Coronation Street star Michael Le Vell says phone hacking trial has taken ‘years off his life’
Coronation Street star Michael Le Vell has said the legal fight with Mirror Group Newspapers over phone hacking has taken “years off his life” and transported him to “really dark places”.
The veteran actor, who has played mechanic Kevin Webster in the Manchester soap for almost 40 years, said confusion over where certain stories had come from caused him to “alienate decent people in my life” and become “extremely paranoid”.
Colleagues suspected him of being a “mole”, he said, as stories about them appeared in the newspapers.
Speaking on the final day of evidence at the Rolls Building in central London, Le Vell, whose real name is Michael Turner, said of the saga: “It’s taken about five years off my life.
“It’s been emotional and it has made me go to somewhere where I thought I would never go again – and that’s really dark places.”
Le Vell went through several stories about him which were splashed in the Mirror, including an article about his arrest in 2011 on suspicion of sexual offences – of which he was later cleared.
Regarding that arrest, he said he remembered seeing an article and “wondering how the press got hold of this information”.
Asked by his barrister David Sherborne how he felt about the publication, he said he was “disgusted”.
He continued: “It just makes me sound like I was a broken man, and I was, but I didn’t want the world knowing.”
Le Vell said he had become ‘extremely paranoid’
In written evidence before the court, Le Vell said he had become “extremely paranoid” over stories about him in the press and that he blamed people around him.
That caused a huge amount of damage to trust and to relationships, he said, commenting: “I feel like I wasted a lot of years alienating decent people in my life.”
He went on to explain why he had joined the legal fight with the Duke of Sussex and more than a hundred others, saying: “Sometimes you just have to speak up for yourself. Now is the time to do that.”
The 58-year-old is suing Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the publisher of the Daily and Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People, for damages over alleged unlawful information gathering between 1991 and 2011.
He claims journalists there were linked to phone hacking; so-called “blagging” or gaining information by deception; and the use of private investigators for unlawful activities.
Prince Harry gave evidence in his case earlier on in the trial
MGN denies Le Vell’s claim, arguing there is “no evidence” of voicemail interception or unlawful information gathering relating to him.
Richard Munden, lawyer for MGN, previously alleged Le Vell’s case is “particularly weak”, saying that some articles in the claim were before phone hacking started or when it had “significantly dropped off”.
Le Vell was followed on the witness stand by Alan Halsall who is supporting his claim. “To think that people did not trust him and wrongly suspected him of leaking information to the defendant is heartbreaking to me and to him,” Halsall said in his witness statement.
Halsall also talked about his own experiences of phone hacking; he described voicemails “going missing” for a period or described dialling in to listen to a voicemail and hearing an “engaged tone”.
At the end of the submissions in court on Tuesday, the judge, Mr Justice Fancourt, read a list of journalists’ names, including Matthew Wright, Neil Wallis, Katie Hind, and former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, and questioned why none of them had been called as witnesses in the case.
Mr Morgan, who has always denied any knowledge of phone hacking or illegal activity at the Daily Mirror, was yesterday accused of knowing how to hack phones, and explaining how to do it to others, by a former Mirror journalist.
Mr Justice Fancourt said he had a “question in my mind” about whether several people, including three or four associates of the Duke of Sussex, “could and should have given some evidence”.
The judge then specifically referred again to Mr Morgan and former Sunday People editor Neil Wallis, whom he said had “relatively recently had a lot to say about this matter outside of court”.
Closing submissions will be entered this week before final arguments pick up again in court on Tuesday.
The case will formally conclude at the end of next week, with a ruling expected at a later date.
MP Mike Amesbury has pleaded guilty to assault by beating for punching a man in Cheshire.
The Runcorn and Helsby MP appeared at Chester Magistrates’ Court on Thursday morning where he admitted attacking 45-year-old Paul Fellows in Main Street, Frodsham, Cheshire, in October.
Speaking outside the court, he said the incident was “highly regrettable” and he was “sincerely sorry” to Mr Fellows and his family.
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CCTV footage showed Amesbury, who has been an MP since 2017, punching Mr Fellows on the ground.
Other previously released videos from another angle show Amesbury punching Mr Fellows repeatedly after knocking him to the floor as members of the public intervened.
It was reported to police at 2.48pm on Saturday 26 October.
The court heard how Amesbury told Mr Fellows “you won’t threaten your MP again” after punching him in the head with enough force to knock him to the ground.
The 55-year-old politician is currently an independent MP after he was suspended by Labour at the end of October when the CCTV footage emerged.
He will continue to be suspended so remains as an independent.
Pic: Richard Townshend/UK Parliament/PA
The court heard Mr Fellows recognised Amesbury in the taxi rank in Frodsham town centre at about 2am on 26 October last year.
Both were alone and had been drinking.
Alison Storey, prosecuting, said Mr Fellows approached the MP to remonstrate about a bridge closure in the town and CCTV then shows they spoke for several minutes but there was no aggression or raised voices.
Mr Fellows then started to walk away but Amesbury re-engaged and was heard saying “what” a few times before shouting it.
The victim then put his hands in his pockets and turned towards the taxi queue and when he turned back Amesbury punched him in the head, knocking him to the ground.
He then punched Mr Fellows again, at least five times, Ms Storey said.
She told the court he was then heard saying “you won’t threaten your MP again will you”.
