Max Clifford to sue News of the World

Max Clifford is one of the first alleged victims of phone hacking by the News of the World to begin legal action against the Sunday tabloid, according to a report in the Guardian. The celebrity publicist is seeking to uncover any role News of the World journalists may have played in intercepting messages left on his mobile phone.

Clifford told the Guardian that police had informed him more than two years ago that his mobile phone had been hacked: "I believed that this was a one-off, just two lads overstepping the mark. I gave them the benefit of the doubt," he said.

Now he wanted want to know which journalists were involved, in case he was still dealing with them. "I have a lot of clients phoning me all the time with confidential information. A lot of them have been in touch, worried, looking for me to get to the bottom of it all."

According to Nick Davies, the investigative reporter who broke the Guardian story last week about phone hacking at the News of the World, Clifford has hired the same legal team who successfully won more than £1m in out-of-court settlements from Rupert Murdoch's News International for Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers Association, and two other figures from the world of football.

Clifford, like Taylor, was one of five people named in charges against the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who was working for the News of the World and was jailed along with the paper's royal reporter, Clive Goodman, in January 2007.

At the time of the trial, the News of the World said it had no knowledge of any phone hacking. Editors and executives have stuck to that story ever since.

But Davies reports that when Taylor decided to sue, Scotland Yard and the Information Commissioner's office were ordered by the court to hand over documents which revealed the involvement of the paper's journalists in using criminal methods to get stories.

Clifford's solicitors, Charlotte Harris and Mark Lewis, say they have a further 20 or more potential clients from the worlds of politics, sport and entertainment, who could join Clifford in a class action suit against the News of the World. ·