Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (18 page)

The MPs decided they should hear from Brooks herself and asked her to give evidence. In a letter to John Whittingdale on 4 January 2010, she contemptuously dismissed the invitation to answer questions about the ‘supposed incongruity’ between the treatment of Clive Goodman and Matt Driscoll, the ‘For Neville’ email and misbehaviour by News International journalists, which, she said, related to the
News of the World
, not to other News International newspapers ‘any more than they do to any other national newspapers’. She asked whether the committee intended to call chief executives of other newspaper groups, said that the
News of the World’
s editor had outlined the measures to end improper behaviour and that as chief executive she would ‘ensure the proper journalistic standards continue to be applied across all our titles’. She concluded:

Given the above, I hope you and your colleagues agree that my attendance before the committee to face questions on the three areas to which you refer would be pointless and a waste of the committee’s time. As I have said before, if there are other matters being investigated by yourselves and on which you and your colleagues feel I may have direct knowledge, I remain very happy to be of assistance.

I should conclude that, given my clear commitment to assisting the committee, I am very surprised at the threat of coercion made in your letter which, I am sure you must agree, is inappropriate.

Although the committee wanted Brooks to give evidence, its members, whose private lives News International had pored over, capitulated and decided not to summons her. On the day the committee met to discuss the issue, two Labour MPs close to Tony Blair, Janet Anderson and Rosemary McKenna, were absent. The gay Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price – who in September unexpectedly announced that he would leave Parliament at the next general election to take up a Fulbright scholarship in the US – claimed that the committee’s members had been warned that if they had called Brooks, their private lives would be raked over. He said later: ‘I was told by a senior Conservative member of the committee, who I knew was in direct contact with executives at News International, that if we went for her, they would go for us – effectively they would delve into our personal lives in order to punish [us].’
⁵

At the
Guardian
, Nick Davies came ever closer to the truth, disclosing on 1 February 2010 that the mobile phone companies Orange, O2, and Vodafone had discovered that more than 100 customers had their inboxes accessed by Mulcaire. He also divulged that the Met had finally answered the paper’s Freedom of Information request, revealing that it had found ninety-two PIN codes in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. Dick Fedorcio, Scotland Yard’s director of public affairs, wrote to Alan Rusbridger complaining about the article, saying that Davies ‘once again presents an inaccurate position from our perspective and continues to imply this case has not been handled properly and we are a party to a conspiracy’. At a follow-up meeting with Rusbridger on 19 February, John Yates, accompanied by Fedorcio, sought to persuade Rusbridger – in Rusbridger’s words – that ‘Nick’s doggedness and persistence in pursuing the story was misplaced.’
⁶

Despite the insistence of Scotland Yard, News International and the Press Complaints Commission that nothing was wrong, the Culture Committee was not duped and on 23 February published a report, ‘Press Standards, Privacy and Libel’, which was highly critical of them all. The PCC, the committee said, should have been ‘more assertive in its inquiries rather than accepting submissions from the
News of the World
once again at face value’, adding that its November report was ‘simplistic and surprising. It has certainly not fully, or forensically, considered all the evidence to this inquiry.’ The Metropolitan Police had failed to investigate properly the Greg Miskiw contract or the ‘For Neville’ email, which was strong evidence of additional lawbreaking and the possible involvement of others. ‘These matters merited thorough police investigation, and the first steps to be taken seem to us to have been obvious. The Metropolitan Police’s reasons for not doing so seem to us to be inadequate.’

About News International itself, the report could hardly have been more barbed. Although the committee had seen no evidence that Andy Coulson had known about phone hacking, it was ‘inconceivable’ that no one else at the
News of the
World
bar Clive Goodman had known about the practice. The MPs stopped just short of accusing Britain’s biggest newspaper group of lying, writing:

Throughout our inquiry, we have been struck by the collective amnesia afflicting witnesses from the
News of the World
. Throughout, we have repeatedly encountered an unwillingness to provide the detailed information that we sought, claims of ignorance or lack of recall, and deliberate obfuscation. We strongly condemn this behaviour which reinforces the widely held impression that the press generally regard themselves as unaccountable and that News International in particular has sought to conceal the truth about what really occurred.

Press coverage was muted. The
Guardian
reported the committee’s acerbic verdict on its front page and the
Independent
across pages 6 and 7, but the other papers marginalized the criticism
.
The
Daily Mail
ran a 154-word story headed: ‘Tory spin chief cleared’. The
Sun
’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, managed to help both the Conservative Party and his employers by writing a small piece on page 2 which claimed that the report had been hijacked: ‘Labour MPs wanted to smear Tory communications boss Andy Coulson, an ex-
News of the World
editor. But the report found ‘no evidence’ he knew phone hacking was taking place.’
The Times
ran a small story on page 15 on the criticism of its stablemate
.

