Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (15 page)

There was no evidence to expand the investigation under which if had done, then this would have been an ineffective use of police resources.

Did we alert others?

Yes … No evidence to support wider phones had been intercepted. Wider people were not informed as there was no evidence to suggest any criminal activities on their phones.

What other journalists were involved?

There was no evidence at that time to implicate the involvement of any other journalists.’
⁶

On John Prescott, the minutes recorded: ‘PW [Detective Chief Superintendent Philip Williams] confirmed that he had no knowledge of John Prescott’s phone being intercepted. If he had been subject to interception and evidence supported this then he would have been informed.’
⁷

At 5.40 that evening, ‘Yates of the Yard’ announced that there was nothing new in the story; the police had been in possession of the ‘For Neville’ email during Operation Caryatid in 2006 – and that inquiry had been a success. Yates said: ‘Their potential targets may have run into hundreds of people, but our inquiries showed that they only used the tactic against a far smaller number of individuals … in the majority of cases there was insufficient evidence to show that tapping had actually been achieved.’ Where there was ‘clear evidence’ of hacking, all those individuals had been informed, Yates said, adding: ‘I therefore consider that no further investigation is required.’

On 10 July, other papers followed up the
Guardian’
s allegations but focused on Yates’s refusal to reopen the inquiry
.
The
Daily Telegraph
quoted a Conservative Party spokesman as saying: ‘Labour have made themselves look stupid by following a story that fell apart within twenty-four hours.’

That afternoon News International, which privately knew the ‘For Neville’ email was a ‘fatal’ document, poured scorn on the story. In a statement, the company ‘stated with confidence’ that there was not and never had been any evidence to suggest that, apart from Goodman’s royal hacking and the Taylor case, journalists at the
News of the
World
had accessed anyone’s voicemails: ‘All of these irresponsible and unsubstantiated allegations against the
News of the World
and other News International titles and its journalists are false.’ News International’s senior executives knew this was untrue.

Despite Yates’s public backing of the original inquiry, behind the scenes there was some concern that perhaps not all of the potential victims had been informed. At 7.36 p.m. on Friday 10 July (after most newspaper deadlines), Scotland Yard slipped out another statement saying that it would contact anyone where there was ‘any suspicion’ they may have been hacked, adding: ‘The process of contacting people is currently underway and we expect this to take some time to complete.’ Yates ordered a small team to start typing the names in Mulcaire’s notes into the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, so that the information would be searchable. If the original police investigation had indeed been complete, as the Yard claimed, the need to contact new victims was puzzling.

The following day, News International’s newspapers launched an offensive against the
Guardian,
starting with
The Times
, whose then media editor Dan Sabbagh
*
trotted out the company line:

News International last night criticized ‘selective and misleading journalism’ by the
Guardian
newspaper and rebutted allegations that reporters on the
News of the World
engaged in widespread hacking into celebrities’ mobile phones.

The publisher said that it had been a victim of irresponsible and unsubstantiated allegations made by the
Guardian
.

The
News of the World
joined the attack the following day, 12 July, describing the
Guardian’
s reporting as ‘inaccurate, selective and purposely misleading’ and reminding readers that despite purporting to represent the highest standards of journalism the paper had in 1983 handed back to the government leaked documents that led to the jailing of the civil servant Sarah Tisdall and in 1993 had forged the signature of the cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken.

Both
The Times
and the
NoW
carried an article by a new columnist who explained that while there had been several hundred names in Mulcaire’s notes, only ‘perhaps a handful’ had actually been hacked. He wrote: ‘Had there been evidence of tampering in the other cases, that would have been investigated, as would the slightest hint that others were involved.’ The columnist was Andy Hayman, the Scotland Yard chief who had overseen Operation Caryatid. In December 2007, eleven months after the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire and a month after an internal inquiry was begun into his expenses,
^†
Hayman announced his resignation from the Met. Seven months later, in July 2008, he had become a columnist on
The Times.
As well as having an insider right next to the Conservative leader, Wapping now had a former Scotland Yard chief on its payroll.

Some media commentators pointed to the significance of the Taylor story: Andrew Neil, a former editor of
The Sunday Times
, said he was ‘shocked’ by the allegations of such widespread lawbreaking; others such as the
Independent’
s Stephen Glover condemned the ‘hysteria’. On Monday 13 July he wrote:

Mr Davies is a journalist who dislikes much journalism, especially of the tabloid variety. He recently published a book which suggests that the press is wildly dysfunctional. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but he seems to me to be a misanthropic, apocalyptic sort of fellow – the sort of journalist who can find a scandal in a jar of tadpoles.

On Thursday 16 July, a week after launching his internal inquiry, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced there was no need to reopen the case. After speaking to his predecessor as DPP, Ken Macdonald, and the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, Starmer deemed the original prosecution to have been ‘proper and appropriate’. He explained that under the law on phone hacking, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (see p. 38), intercepting a phone communication was illegal only ‘in the course of its transmission’, and so did not apply when it had been heard by the owner of the phone. Even if there were many names in Mulcaire’s notes, Starmer was saying, they were not necessarily victims. What was striking about this interpretation is that it had not been the one used at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire by the CPS barrister David Perry, who had explicitly stated that RIPA covered saved messages.

Despite the lack of concern from police and prosecutors, the Gordon Taylor story prompted action from Max Clifford, the publicist whom Mulcaire had in court admitted hacking in 2006. Clifford phoned George Davies and asked to meet the lawyers who had fought Taylor’s case, Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris. George Davies was reluctant to take on another phone hacking case (Taylor had complained about the appearance of the
Guardian
story) and Harris had moved to another law firm in Manchester, JMW. Clifford instructed Harris to sue.

