TWO words may have changed Clive Goodman’s life for ever: “Guilty, m’lud.”

The media business, tabloid newspapermen in particular, will collectively have drawn a sharp intake of breath upon hearing that the News of the World’s royal editor had admitted conspiring to intercept voicemails meant for members of the royal household.

Suspended from his job, awaiting the sentence of the court, life must be lonely for the Nigel Dempster apprentice who has filled the Screws with as many, if not more, world exclusives than his colleague, Mazer Mahmood.

His proprietor will be furious: Goodman getting his collar felt so hard on the heels of the OJ Simpson affair and Kelvin MacKenzie’s insistence that the Sun’s disastrous Hillsborough story was right has turned 2006 into Rupert Murdoch’s annus horribilis.

His editor, Andy Coulson, has already put a healthy distance between himself and the man in the dock by ruling that Goodman’s activities were “entirely wrong” and instituting staff training to ensure that such naughtiness does not happen again.

Other than that, business as usual.

In truth, invading people’s privacy in search of the sort of celebrity trivia and personal details that Goodman’s trawls appear to have elicited cannot hope to attract either public or professional sympathy, much less any public interest defence.

It might even prove to be the final straw that breaks the government’s reluctance to impose stricter controls on the media.

But to those who shake their worthy heads and condemn him and his newspaper, ‘judge not, that ye be not judged’, as The Man said. We all bear some responsibility.

Goodman’s actions have, after all, been little more than a logical extension of the Peeping Tom journalism that I and others have employed, the dustbin rifling of Benjy and his brothers and the turban-cam exploits of Mazher Mahmood.

The way in which Clive Goodman and his newspaper operate today – and who did not laugh aloud at the notion that his editor knew nothing, asked nothing? – a highly copycat industry will follow tomorrow unless some sort of barrier is not erected.

Preferably by proprietors. Probably by politicians.

AS sequels go last week’s was a stunner: The Madness of King Kelvin (Part Two), a remarkable repeat of the gigantic clanger that lost the Sun 50,000 readers on Merseyside and is estimated to have cost Rupert Murdoch £100million over succeeding years.

WHAT? He did it again?
You bet he did. Not content with his original, morning-after attack on a city grieving for the 96 Liverpool football supporters killed in the 1989 Hillsborough stadium disaster, the most famous mouth in the media drove a final nail into the coffin of seventeen years of News International apologies for the calumny.

“I was not sorry then and I’m not sorry now,” growled former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie. “I only went on the World at One the next day and apologised because Rupert Murdoch told me to.”

What the man who published ‘THE TRUTH!’ – a quickly discredited story which alleged that drunken Liverpool fans caused the stadium stampede then urinated upon and looted the bodies of victims – apparently did not realise was that among the hundred or so guests at a closed-door business lunch in Newcastle Upon Tyne was a journalist from the North-East’s leading regional daily, The Journal.

Worse still, The Journal is owned by Trinity Mirror, sworn enemy of the Sun and all things Murdoch. And so is the Liverpool Daily Post. As a result, within hours Merseyside was treated to a front-page verbatim report of Kelvin’s outspoken and devastating rejection of an apology which was publicly reiterated only two years ago when the Sun described its “false allegations [as] the most terrible mistake in our history.”

Trinity Mirror’s perfectly proper collusion in the matter is, and must remain, merely a reasonable conjecture on my part. I have, you see, several interests to declare: I am a former editor of the Daily Mirror (with all the schadenfreude at Kelvin’s discomfort that that implies) and, coincidentally, I now live part of my life in the North-East and write a weekly column for The Journal. I am not, however, privy to the wider workings of the company.

I am also an admirer and, I hope, still a close friend of the one-time Beast of Bouverie Street. Ironically, as the controversy swirled about us last weekend I was with MacKenzie and News Chief Executive Les Hinton (does Kelvin even realise that Hinton was born in Bootle?) at a 60^th birthday party for Wireless Group MD Bill Ridley. Embarrassingly, with the fallout still settling on Monday, my face stared embarrassingly out of the pages of the Independent’s media section where I was recording gushing gratitude to my mentor . . . er, one Kelvin MacKenzie.

