Bob, Sue and Neville Too

In 1998, Bob and Sue Firth, a harmless if slightly unconventional couple who ran a naturist guesthouse in Dorset, were stitched up by the News of the World. It was a fairly typical undercover sting operation of the type for which the now defunct Sunday tabloid was famous. Hearing rumours (highly exaggerated, it turned out) of rampant sexual goings-on at the property, the Screws dispatched its longtime chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck to investigate.

Thurlbeck played the part of a thrill-seeking voyeur with what many would consider a little too much conviction in pursuit of this tawdry scoop, talking dirty while Sue massaged him and later persuading the couple to have sex while he watched and stroked Sue's legs. This cost £75. Making the request over the phone, Thurlbeck explained that he had a foot-fetish. The Firths suspect that this may have been more than just a cover story.

The splash that appeared the following Sunday was largely made up, say the Firths, peppered with invented quotes and heightened by the Screws' trademark mock outrage. Under the headline "The guesthouse where all rooms come with en suite pervert", Thurlbeck claimed that Bob enjoyed hiding in a wardrobe while Sue had sex with customers and that the couple had "insisted" on putting on the sex show. As a result of the unwelcome publicity, the couple's business and reputation were ruined, neighbours in the small village where they lived started looking at them strangely and they were deluged by lewd letters and suggestive phone-calls.

Bob and Sue were far from unique in receiving such treatment. The News of the World ran countless similar titillating exposés in its more than 150 years of operation, allegedly in the public interest. Ordinary couples with slightly spicy sex lives, schoolteachers with a sideline in stripping, suburban dominatrices, people who have never done anything to attract attention yet who found themselves turned into news fodder, paraded before a leering readership in stories that often bore only a tangential relationship with the truth.

In the Firths' case, as in most others, there was a small kernel of reality. Bob and Sue used to be swingers (though they had given up some years before) and Sue would, for an extra £15, offer to give massage clients who became aroused and who specifically requested it a "happy ending" (aka hand relief). These facts led several lawyers to advise them against pursuing a libel action, even though 90% of the story was made up, and the Press Complaints Commission ultimately sided with the News of the World. (The fact that the paper's the editor, Phil Hall, was a member of the PCC was of course entirely coincidental.)

But the couple remained undaunted. They were possessed of a strong sense of moral indignation, doggedness, a complete lack of embarrassment, a rather tenuous grasp of the concepts of harassment and blackmail and, crucially, incriminating video evidence of a naked Thurlbeck. They were determined to fight back.

Their new book tells the eye-opening and often hilarious tale of what happened next. Written from Bob Firth's viewpoint, though with both names on the cover, it conveys a vivid sense of what it feels like to have your life turned upside down by a newspaper and the frustrations of trying to negotiate a legal and media landscape not designed with "little people" in mind. It would, I think, make excellent material for a farce.

Lacking the resources and legal sophistication of one of ThurIbeck's later victims, Max Mosley, the Firths have every ounce of his chutzpah. They track down Thurlbeck's address and send evidence to his wife. They place incriminating photos of the naked Neville on a website for all to see and are astonished when the News of the World manages to have it taken down. Formal redress may not have been theirs, but they conclude by saying that "we might regret the day we ever let Thurlbeck over our threshold, but probably not as much as he regrets crossing it."

Ever since his enforced departure from News International, Thurlbeck has sought to portray himself as a champion of old-fashioned tabloid values and his old newspaper in particular. He told the Leveson inquiry that he had been proud to work on a title that "was staffed by the best journalists in Fleet Street, who worked with great diligence and great integrity." He lamented that "the bulk of those very decent journalists have been tainted" by abuses such as phone-hacking. But stories such as the Firths' tell a different story.

I Made My Excuses and Stayed by Bob and Sue Firth is available from their website here for £9.50.