Phone hackers 'sought details of Kylie Minogue's cancer treatment'

Details of the hack were revealed in one of two new books published after the phone-hacking trial, both of which shed new light on the scandal that engulfed Fleet Street over the past half-decade.

Hack Attack, by Nick Davies of the Guardian, covers six years of his reportage and investigation.

And The News Machine, by the Independent's James Hanning, is co-written by Glenn Mulcaire, the News of the World's private investigator who was twice convicted for phone hacking, and whose notes and emails were vital evidence in convicting four senior News of the World editors on phone hacking charges.

In the book - for which he will not be paid - Mulcaire reveals he was adept at ''triangulating and pinging'' mobile phones, to determine their location.

It was a technique used in his, and the NotW's scoop on David Beckham's affair with Rebecca Loos.

Hanning and Mulcaire wrote that public tip-offs to the paper led to Mulcaire being assigned to the story.

He verified a lot of the claims, which led to Loos agreeing to a kiss-and-tell deal with the paper. However, Mulcaire also had to prove that text messages on her phone were sent by Beckham, when the phone was in his possession and he was alone.

Beckham's lawyer was tipped off about the methods used against him, and they began legal action against NotW, which ended with an unreported settlement, after which ''the paper was not notably critical of the player''.

Wrote Hanning: ''Many suspected that Australian model Elle Macpherson also reached an accommodation with the paper after she was named as one of the original victims of phone hacking in the 2006 trial … In the approximately 30 mentions of Macpherson in the paper in the following years, about half were neutral and half were laudatory''. However, there was no admission of or evidence for such an arrangement, Hanning writes.

In Hack Attack, subtitled ''How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch'', Davies says that, after Mulcaire was caught hacking royal household voicemails, police had found ''masses of mobile phone numbers'' in thousands of pages of Mulcaire's notes but ''made no attempt to prosecute Mulcaire for all these other possible victims''.

''I finally realised that what really mattered was that the man who was editing News of the World at the time - Andy Coulson - was now working as media adviser for the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron,'' Davies wrote.

By 1999 the News of the World newsroom had learnt voicemail hacking techniques, ''swapping good numbers and useful messages like schoolboys swap conkers''.

By 2001 Mulcaire had a contract worth more than the news editor's: ''Coulson's former reporters say he was helping them on just about every story they covered, though not all of them knew he was hacking.''

In 2005, Davies wrote, chief News of the World reporter Neville Thurlbeck was sent to Australia to cover the medical care of Kylie Minogue, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

''Thurlbeck filed a long piece from Melbourne quoting her younger brother Brendan 'speaking to a family friend'. Brendan Minogue and his sister Dannii were being hacked by Mulcaire.''

In January last year News International confirmed it had paid an undisclosed amount to Dannii and Brendan Minogue in settlement of their phone-hacking claim against News International.

Davies wrote ''Rupert Murdoch has consistently denied ever having any knowledge of illegal activity in his newsrooms … (However) he always understood in general terms that his journalists might break the law to deliver results.''

Though James Murdoch was briefly marginalised, and his father ''bruised and diminished'' by the scandal, they escaped responsibility.

''Their refusal to run an effective internal inquiry became their best line of defence, like a reverse version of the Nazi defence at the Nuremberg war trials: 'we didn't know they weren't obeying orders','' Davies writes.