Guardian's ex-Editor Peter Preston "stars" in a Street of Shame reports that exposes Murdoch's latest dirty digging felling Chris Huhne and ex wife

0450 GMT London Friday 17 February 2012.
By © Muhammad Haque.

Chris Huhne, UK CONDEM Collusion’s Cabinet Minister[ex] for Energy and Climate Change who appeared in court yesterday [Thursday 16 February 2012] with his co-accused and ex-wife Vicky Pryce, may have been the victim of a still active war agenda by Rupert Murdoch's. As the following report by PRIVATE EYE magazine asserts, the criminal charges being faced now by Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce may not have been brought about by the scorned ex-wife after all but by Rupert Murdoch’s SUNDAY TIMES betraying its source. [To be continued]
STREET OF SHAME Column, Private Eye
PRYCE DROP AT THE SUNDAY TIMES

THE reputation of former Guardian editor Peter Preston has never recovered from his decision almost 30 years ago to obey a court order and return leaked Foreign Office documents, thus enabling the government to identify and jail the leaker, civil servant Sarah Tisdall.
Many hacks protested that Preston had committed a cardinal sin of journalism – shopping a source.

Why are there no such protests at the behaviour of Sunday Times editor John Witherow?

For three months his newspaper resisted a court order requiring it to give Inspector Knacker copies of a private email correspondence between Chris Huhne’s ex-wife Vicky Pryce and ST political editor Isabel Oakeshott.
On 20 January, without explanation, it suddenly agreed to hand over Pryce’s emails after all.
Given the lack of fuss or outrage, some people assumed Pryce herself must have consented to the paper’s U-turn.
Not so. Pryce tells friends that she certainly did not consent and finds the Sunday Times’s failure to protect its source “a strange way to behave”.

The effect on Pryce may be devastating.
Director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer said last week that the “new material” supplied from Wapping allowed prosecutors to declare that they had “sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against Mr Huhne and Ms Pryce for perverting the course of justice”.

Rupert Murdoch won’t be unhappy

Witherow and Oakeshott have not just betrayed their source but also landed her and Huhne with a criminal prosecution. Their master Rupert Murdoch won’t be unhappy to see Huhne out of the cabinet and in the dock. Last July, when the phone hacking scandal went ballistic, Huhne upped the pressure on the Digger by holding him personally responsible for the crimes of his underlings. “I believe we should have a personal assurance from Rupert Murdoch, for example, that these illegal practices were confined to the News of the World,” he said. “There are rumours at the moment that there are civil actions against the Sun. There have been rumours even that the Sunday Times may have been involved in this.”

A few days later, while the Murdochs’ doomed attempt to take full control of BSkyB was still in the balance, Huhne said the scandal threatened the family’s ownership of any stake in the satellite cash cow, however small, since it raised the question of whether they were “fit and proper” people under the Ofcom test to hold a television licence at all: “If he doesn’t pass that, it won’t be a question of just stopping the BSkyB deal – it will be a question of him having to get rid of Sky altogether.”

The Sunday Times has been pursuing him ever since, first pumping and then dumping Vicky Pryce.