News Of The World Cleaner Finds Tape Recorder Nailed To Telephone Hidden Behind Editor’s Filing Cabinet

It's my DIY answering machine, officer

News Corp today confirmed that senior News of the World editor ‘Big Ears’ Edmondson has been sacked, after a Lithuanian cleaner failed to read the ‘Warning! Minefield’ sign on his filing cabinet and inadvertently moved it whilst looking for somewhere to plug in the vacuum cleaner – revealing a dusty telephone with a microcassette recorder nailed to the handset.

“Regrettably, further investigations into the filing cabinet have revealed thousands of little tapes, which we have now handed over to the police for their amusement,” commented ashen-faced News Corp chairman James Murdoch. “We don’t know or, frankly, care what might be on them – probably just a load of uninteresting everyday chit-chat of no possible interest to anybody – and we have no idea about the meaning, if any, of a numbered list found sellotaped to the back of the cabinet.”

“People like ‘Brown, G.’, ‘Miller, S.’, and ‘Elizabeth R’ who appear on the list are surely no more than random nobodies culled haphazardly from the phone book,” he added hopefully.

“The police have been nosing about and asking a lot of damn silly questions ever since,” he added peevishly, “Like why so many of our newsrooms’ filing cabinets are labelled ‘Danger: UXB’ and ‘Contains Gelignite – DO NOT TOUCH’. The answer, of course, is simply that many of our world-beating investigative reporters are working tirelessly to uncover explosive stories of tremendous public interest and international importance, and do not want any of their jealous colleagues stealing their sensational scoops. What, I ask you, could be more innocent?”

“Well, me, obviously,” he emphasised. “I have no idea of how the news media works, as anybody in the industry will readily agree.”

The BBC later apologised.