But to return to the wider picture: I am only too aware that editors – former or otherwise – are just as likely as Joe Soap to fall into the on-or-off-the-record trap. Thirteen years ago, when I published clandestine pictures of the Princess of Wales in a gymnasium, an indiscreet remark to a reporter in Australia bounced its way back across the world within the hour to splash in the Evening Standard (‘I’m a Ratbag, Says Di Editor!’).

This is not the first such difficulty Britain’s best tabloid marketeer has created for himself with his slick grasp of sensation and almost criminal power of invective. Remember him snubbing the Queen’s ‘invitation’ to editors to enjoy a cup of tea at the Palace in order that she might lecture them on the unwelcome attention paid by the Press to her daughter-in-law Diana? Or his reply when Prime Minister John Major telephoned to nervously inquire how he planned to treat coverage of the Black Wednesday monetary fiasco – “I’m going to tip a bucket of shit all over you!”?

Amazingly, he lives to tell the tale and grow the legend. While party guests at Ridley’s sixtieth hissed to one another (behind their hands) ‘Why does he keep doing it?’, most publicly agreed that MacFrenzy was still a power in the media land. So where does that leave the central players in this never-ending saga?

RUPERT MURDOCH will rage, impotently for once, at his one-time favourite lieutenant’s ghastly gaffe, following so close on the heels of the similarly costly OJ Simpson fiasco in the United States. Apart from costing his company money the misnamed Dirty Digger is forever and unfairly still identified with his protégé’s dirty digging.

THE SUN will haemorrhage even more copies on Merseyside, adding to the discomfort of current editor Rebekah Wade and further diminishing the coffers of News International for decades to come, tarnishing, as a result, the achievements of CEO Les Hinton.

LIVERPOOL and its soccer-mad supporters from opposing ends of Stanley Park (Everton’s ground is only a penalty kick from Anfield) will never forgive the publisher, the newspaper or – especially – the former editor. Liverpool FC, strangely, is another matter: perhaps with one eye on its lucrative relationship with Sky Sports, the club shamefully moaned only that the comments were “totally inappropriate and hugely disappointing.”

AND KELVIN? Don’t expect him to change any time soon. He’s an instinct journalist, at once the best and the worst of his profession. He defends by attacking, and will not take a backward step. After all, Ben Bradlee’s immortally defiant endorsement of the work of Woodward and Bernstein – “We stand by our story” – earned the Washington Post editor lifelong fame. MacKenzie, however improbably, is similarly confident of his case.

But his renewed one-man jihad against the horrified, maligned and outraged people of a city withholding an enormous ransom of lost circulation from the redtops’ market leader might just have cost him his part-time but highly profitable job by the time you read this.

Oh, didn’t I mention that he is currently the sassiest, lippiest, most insulting columnist in Britain?

For the Sun, of course . . .  

I WAS down in London the other day. Usual stuff: medical onceover from a consultant I see far too often for my liking, a media birthday party, couple of radio appearances, lunch with old pals . . . that sort of thing.

Anyway, nice though it is to spend a few days in the Smoke I do find the Inevitable Question a tad wearing. It is always the same: “Why do you live all the way up there in – where is it – Northumberland? Long way from London, isn’t it?”

“You’ve answered your own question,” I tell them. “It being a long way from London is precisely what I like about it.” Now, that might make me feel pretty smug but it doesn’t stem the flow of silly quibbles.

“Bloody cold, though . . . more sheep than people . . . what d’you do for culture?” and so on until, against my better judgment I am trapped into delivering a heartfelt but over-the-top testimonial to the Land of Milk and Honey: mediterranean summers along a National Trust coastline, alpine winters on the ski-friendly slopes of Cheviot, the retail wonders of the Metrocentre and Eildon Square, international stars at the Sage, Holy Island, blah-blah-blah . . .

You don’t need me to tell you what happens next. From Christmas onwards GNER disgorges a constant stream of weekender City types seeking a sniff of what they term “the Bankses’ good life”. And don’t they love it! The only disappointment we’ve experienced thus far was from some overseas visitors who “just adored your Alnwick” (they pronounced it Allen-Wick) but were disappointed not to have bumped into Harry Potter “at the Dook’s place”. They were, of course, American.

It’s what happens afterwards that is beginning to worry me. You see, these outsiders begin to want to stay. For good.

