so remorseless, its appetite is so unable to be filled, that the ...

I'm not sure there is one. I think -- I think that -- from what I've been able to understand about Mr Mulcaire's activities and the number of names in his notebooks, I think it was -- it has been said that the spying was on an industrial scale and ...

Um ...

Yes. I wrote a column -- this column headed "Celebrities or pagan deities". I think there had been a huge amount of interest in the marriage of the Beckhams at that point and they had been doing what celebrities often do, which is try to kind of negotiate their way through ...

I was writing a lot for the Times and I was writing columns for the Times and they would ask me to do additional things like Vivien Westwood was having a huge retrospective of her work at the V&A and they asked me to go and do a cover feature ...

I'm amazed by how shocked I was because in my journalistic life, I've had one or two bad experiences, you know. I was caught in a riot in Sierra Leone last year which was pretty unpleasant and I do now recognise the impact of shock, and on that ...

I arranged to -- I got in touch with the detective and wrote back to his email and said, "I gather you're trying to get in touch with me and here are all my details", including my home address and my home telephone number and my mobile phone, and he ...

In April this year when I got an email from a detective at Operation Weeting.

Very rarely. I mean, I remember once Dennis rang me and said that he and three friends had just got to the summit of Mont Blanc that morning and he was excited about it, and I was writing, as it happened, a column for the Independent that day, and I ...

Dennis and I were -- he was my partner from 2003 to 2010, and I was always quite open about it. I mean, just before this -- I first appear in Mr Mulcaire's notes, we had been to a conference in Venice that Dennis was speaking at in early 2004 and ...

Yes.

Not in the least. I'm a very minor public figure, in the sense that I write books and increasingly people who write books are expected to turn up at literary festivals and talk about where we get our ideas from and things like that, but I'm a writer ...

Oh, I think it's absolutely essential. I mean the reason I got involved in this work, this voluntary work, is that it seems to me that a free press is absolutely a cornerstone, sine qua non, of civil society. If you don't have a free press which is ...

Robin Cook was a friend of mine and in 2001, just before the election, he asked me if I would share his last big speech as foreign secretary -- well, we didn't know it was his last big speech, obviously. And afterwards, at a -- he wanted to talk about how ...

I've been a journalist for more than 30 years. I started my career in national newspapers on the Sunday Times. I worked for the Sunday Times insight team doing investigative journalism, doing stories like the Iranian embassy siege, the Yorkshire Ripper murders and so on.

After that, I decided ...

Yes.

Joan Alison Smith.

Good morning.

Thank you.