Now a Foreign Office minister, Chris Bryant was also reflecting on his treatment by the
NoW
. On 30 November 2003, eight months after he had asked Rebekah Wade in Parliament about payments to police, the
News of the
World
and the
Mail on Sunday
had published a picture of him in his underpants on the Gaydar website. There was more to come. The following Sunday
,
the
NoW
reported that the former vicar was facing the sack. In an unusually abusive profile
The Sunday
Times
described him as a ‘bumptious little berk’ and a ‘pillock’. ‘Short, fair-haired and with his eyes set wide apart, Bryant has used the sanctimonious tones of his former vocation to lecture MPs on morality.’ More characteristically the
Sun
urged voters to give the Rhondda MP ‘a Rhondda Rogering’. Humiliated, Bryant received hate mail, acquired a stalker and feared his political career was over. He said: ‘It’s the closest I’ve ever been to suicidal.’
⁸
As he read more about the behaviour of News International, he remembered that his London flat had been broken into in 2003 and began to fear his phone had been hacked and perhaps his computer too. After reading Davies’s article, he wrote to Scotland Yard asking whether he was in the Mulcaire files. It took eight months to reply.

A third individual, the actress Sienna Miller, was becoming increasingly convinced that her phone had been hacked after her engagement to the Hollywood actor Jude Law in 2004. With astonishing accuracy, the
News of the World
had chronicled their lives under punning headlines: ‘How Jude do that?’ in August 2005 (about an argument); ‘It’s on and off’ in October 2005 (about an alleged fling with another actor); and ‘Jude’s not Sien her any more’ in July 2006 (recording the end of their relationship). During that period calls Miller answered quickly went dead, voicemails she had not listened to appeared in her inbox as ‘old’, and messages from friends and family never arrived. She changed her mobile phone three times in late 2005 but the stories kept appearing. She began to suspect that she was being betrayed by someone close to her, and started to experiment, leaving messages for friends with bogus snippets of information which would duly appear in print. She accused her friends and family of betraying her: ‘I sat down in a room with my mother, my best friend, my sister, my boyfriend and said: “Someone in this room is lying and selling stories and one of you has got to admit it.” ’
⁹
Mark Thomson, Miller’s silver-haired, occasionally irascible lawyer, wrote to the Met asking whether she featured in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. As with Bryant, the letter went unanswered for months.

While the authorities stonewalled, the MPs on the cross-party Culture Committee decided to look afresh at the
News of the World
. The Committee was just concluding another inquiry into the press, prompted by Fleet Street’s repeated libelling of Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter Madeleine had gone missing in Portugal. During that inquiry, phone hacking had been so forgotten that Colin Myler and Tom Crone were not even asked about it when they gave evidence in May, and the focus had been on the
NoW’
s treatment of Max Mosley. Now the MPs summoned Myler and Crone back.

On the eve of their reappearance on 21 July, News International wrote to the committee demanding the removal from the hearing of its newest member, Tom Watson. While still at the Cabinet Office, Watson had taken the unusual step of suing the
Sun
for its hounding of him during the Damien McBride affair. NI had asked Number 10 aides to pressure Watson into dropping the claim, and he was called by the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, who advised him it would be ‘unwise’ to proceed with the case while a minister. Watson did not drop the case, but returned to the backbenches in June (see p. 12). Looking for a new beginning, in July he had joined the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, where he hoped to pursue his interest in the digital economy.

News International wrote to the Committee’s Conservative chairman, John Whittingdale, demanding Watson’s removal on the grounds that he was still in dispute with the
Sun
, even though it had accepted weeks before, on 30 June, that it had defamed him and all that remained was to reach a settlement about the damages and apology. After taking advice from parliamentary lawyers, Whittingdale rejected the request. At the start of the session, the urbane Tom Crone repeated the demand, warning Whittingdale: ‘If he [Watson] remains we will be making a complaint to the Parliamentary Commissioner.’ News International never made the complaint but its attempt to eject Watson was a good PR trick: it, rather than the substance of the hearing, became a breaking story on Sky News.

With its demand frustrated, News International now had to survive the session without making any embarrassing admissions. Even without public knowledge that Mulcaire’s notes ran to 11,000 pages, that NI’s counsel had identified a ‘culture of illegal information gathering’, and that sizeable pay-offs had already been made to Goodman and Mulcaire, the company’s story was a mess. NI’s then chairman, Les Hinton, had told the committee in March 2007 that Goodman was the only reporter who hacked voicemails; yet it had now emerged that the
News of the World
had secretly paid off another victim who was very unlikely to have been hacked by Goodman.

Myler and Crone’s tactics soon emerged: confusion, obfuscation and spectacular memory loss. They could not remember who had done what, nor, they added, could the colleagues they asked. The Goodman case was very much in the past and checks for other wrongdoing had found nothing: Operation Caryatid had been very thorough. Crone said:

The police raided Mulcaire’s premises, they raided Goodman’s premises, and they raided the
News of the
World’
s offices. They seized every available document; they searched all the computers, all the files, the emails. Subsequent to the arrests they came to us and made various requests to us to produce documents. At no stage during their investigation or our investigation did any evidence arise that the problem of accessing by our reporters, or complicity of accessing by our reporters, went beyond the Goodman/Mulcaire situation.
¹⁰