Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (14 page)

News International’s redtops, which had long decried judgments arising from the 1998 Human Rights Act, which enshrined a right to privacy in British law, were furious
.
The
Sun
described the ruling as a ‘dark day for British freedom’ and a step towards ‘a dangerous European-style privacy law’
.
The
News of the
World
complained that the powerful should not be able to run to the courts to gag papers from publishing ‘true’ stories, adding: ‘This is all about the public’s right to know.’

Mosley began suing the
News of the
World
in other European countries where the paper had been sold. Just as significantly, from his home in Monaco he started to take an interest in the phone hacking affair. News International had made an intelligent, tenacious and wealthy enemy.

Meanwhile, David Cameron was making friends – or, rather, one big friend: Rupert Murdoch. Socially, the Conservative leader was becoming ever closer to the American’s British newspaper editors, including James Harding (a friend of James Murdoch appointed editor of
The Times
in December 2007) and Rebekah Wade, the
Sun
’s editor, who lived a few miles from Cameron’s wisteria-clad farmhouse in the Cotswolds hamlet of Dean. Cameron had been friends for thirty years with Wade’s new beau, an Eton contemporary, the former racehorse owner Charlie Brooks, and regularly went hacking with him in the Oxfordshire countryside, sometimes on a retired police horse, Raisa, which Wade had borrowed from the Metropolitan Police in 2008 after a lunch with the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair.

Cameron and Wade were among the most important members of a network of influential media, political and showbusiness friends living around the Cotswolds town of Chipping Norton. Other members of the Chipping Norton Set included Liz Murdoch and her PR guru husband, Matthew Freud, who owned the opulent Elizabethan manor house Burford Priory, and the celebrity BBC
Top Gear
presenter and
Sunday Times
columnist Jeremy Clarkson, who lived in the village of Churchill.

With Rebekah Wade and James Harding among his personal friends and Andy Coulson leading his media team, Cameron began to reach out to the Murdochs. On 16 August 2008, in a journey redolent of Tony Blair’s homage to Australia in 1995, the Conservative leader boarded Matthew Freud’s Gulfstream jet for Santorini in Greece, where he joined Freud’s father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch, for drinks on his yacht
, Rosehearty
. What they discussed remains a mystery, but from that point on the media policy of the Conservatives and the interests of the Murdochs began to converge. Three months after the meeting, in November 2008, Cameron penned a comment piece for the
Sun
headlined ‘Bloated BBC out of touch with the viewers’ protesting at rises in the licence fee.
⁹
In January 2009, his shadow Culture Minister Ed Vaizey promised the party would force the BBC to publish the salaries of its highest-paid performers;
¹⁰
in July that year, Cameron said he intended to remove the policy-making powers of Ofcom, the media regulator;
¹¹
and in October, Jeremy Hunt, his shadow Culture Secretary, said the Tories would abolish the BBC Trust, the governing body of the corporation.
¹²

These policies coincided with the demands of the Murdochs, explicitly outlined by James Murdoch in his MacTaggart lecture to the Edinburgh Television Festival in August 2009. Openly and uncompromisingly, the heir apparent to the Murdoch dynasty identified the BBC as the enemy of free and dynamic programming offered by the likes of BSkyB. ‘The scale and scope of its current activities and future ambitions is chilling,’ he protested. ‘Being funded by a universal hypothecated tax, the BBC feels empowered and obliged to try and offer something for everyone, even in areas well served by the market.’ The BBC was lavishing large salaries on entertainers such as Jonathan Ross that no commercial broadcaster could afford, its news website was unfairly competing with national papers, and the BBC Trust had an ‘abysmal record’ in limiting the corporation’s creep. As to Ofcom – which two months before had ordered BSkyB to cut its rates for selling sport and films to rivals – Murdoch complained that it was placing ‘astonishing’ burdens on commercial broadcasters. In the most significant portion of his remarks, he said: ‘There is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’

The demand was clear: the government should hobble the BBC and Ofcom and give a freer run to commercial broadcasters, such as BSkyB. The Conservatives’ announcements between the meeting on the yacht and James Murdoch’s broadside in Edinburgh showed how much Cameron and Murdoch were beginning to appreciate one another.

Rebekah Wade, who with James Murdoch had encouraged the
rapprochement
, was the powerbroker. In the summer of 2009, Wade was at the height of her power. She had been told by Rupert Murdoch that she would shortly become NI’s chief executive, responsible not just for the
Sun,
but also the
News of the World, The
Times
and
Sunday Times
; and in June, her marriage to Charlie Brooks had confirmed her position at the centre of political and media power. Guests at the reception at Clarkson’s home included Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Will Lewis, editor of the
Daily Telegraph
, her pop star neighbour, Blur bassist Alex James, and all the most powerful Murdochs – Rupert, James, Elisabeth and Matthew Freud.

But as they partied, a reporter on a rival newspaper was preparing an explosive story.

One Determined Reporter

Very relaxed

– a spokesman for David Cameron, giving his response to Nick Davies’s story on Gordon Taylor, July 2009

Nick Davies, a 56-year-old investigative reporter with a swirl of receding white hair, eschewed regular contact with executives at the
Guardian
. His contract stipulated he had to write only twenty-four substantial features a year ‘or the equivalent in time and effort’ – which meant that unlike the vast majority of journalists he could stay on one story. Working from his home in Lewes, East Sussex, he responded by exploring the hidden sides of British life: poverty, failing schools, drug addiction and child prostitution. Frustrated by the misreporting of the Iraq War
,
in 2007 he wrote a book about falsehood and distortion in the media,
Flat Earth News
, which contained a chapter on Steve Whittamore – and described how Fleet Street newspapers illegally obtained criminal records, car registration details, ex-directory numbers, mobile phone records and bank statements.