Gemma’s big brother came first. As soon as he retired from chiropody my brother-in-law took holy orders and moved himself and his wife into our village. Now, having resisted Malcolm The Byreman’s earnest requests to “have a look at my cows’ heels, you’re a foot doctor”, The Deacon is happily ensconced bringing spiritual succour to such human flock as he can find around Berwick.

It doesn’t stop there. Our friends Diane and Nigel can’t meet us for dinner next time we’re in London because they’ll be “up in Kelso having a look at a couple of properties”. Mutual friends Maureen and Ajit have requested that property pages from the local papers’ be sent to them weekly in east London. Even our best pals from Australia have mused about settling down in the old country, despite confessing that they would “miss the decent cricket Down Under”.

You see what is happening? I have become the Borders’ very own Oscar Schindler, the conduit through which friends who have glimpsed a better life than the polluted, noisy, crowded outside world affords can escape to Paradise on Tweed and contentment.

There is, of course, a downside of which I am all too aware: immigrants into this rural retreat might be well-named ‘incomers’ as much for the spending power they wield when it comes to property investment as for the fact that they are newly arrived.

As a result, local people whose families have been here for generations – and I can just about claim that lineage – are priced out of the market. A steady inflow of outsiders, despite the energy and new skills they could introduce, might change irrevocably the nature of the society which attracted them in the first place.

The Deacon at least provides a much needed social and spiritual service in return for the shelter he gains in our community. I, on the other hand, offer little more than a substantial improvement in the wealth of local hostelries through my overly generous contributions to the hospitality industry.

I’d welcome your thoughts on the issue . . . problem is, I can’t give you my full address here.

YOU might want to come and live in the village, too!

SOMETIMES, biding in Berwick can be like hiding out inside the Alamo or riding the bounds at Rorke’s Drift. One eyelid is always ajar, one ear constantly cocked for signs of restlessness among the natives on the other side of the Tweed.

And, mark my words, there’ll soon be trouble brewing among the blue bonnets north o’ the Border.

Failure by Cameron’s Highlanders to improve their political standing in Scotland come the May elections will have serious consequences for more than just the Conservative party. In that event Labour’s sorry army, with either Clan Blair or Clan Broon at its head, is unlikely to be able to prevent the Scottish Assembly falling under the control of the SNP.

That, in turn, will be enough to open once more the floodgates of demands for a step beyond devolution: Alex ‘Leaping’ Salmond and his Orkney oil barons will be banging the secessionary drum and demanding independence exactly 300 years after signing it away in the first place.

Will it succeed? Probably not: a recent ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph showed that only 52 per cent of Celts favour a Scottish breakaway led (and this is MY suggestion) by King Mel of Braveheart, or a tartan republic headed by Scottish President Sean Connery. Of course, that may be due to Gordon Brown’s claim that one in six Scots live south of the border while 400,000 Sassenachs are squatting in the glens and braes to the north (and they can’t ALL be taking part in BBC TV survival documentaries).

Perhaps, for all the petty spites and enmities exhibited on both sides of the Tweed’s roiling waters, three centuries of neighbourliness have achieved a kind of homogeneity now being cautiously repeated by the comings and goings across ‘borderless’ European states.

Naturally some preferences will always remain resolutely nationalistic. I scoff, for example, whenever I hear Roddy Forsyth doing his Mister-Mackay-of-Porridge impressions while reporting from Glasgow on Radio Five’s Saturday footy programme: “And yes, it’s that man JockymacKowski again, scoring his 143^rd goal of the season to put Celtic 18-nil up against plucky part-timers Invercockyleekie . . . “

I complain bitterly when I stumble across Radio Borders or BBC Scotland instead of BBC Newcastle and Tyne Tees. Or when the ladies – never the lasses – in the Cornhill shop save me Scottish instead of English newspaper editions.

“Blame Menzies, not me,” says Morag. Aye, Menzies – even the wholesalers are Scots!

And I find it hard to live on the English side when across the Tweed in Coldstream, just a fly fisher’s cast away, Borderers like me avoid university fees and means-tested care in old age AND send their MPs to vote in the London parliament on matters affecting my life while I have no say in theirs, despite the handsome cash subsidies Scotland enjoys from the British budget.

