Iam still in shock. That a once-great newspaper, with the largest circulation on the planet, should have come to such an ignominious and inglorious end, mired in disgrace, simply beggars belief.
In 1993 I co-authored the official history of the News of the World to mark its 150th anniversary. We had a huge and expensive party at Wapping to celebrate, attended by hundreds of staff and many guests from the great and the good of Fleet Street and the media world.
All then seemed rosy and what was still then far and away Britain's best-selling Sunday newspaper looked set to live forever. Never, in my worst nightmare, could I have imagined that only 18 years later the paper I worked for and loved for all its faults for three decades would publish its last-ever edition.
When the NoW was launched in 1843 it was billed as the "Novelty of the Nation and the Wonder of the World" — and so it has proved to be throughout its colourful history.
Under the legendary leadership of Lord Riddell and Sir Emsley Carr (editor for 50 years, 1891-1941) the paper prospered. By the 1950s sales had reached 8.5m and the NoW was the envy of Fleet Street. In 1969 it became the first British title Rupert Murdoch acquired, and in the past 25 years it has continued to flourish, often earning praise, sometimes earning censure, but always appealing to the heart of the nation.
From the Crimean war to the swinging 60s, from the first world war to the Profumo affair, from a quaint Victorian broadsheet to the thrusting tabloid newspaper of today, the NoW's story is a fascinating chronicle of the life and times of our country.
Its staple diet was crime from the 19th century until well into the 1980s, and that only really ended when the paper was transformed from a broadsheet into a red-top tabloid in 1984. When I joined the paper as a reporter in 1967, I found myself spending half my life at Assize Courts (as they were called in those days) in places like Hertford, Winchester and Lewes. One would go wherever the news editor sent you, spending a week covering the Assizes, chatting up clerks of the court, coppers and barristers to find out what cases were coming up that the readers were likely to be interested in.
Fortunately, having been trained in the old school on local provincial papers, I had a good shorthand note — something I tend to doubt many journalists even know about these days — and could supply the NotW with a full report of a particularly juicy case with all the salacious details of rapes and indecent assaults, etc.
I recall one particularly scary moment when I was in a first-class carriage on a train from Winchester to London (yes, we travelled first-class on expenses in those days) and suddenly realised that my two travelling companions were a pair of judges who were discussing their respective cases. I kept my head down and uttered not a single word!
And it was the NoW that introduced kiss'n'tell with the memoirs of Diana Dors in 1959, for which the paper paid an unheard-of (at that time) sum of £35,000.
However, it did, throughout its history, address many serious issues and ran many campaigns exposing corruption and villainy in high places. For that alone, it deserves respect and not pillorying. It was a legendary NoW crime reporter, Peter Earle, who first exposed the Profumo scandal that brought down the Macmillan government in 1963.
Until Rupert Murdoch took over the NoW in 1969, the paper had been owned for decades by the Carr family who ran it like a family grocery store. Emsley's son Sir William Carr, the eccentric baronet who was chairman from 1952 to 1969, was a "two bottles of scotch a day" man – said to be a brilliant mathematician, but only before lunch – who would invite staff to his palatial home in Sussex, where they played croquet and flunkies served champagne.
There was a famous story that at one office male-only function a showbiz reporter, very drunk, grabbed the chairman by the tie, banged his head against the wall and uttered the immortal question "Why are you so fucking rich and I'm so fucking poor?" Next morning, the hapless reporter, with a vague memory of what he'd done, appeared in Bouverie Street expecting to pick up his cards. He walked into the lift, straight into the arms of Sir William Carr who simply shook his head and said: "Why do we do these things?"
When Murdoch first appeared on the horizon in 1969 with a bid for the paper, Robert Maxwell had got there before him and was trying to take it over. The then editor, Stafford Somerfield, wrote a famous leader in which he declared that the NoW was "as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding" and he would not work for a Czech called Jan Ludwig Hoch, ie Maxwell.
At a special meeting at the Connaught hotel NoW shareholders were invited to decide between the two. What perhaps is little known (though it is mentioned in thebook) is that many were given shares on a temporary basis and asked to vote for the Murdoch bid. The shares were then taken back.
So that was how Rupert Murdoch got the NoW – the newspaper that was to prove the cornerstone of his entire global empire. Believe me, I know, because I was there (not at the actual meeting, but holding the fort in the office) at the time.
It was common talk at Wapping even in my day that Murdoch wanted to turn the NoW into the Sun on Sunday. It seems now very likely that he will get his wish – or am I just being cynical?
Roy Stockdill was a News International journalist from 1967 to 1997 and co-wrote The News of the World Story