Davies then had two strokes of luck which led him towards a bigger scandal. The first was that Stuart Kuttner, the
News of the World’
s managing editor, appeared alongside him on BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme in February 2008 and dismissed his newly published book as ‘sour and gloomy’. He went on: ‘If you read Nick’s book you get a view of British journalism as a corrupt profession but I think it’s the finest in the world. It is admired throughout the world and rightly so. My
News of the World
reporters wouldn’t recognize that description at all,’ adding that hacking ‘happened once’ at the
News of the World. ‘
The reporter was fired, he went to prison. The editor resigned.’ After the programme a
News of the World
insider contacted Davies and told him the scale of illegality at the paper. Davies said: ‘I felt it was the sheer, brazen dishonesty of Kuttner that made that person get in touch.’
¹

The second piece of good luck was that soon afterwards Davies found himself at a social function sitting ‘next to somebody very senior from the Met’, who casually referred to the extent of material in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes: ‘Oh, yeah, thousands of names.’
²
(‘Scotland Yard is a snakepit of people who hate each other and that’s very helpful,’ Davies said later.) By now Scotland Yard had put the thousands of pages of Mulcaire’s notes in storage. That they were opened again owed much to what Davies did next
.
Throughout 2008 and early 2009, while working on other projects, he scanned back copies of the
News of the World
to identify ‘interesting’ stories and began contacting their authors. Many former
NoW
journalists willingly spoke to him because of bullying at the paper, and would refer him to others who felt similarly: ‘They would say: “I know such and such hated that boss.”’ But they wanted to stay anonymous because Rupert Murdoch was so powerful, or because they were freelancing or in PR and were trying to sell stories to News International.’
³

Eventually, Davies gathered enough material. The
Guardian’
s editor, Alan Rusbridger, recalled: ‘In early 2009 he came in and closed the door and said: “I’ve got this amazing story” and he told me about the Gordon Taylor settlement, and it was immediately obvious that this was a story that would cause enormous trouble.’
⁴
At 5.33 p.m. on 8 July 2009, the
Guardian
website (and the newspaper the following day) published the story: ‘Murdoch papers paid £1m to gag phone-hacking victims’:

Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1 million to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

For the first time Davies referred publicly to the existence of the ‘For Neville’ email (though he omitted its title) and revealed that Wapping had settled with Taylor for around £400,000 damages plus costs – while the company had paid out £300,000 in damages and legal costs to two ‘other football figures’ [Taylor’s two lawyers]. Davies quoted a police source as saying News International journalists had hacked into ‘thousands’ of mobile phones, and suggested that the targets included John Prescott while he was Deputy Prime Minister. He also mentioned the
Screws
’ use of Steve Whittamore searches to obtain tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemized phone bills. It was the single most important story in the phone hacking scandal.
*
While many journalists and politicians had been sceptical that Clive Goodman had been the only
News of the
World
reporter to hack phones, until then the proof had been missing. Now it was clear that the
NoW
had paid out a vast sum to secure the silence of a union leader who was unlikely to have been eavesdropped by its jailed royal editor. The Press Complaints Commission, which had fallen for the
News of the World’
s explanation of the hacking in 2007, launched a new inquiry. From the G8 summit in Italy, Gordon Brown said the story raised serious questions that ‘have to be answered’. John Prescott urged the Leader of the Opposition to sack Andy Coulson, during whose editorship the hacking had taken place. Geoff Hoon, the Labour former cabinet minister, said: ‘It is hard to see how in these circumstances Andy Coulson can continue as David Cameron’s communications chief.’ However, David Cameron’s office batted off the demands, telling the
Daily Telegraph
that the Conservative leader was ‘very relaxed about the story’. Asked that evening by Bloomberg news wire about the payment to Gordon Taylor, Rupert Murdoch replied: ‘If that had happened, I would have known about it.’
⁵

Shortly after 9 a.m. the following day, 9 July, the Metropolitan Police’s new Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, a Lancastrian former shoe salesman with a reputation for straight-talking, announced that he was asking a senior officer to look into the allegations. Educated at Marlborough College and a history graduate of King’s College London, Assistant Commissioner John Yates was no ordinary copper; he was one of a new breed of graduate, politically astute senior officers. Like his forerunner Andy Hayman, he was the country’s top counter-terrorism officer and, like Hayman, he took his media duties seriously. He regularly dined with journalists, including the
News of the World’
s deputy editor, Neil Wallis, a long-standing friend, with whom he would have regular lunches and dinners that were not declared in the Met’s Register of Hospitality because, according to Yates, they were ‘private engagements’. Yates had taken on some high-profile cases, investigating allegations that Labour had sold peerages and that Princess Diana’s former butler Paul Burrell had stolen her possessions. Neither resulted in a conviction, but they established him in the minds of his friends in Fleet Street as a fearless investigator: ‘Yates of the Yard’.

That day, Keir Starmer, the new Director of Public Prosecutions, launched an ‘urgent’ examination of the evidence the police had supplied to the Crown Prosecution Service during the investigation in 2006. The CPS examined the case for a week, but despite the intense political heat, Yates’s review was over in hours. At 11 a.m. he convened a ‘gold meeting’ in Room 556 of the Victoria Block of Scotland Yard with eight senior staff, including the now-promoted Detective Chief Inspector, Philip Williams, the senior investigating officer on Operation Caryatid. The minutes of the meeting gave a curious account of the inquiry:

Why was there not a more wide-ranging investigation?