Back in 2005, the News of the World won just about every award the industry could bestow – including the biggest of them all, Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards. As editor of Press Gazette, which organised those awards, I was given rare interview access to the usually-secretive newspaper’s top executive team, including the only interview with editor Andy Coulson.

Now Press Gazette has exhumed from its archive (thanks to former deputy editor Jon Slattery) the lengthy piece that I wrote. In the light of the recent return of the phone-hacking hoo-ha, and Coulson’s current discomfort, it makes interesting re-reading.

For me, one key passage comes from the interview with chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, discussing his scoop on David Beckham’s affair with Rebecca Loos.

After explaining that Loos wouldn’t initially come clean, he says: “To produce the Beckham story, I had to find every piece of the jigsaw. People supplied me with evidence in terms of telephone numbers, SIM cards, text messages, which proved so damning against Beckham in the end.”

Now I have no desire to fan the flames of this any further –  Coulson already paid his price by resigning his editorship, after all. But acquiring SIM cards and text messages of two people who weren’t playing ball with an investigation? To some, that might that sound suspiciously similar to phone hacking.