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Amesbury was voluntarily interviewed under caution by Cheshire Police in October and was charged with common assault on 7 November.
At the time, Amesbury said what happened was “deeply regrettable” and he was co-operating with police.
A Labour Party spokesman said: “It is right that Mike Amesbury has taken responsibility for his unacceptable actions.
“He was rightly suspended by the Labour Party following the announcement of the police investigation.
“We cannot comment further whilst legal proceedings are still ongoing.”
Amesbury is set to be sentenced next month. If he is sent to prison or given a suspended sentence he could lose his seat.
A sentence of less than a year, even if it is suspended, would leave him liable to the recall process, which would trigger a by-election if 10% of registered voters in his seat sign a petition calling for it.
A jail term of more than a year would mean he automatically loses his seat.
UK
‘I have nightmares of dead bodies’: Patients dying and undiscovered for hours in hospital corridors
Patients are dying in corridors and going undiscovered for hours while the sick are left to soil themselves, nurses have said, revealing the scale of the corridor crisis inside the UK’s hospitals.
In a “harrowing” report built from the experiences of more than 5,000 NHS nursing staff, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) found almost seven in 10 (66.81%) say they are delivering care in overcrowded or unsuitable places, including converted cupboards, corridors and even car parks, on a daily basis.
Demoralised staff are looking after as many as 40 patients in a single corridor, unable to access oxygen, cardiac monitors, suction and other lifesaving equipment.
Women are miscarrying in corridors, while some nurses report being unable to carry out adequate CPR on patients having heart attacks.
Sara (not her real name) said she was on shift when a doctor told her there was a dying patient who had been waiting in the hospital’s corridor for six hours.
“It took a further two hours to get her into an adequate care space to make her clean and comfortable,” she told Sky News.
“That’s a human being, someone in the last hours of their life in the middle of a corridor with a detoxing patient vomiting and being abusive behind them and a very poorly patient in front of them, who was confused, screaming in pain. It was awful on the family, and it was awful on the patient.”
Dead patients ‘not found for hours’
A nurse working in the southeast of England quit her job after witnessing an elderly lady in “animal-like conditions”.
She told the RCN: “A 90-year-old lady with dementia was scared, crying and urinating in the bed after asking several times for help to the toilet. Seeing that lady, frightened and subjected to animal-like conditions is what broke me.
“At the end of that shift, I handed in my notice with no job to go to. I will not work where this is a normal day-to-day occurrence.”
Another nurse in the South East said a patient died in a corridor and “wasn’t discovered for hours”.
Sara told Sky another woman needed resuscitating after the oxygen underneath her trolley ran out. Sara was one of just two nurses caring for more than 30 patients on that corridor.
“I have had nightmares – I have a nightmare that I walk out in the corridor and there are dead bodies in body bags on the trolleys,” she said, growing visibly emotional.
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No electricity to plug in computers
One nurse, who spoke to Sky News, said the conditions were “undignified” and “inhumane”.
“It’s not just corridors – we utilise chairs, cupboards, whatever space is available in the hospital to be repurposed into a care space, in the loosest sense of that term. These spaces are unsafe.”
Some spaces, she said, don’t even have basic electricity for nurses to plug in their computers.
The nurse, who spoke to Sky on the condition of anonymity, said she has experienced burnout multiple times over the state of her workplace.
“I have come to the conclusion this week I don’t think I can continue working in the NHS or as a nurse,” she said.
“It breaks my soul; I love what I do when I am able to do it in the right way. I like caring for people, I like making people better, I also like providing a dignified death.”
She added: “I want to look after the institution I was born into, but for the sake of my family and my mental health, I don’t know how much more I can give.”
With 32,000 nursing vacancies in England alone, data also shows around one in eight nurses leave the profession within five years of qualifying.
Nurses are being forced to provide care in hospital corridors and car parks. Pic: PA
Staff ‘not proud of the care they are giving’
The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) says the testimony, which runs to over 400 pages, must mark a “moment in time”. In May 2024, the RCN declared a “national emergency” over corridor care in NHS services.
Professor Nicola Ranger, RCN general secretary and chief executive, said: “At the moment, [nursing staff] are not proud of the care they are giving.”
“We hear stories of escalation areas and temporary beds that have been open for two years,” she added. “That is no longer escalation, it’s understaffed and underfunded capacity that is pretty shocking care for patients. We have to get a grip on that.”
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She called the situation “a disgrace”, citing abuse of staff as another reason for people leaving the profession in droves.
Last week, a nurse was left with “life-changing injuries” after being stabbed by a man while at work.
“The NHS used to be the envy of the world and we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and say ‘what needs to change?’
“The biggest concern for us is that the public Is starting to lose a little faith in their care, and that has to stop. We absolutely have to sort this out.”
Commenting on the RCN’s report, Duncan Burton, chief nursing officer for England, said the NHS had experienced one of the “toughest winters” in recent months, and the report “should never be considered the standard to which the NHS aspires”.
“Despite the challenges the NHS faces, we are seeing extraordinary efforts from staff who are doing everything they can to provide safe, compassionate care every day,” he added. “As a nurse, I know how distressing it can be when you are unable to provide the very best standards of care for patients.”
Have you experienced corridor care in an NHS hospital? Get in touch on NHSstories@sky.uk
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