New Sunday newspaper on hold after Sun arrests

Plans for a new Sunday newspaper to replace the News of the World have been put on hold after the arrest of four senior journalists from its sister paper, The Sun, according to three senior insiders.

The plans, known as Project X, had been in readiness for some weeks, although the same sources downplayed reports that a launch date of April 29 had been set in stone.

On Saturday, police arrested four senior journalists, named by colleagues as Graham Dudman, a former managing editor, Fergus Shanahan, a former deputy editor, as well as the current head of news, Chris Pharo, and the crime editor, Mike Sullivan.

All were questioned under suspicion of corruption as defined by the 1906 Prevention of Corruption Act and aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office. A service police officer was also arrested and all five were bailed to appear before police on dates in April and May.

The insiders said that managers of News International had decided that the adverse publicity surrounding the arrests and the suspension of the four journalists while police inquiries were going on would hamper any possible launch of a new title, which earlier reports said would be called the Sun on Sunday.

“It has gone way on to the back burner since Saturday,” one person said.

News International declined to comment.

Neville Thurlbeck, a former chief reporter and former news editor of the News of the World, said: “The launch of that newspaper is not even being discussed now.”

Mr Thurlbeck said that an internal group, the management and standards committee, set up at the direction of Rupert Murdoch to co-operate with a police investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, had handed over so much material that it had lost control of the situation.

“The staff [of The Sun] have lost trust in their own management because they [the MSC] don’t believe that they know what is contained in the material that the police now have.”

The committee has organised the reconstruction of databases of emails and other documentation surrounding the News of the World, some of which may have been deliberately deleted, according to statements made by a High Court judge last week.

There are eight so-called “data pools” and one in particular, known as Data Pool Three, is said by lawyers involved in a raft of civil privacy actions being taken against the News of the World, to contain a great deal of email traffic from the Sunday tabloid relevant to the cases.

At Monday’s hearing of the Leveson inquiry, set up to inquiry into press standards after the scandal surrounding the hacking of the mobile phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old murder victim, the current and immediately past directors of the Press Complaints Commission both agreed that it could not properly be called a regulator.

Stephen Abell, the current director, said the PCC had a complaints-resolution function, but could be reshaped to regulate the press better. He urged Sir Brian Leveson to consider a contractual structure in which newspapers signed up to a code of conduct and would be fined for breaches of it, rather than anything based on statutory rules.