David Yelland, who edited the Sun until 2003 and left News International before the hacking scandal, admits to finding it odd that a lot of his friends are now facing jail.
Speaking at a seminar organised by the Royal Television Society called Crisis! What Crisis! last night, Yelland, who is now a partner at PR firm Brunswick, said: “The older I get the more people I meet who have been to prison. My mother would be alarmed at how many people I know who have served time at Her Majesty’s pleasure or at the pleasure of the American prison authorities.
“People make a lot of money in business but if you do something wrong you tend to get caught,” he added, saying of his departure from the Sun. “The lesson is to leave before things go wrong, like I did when I resigned from News International.”
Yelland also revealed that pride of place in his downstairs loo — at the home he shares with his wife Charlotte Elston, director of communications at BBC Worldwide — is taken by one of his first Sun editorials headlined “Why the BBC should be shut down”.
