Greg Miskiw
Son of Ukrainian refugees who directed News of the World scoops but was jailed for phone-hacking
GREG MISKIW, who has died aged 71, was a senior executive at the News of the World who was sentenced to six months in prison for his part in the phone-hacking scandal that sank the paper in 2011. As the paper’s news editor, Miskiw used his mastery of the dark tabloid arts to earn the nickname “the Prince of Darkness”, but also acclaim as the archetypal tabloid journalist.
“You were in a bubble at the News of the World,” he explained, “where the objective was very simple: just get the story. Just get it … no matter what … no matter how.”
After such “crushing” pressure to produce a front-page exclusive every week, he defended his role in the phone-hacking affair by saying he was “only ever seeking the truth”, but never downplayed what he had done wrong.
When he discovered that colleagues had hacked the phone of the murdered 13-yearold schoolgirl Millie Dowler, Miskiw declared himself “devastated”. Asked what he would say to the girl’s father, he said: “What could I say, other than: ‘I’m terribly sorry. It happened. It was more than misjudgment – it was an appalling thing to do.’ ”
Affable in person but professionally ruthless, Miskiw was a complicated character whose journalistic exploits could lack empathy, his family identifying “a vicarious emotion he’d never been taught” as the son of wartime Ukrainian refugees and victims of Russian atrocities in which his grandmother had been shot dead.
This emotional vacuum gave Miskiw a professional edge: he pursued stories with little regard for the methods used or collateral damage. “This is what we do,” he once remarked. “We go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
At his Old Bailey trial in 2014 Miskiw was said to have ordered 1,500 hackings at the News of the World between 1999 and 2006, some after he had left the paper.
In 2011, after a 12-hour “no comment” police interview about his conduct, Miskiw was charged with conspiracy to intercept voicemails. Along with two former colleagues, Miskiw pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey in 2014 and was sentenced to six months in prison. In the event he served only 37 days, having already served 106 days of home detention with an electronic tag.
Miskiw insisted he was “100 per cent” certain other media groups had hacked phones, telling Channel 4 News in 2015: “If I’m a prince of darkness then I’m one of several princes. I’m more of a duke.”
Pressed that he had been “in good measure responsible for bringing down an entire newspaper”, Miskiw said: “I did not bring down the News of the World. The News
of the World brought itself down.”
He was born Ihor Miskiw on December 6 1949 in Chapeltown, Leeds, where his Ukrainian parents had settled after the Second World War. His father was a tailor while his mother worked in a factory; the boy barely spoke English until he was seven. From St Matthew’s School, he took his A-levels at Park Lane Sixth Form College, where he picked up the nickname Gregorovitch.
When he wrote to the Bradford Telegraph
and Argus for work experience, he was advised to study for his National Council for the Training of Journalists certificate. After a couple of years as a reporter on the Wolverhampton Express and Star, he moved to the Evening Mail in Birmingham.
He worked in London on the Evening News, then in 1979, after stints on the Fleet St News Agency, worked shifts at the Sunday Mirror. He secured a staff job on the strength of an exclusive with the Prince of Wales, who had talked to protesters in Brixton about the controversial stop-andsearch “sus” law, Miskiw being the only reporter present.
In December 1981 he travelled to crisistorn Poland, then under martial law, sneaking into the country in the mail wagon of the overnight train from Vienna, the Chopin Express. Arrested for visa irregularities, Miskiw spent 26 days in Warsaw’s grim Rakowiecka prison.
In 1987 he moved to the News of the World as a reporter, and by the mid-1990s was running the news desk. After a spell in the paper’s New York office he returned to London to run the paper’s news investigations unit, which was closed in 2001.
In 2003, after a clash with the paper’s crime editor Peter Rose, an employment tribunal branded his actions “cavalier and irresponsible”, and Miskiw moved to Manchester to oversee the paper’s northern operations. After two years he left the paper for good, briefly running the Liverpoolbased Mercury Press Agency as editor before moving to Florida, where he joined a supermarket tabloid, The Globe.
Miskiw never fully recovered from his spell in prison. He considered his career and reputation destroyed, and the emotional and financial repercussions took their toll.
For relaxation he read (Hemingway and Dostoevsky were particular favourites), played squash and followed Leeds United.
Greg Miskiw’s first marriage, in 1978, to Patricia Mccabe, ended in divorce. With his second wife, Sara Newman (née Moore), he had a daughter, the journalist Sophie Miskiw, who survives him with his 96-yearold mother and a son from a relationship with another journalist, Terenia Taras.