Coulson and Brooks accused of conspiracy Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of News International, and Andy Coulson, Prime Minister David Cameron's former communications director, were on Tuesday charged with conspiring to commit misconduct in public office. Both already faced allegations relating to phone hacking with Ms Brooks facing further charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The latest charges, against a total of five individuals, were made as part of Operation Elveden, the Metropolitan Police's investigation into inappropriate payments to police and public officials. Ms Brooks was charged, along with John Kay, The Sun's chief reporter, and Bettina Jordan Barber, a senior official at the Ministry of Defence, with conspiracy to pay for information for news stories during her time as editor of The Sun. Prosecutors alleged that about £100,000 was paid to Ms Barber between 2004 and 2011 for news stories. Ms Brooks was charged and answered bail at a south London police station. Mr Coulson, who served as deputy editor of the now defunct News of the World between 2000 and 2003 and then as the paper's editor until 2007, was charged with conspiring to pay for information alongside Clive Goodman, the Sunday tabloid's royal correspondent until 2007. This included allegedly gleaning information from the Green Book, an internal phone directory for Buckingham Palace which includes private numbers for senior royals and staff. All the individuals are accused of conspiring with others to commit misconduct in public office, a common law offence which carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. Lawyers said, if found guilty, a sentence would take into account the nature of the information received, the frequency of any payments and their amounts as well as the seniority of the public official. Ms Barber's profile on business networking site LinkedIn lists her as a "strategy officer" at the Ministry of Defence. Those charged on Tuesday could try to mount a public interest defence, some lawyers said. However, the Crown Prosecution Service said its charges took into account guidelines from the Director of Public Prosecution which ask prosecutors to consider, before bringing any criminal proceedings, whether any public interest served "outweighs the overall criminality." Some lawyers questioned whether the case could lead to corporate allegations against News International, the UK publishing business of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, or even the US parent group itself. However, Homer Moyer, senior partner at law firm Miller Chevalier in Washington, said action under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was unlikely without direct involvement by News Corp or any activity in the US. News Corp executives have been eager to show that they have contained the risks of the UK scandals and focus investor attention on the company's better-performing entertainment businesses, notably in sports television. On Tuesday, the group announced the acquisition of a 49 per cent stake in the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network, which has rights to Yankees baseball games until 2042. The YES deal was announced by James Murdoch, who as deputy chief operating officer has shed or lost most of his former duties in London and pushed for an expanded role in the group's US television networks. The charged individuals are due to appear before Westminster magistrates" court on a so far unspecified date. News was defined by Lord Northcliffe, the godfather of popular newspapers, as "what somebody somewhere wants to suppress," so it is not surprising that journalists have often resorted to questionable methods to obtain stories. The lengthy Leveson inquiry into standards and practices of the UK press, which is expected to report within weeks, has heard plenty of evidence about methods such as: ● Blagging - the practice of obtaining secret or private information by pretending to be someone else. Once something that journalists might themselves attempt, Lord Justice Leveson heard much about the professional blaggers uncovered by the Information Commissioner's office in Operation Motorman, which ended in 2003. It found a ring of individuals who in more than 17,000 instances obtained private data, such as health or financial records, or mobile phone numbers, often by pretending to be security officials or other authorised people. Newspapers giving evidence to the inquiry insisted that most of these cases were in the public interest, a defence that can sometimes be used to justify techniques that might otherwise be illegal. The ICO disputed the public interest argument. ● Hacking - there is no public interest defence to intercepting mobile phone calls. Indeed, that is one of the reasons police chose to prosecute the offence in 2006 when a News of the World journalist and a private detective were convicted. The Leveson inquiry heard allegations that listening to the voicemails of others was a practice that had developed from one that was originally almost a hobby among show business reporters to one where private investigators were contracted on a regular basis to hack phones. ● Payments - over a period of several decades, an atmosphere in which contacts, particularly police officers who were close to crime correspondents, would be rewarded for tips that led to stories, turned into something different. In 1996, the then editor of the News of the World said he believed 10 per cent of story-subjects had been paid. In one trial, 19 witnesses were paid and the government considered outlawing such payments. The "kiss-and-tell" story grew in popularity among papers with sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds on offer. During the entire period, the distinction between what was and was not in the public interest became increasingly blurred.