For all that, I cherish the rarity value of life on the borderline. Where else but in Berwick could one spend, as I did recently, an evening in the Hen and Chickens watching international football via satellite – England v. Croatia in one bar and, not three metres away, Scotland v. Ukraine in the other. And weren’t there groans and jeers from each bar in turn as the home sides both went a goal behind within thirty seconds of one another?

There was no trouble, though, and little rejoicing in either bar, as I recall. A far cry from years gone by, judging by a recent recollection from her teenage years by my Berwick Ramblers friend, Annie.

“I was walking our dog across Berwick Bridge the day Berwick beat Glasgow Rangers in the Scottish Cup,” said Annie.

“A scowling Scotsman in a kilt, obviously the worse for wear and with his pride badly dented, waved a fist at the dog and growled at me: ‘Aye, yer windies’ll be oot the neet!’”

Crivens! Maybe it’s we English who should be seeking Home Rule . . .

YOU’LL notice this week I haven’t mentioned any of my usual cast of characters – The Byreman, young Neil and big Frank from the sawmill, John Next Door and the rest – because the jury is out at the Blue Bell on my weekly reports of the barflies’ gossip.

“You’ll have the anti-hunt lot spray-painting your cottage if you mention the village,” warned one. “You’re infringing my privacy,” grumbled another, “my wife will read what we’ve been saying down the pub.”

It’s getting serious. Someone has even suggested a protest to the Press Complaints Commission..

I am playing a dangerous game . . . watch this space!

I TOLD them so.  Call me a bighead if you like, but ever since I abandoned my full-time media career in favour of the peace and calm of Paradis-sur-Tweed I’ve said the same thing over and over:

if you don’t like what your read/see/hear in the media, don’t just moan - DO something about it.

But what CAN we do? wailed the Moaning Minnies. Who’d listen to me?

Who? From now on Rupert Murdoch will, for one. According to suffering celebs and picked-on politicians as well as you, Mr and Mrs Everyman, bullies don’t come much bigger than the Australian-born American publishing tycoon.

All the more commendable, then, that this week the Mighty Mogul bowed to the wishes of the Moaning Minnies by cancelling and pulping US publication of OJ Simpson’s odious money-for-murder book ‘If I Did It ‘ and junking the planned two-hour interview already taped for a Fox TV special. Furthermore, he apologised “for the pain caused by this ill-considered project” to the families of Simpson’s dead wife and her murdered friend.

Since ceasing to edit newspapers for a living - including one or two Murdoch titles - I’ve argued in newspaper articles, on TV and in countless radio interviews that the media can, and often should, be brought to heel. It happened to the Murdoch empire this week: within a few days of plans for the book and TV programme becoming known it was engulfed in a tsunami of criticism. The rest - and the project - is history.

TO London, as Pepys would say, to celebrate a friend’s wedding, do a bit of radio and attend a black-tie dinner at the rather medieval-sounding Tallow Chandlers Hall.

Medieval the Tallow Chandlers certainly are, a livery company founded in the 1300s whose membership these days comprises City grandees rather than the candlemakers for whom it was created. A Masonic feel to the occasion: men (and only men, I regret) with odd-sounding titles sharing loving cups of wine and passing both port bottle and communal silver snuff boxes to the left.

An unusual yet glittering evening, not unlike a recent crowded dominoes night at the Blue Bell when I was arguing renewable energy policy with my dairy farmer friend Malcolm, known fondly hereabouts as The Byreman and a man implacably opposed to my David Cameron-inspired ambition to have a wind turbine in my garden and a solar panel on my roof.

“Rubbish!” he snorted, “what happens on a cold frosty night when the wind doesn’t blow or a dark winter’s day when there’s no sunlight?”

I was, I confess, stumped. “Coal’s the answer!” cried the sozzled old son of the steading, jabbing a careworn finger at a story in The Journal. “Says here they’re building a new coal-fired power station that will produce zero emissions and power a million homes.”

Anyway, I recalled that conversation at the black-tie dinner where, seated conveniently next to the technology director of a major oil company which has recently boasted its credentials in the renewables area, I ventured to reveal my wind and solar plan.

“Pipedreams, I’m afraid,” he said with a sigh. “Wind stops blowing, sun doesn’t shine and we’re back with oil, gas and nuclear . . . or coal, of course. Did you hear that Centrica plan to build a zero-emission coal-fired power station?”

I had, of course. From The Byreman, back home in Crookham. AND he won the dominoes . .  .