The
News of the
World
was apoplectic. In an editorial on 28 February, Colin Myler’s paper protested that the report had been ‘shamefully hijacked’ by Tom Watson and Paul Farrelly. It thundered: ‘We’ll take no lessons in standards from MPs – nor from self-serving pygmies who run the circulation-challenged
Guardian
.’ To add insult to injury, the
NoW
ran a commentary from one of the committee’s Tory MPs, Philip Davies, who complained that its work on press freedom should not be overshadowed ‘by pathetic and petty Labour politicians who have tried to hijack the report to settle a score with News International for supporting the Conservative Party at the next election’.
⁷
In a statement, News International said the select committee system had been damaged and diminished by the report, which, it protested, was laden with ‘innuendo, unwarranted inference and exaggeration’.
⁸

A Murder

No one pays like the
News of the World
do

– Jonathan Rees

Despite the underwhelming response to the Culture Committee’s report, News International and the Conservative Party knew that another dark story about the
News of the World
and Andy Coulson was lurking in the background, about to surface. On 25 February, the
Guardian
’
s
deputy editor, Ian Katz, phoned Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s director of strategy. He wanted him to know that Coulson had worked with a notorious private investigator at the
News of the World
after the man’s release from a long prison term for conspiring to pervert the course of justice
.
The
Guardian
could not publicly report Jonathan Rees’s conviction to avoid prejudicing a new court case: the man taken on by Coulson’s
Screws
was now on trial for murder, accused of killing his former business partner. The case, which revealed close links between tabloid newspapers and corrupt police, dated back three decades to the late 1980s, when Scotland Yard was awash with bent coppers – and Rees, a Freemason, co-owned a detective agency in Thornton Heath, south London.

His business partner at Southern Investigations was Daniel Morgan, a gregarious 37-year-old who had become concerned about Rees’s close links with corrupt police. On 10 March 1987, Morgan had been having a drink with Rees at the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham. One of the topics for discussion that night was the theft of £18,000 in cash Rees had been transporting for a client, Belmont Car Auctions. Belmont and Morgan suspected that Rees and his associates – some of whom were moonlighting police officers – had stolen the money.

A few minutes after Rees left the Golden Lion, Morgan walked into the car park towards his BMW. He never drove away. His body was discovered at 9.30 p.m., with a hatchet buried so deep in his face that the only part of it showing was the haft, which had been covered with sticking plaster to destroy fingerprints. Morgan’s £900 Rolex watch had been taken but not £1,100 in cash from his pocket.

Daniel’s brother, Alastair Morgan, spoke to Jonathan Rees about what had happened but was unconvinced by his explanation. He went to the police incident room at Sydenham, where he was interviewed by a CID officer, Sid Fillery, one of the detectives who had moonlighted for Rees. The murdered man’s brother was surprised by Fillergy’s casual manner. At Morgan’s inquest in 1988, Kevin Lennon, Southern Investigation’s bookkeeper, testified that six months before the murder, Rees said he was planning a contract hit: ‘My mates are going to arrange it. Those police officers are friends of mine and will either murder Danny or will arrange it.’ Asked if he had murdered Morgan, Rees replied: ‘I did not.’
¹
The inquest returned a verdict of unlawful killing. The coroner said there was no forensic evidence to link anyone to the murder.

A second murder inquiry failed in 1989, by which time Fillery, who had omitted to disclose his work for Southern Investigations during the first one, had left the Metropolitan Police on medical grounds and stepped into Morgan’s shoes as Rees’s new business partner at Southern Investigations. Business boomed. The most lucrative work was selling confidential data to the media, much of it from bent detectives at Scotland Yard, though Rees and Fillery also developed contacts in other forces. In the late 1990s, their best customers were the
News of the World
, the
Sunday Mirror
and the
Daily Mirror
.

In 1997, following pressure from Alastair Morgan, Scotland Yard launched a third murder inquiry, Operation Nigeria. An elite anti-corruption squad, CIB3, planted a listening device in Southern Investigations’ office in the hope of recording Rees and Fillery talking about Morgan’s killing. Stressing the need to place the bug with great delicacy, a CIB3 report warned: ‘They are alert, cunning and devious individuals who have current knowledge of investigative methods and techniques which may be used against them. Such is their level of access to individuals within the police, through professional and social contacts, that the threat of compromise to any conventional investigation against them is constant and very real.’
²

The bug, which was active between April and September 1999, unintentionally picked up the chatter between Jonathan Rees and his Fleet Street customers. The Metropolitan Police gave a briefing on the conversations to journalist Graham McLagan, who published them in an article in the
Guardian
on 21 September 2002. Through their corrupt contacts in the police, Rees had sold a string of juicy stories about ongoing investigations, obtaining information about the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, the Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and the neo-Nazi nailbomber David Copeland. Before the gangster Kenneth Noye was convicted in 2000 for the M25 road-rage killing four years earlier, Rees sold the fact that GCHQ had helped track him down to Spain, from where he had been extradited, as well as the secret route by which he was being transported to court.

In April, Rees discussed the arrest by anti-corruption police of another private detective later jailed for nine years for corruption and conspiracy, Duncan Hanrahan. The bug caught Rees telling an unidentified person: ‘Hanrahan said what [CIB3] want to do is fuck us all. He said they keep talking about the fucking Morgan murder every time they see me.’
³

On 4 June, Rees showed a close interest in obtaining details of the murder of Jill Dando, the
Crimewatch
presenter who was shot dead on her doorstep in London in 1999, telling a source: ‘There’s big stories … nearly every day with good information on the Jill Dando murder. We found out one of our bestest friends is also on that fucking murder squad, but he ain’t told us nothing. We only found out yesterday after that torrent of abuse we initially gave him. He’s going to phone us today.’

Rees also had corrupt contacts outside the police. He was in touch with a corrupt VAT inspector who could access business records, two corrupt bank employees (nicknamed Fat Bob and Rob the Bank) who could provide details of personal accounts, and two former police officers working for Customs and Excise. Two blaggers conned phone companies into handing over names and addresses of customers and itemized phone bills. One, John Gunning – later convicted – was a specialist in blagging ex-directory numbers from BT. On one occasion Rees was asked by an unnamed journalist to trace the owner of a Porsche whose registration number he had been given. He had the owner’s name and address from the DVLA and his criminal record from the Police National Computer in thirty-four minutes.