Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (20 page)

Inside Wapping in spring 2010 executives were exasperated. Although Tom Crone at the
News of the World
and Julian Pike at Farrer & Co had seen off Gordon Taylor’s case and the ancillary ones of the two lawyers, Jo Armstrong and John Hewison, as well as that of Max Clifford, more cases were coming forward. Just as the Goodman and Mulcaire court proceedings had prompted Taylor’s action, and Taylor’s had prompted Clifford’s, Clifford’s now set others in motion. The sports agent Sky Andrew began to sue, represented by Charlotte Harris. Mark Lewis started to act for Max Clifford’s assistant Nicola Phillips, whose phone had been hacked in an attempt to steal Clifford’s stories.

Sienna Miller, Chris Bryant and others had written to the Met asking whether they appeared in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. Although other lawyers represented Miller and Bryant, News International were aware that Harris and Lewis knew the most about hacking. Crone and Pike suspected they were having an affair and sharing confidential information from their respective cases. If they could prove that, they reasoned, a complaint of professional misconduct could be made against them – which might prevent them taking any more hacking cases. Pike explained in 2011
:

For a number of reasons, by the early part of 2010, I had concerns, which had accumulated over the previous months, that Ms Harris and Mr Lewis may be exchanging highly confidential information gained from acting for claimants (and Mr Taylor in particular) in cases against [NI’s subsidiary] NGN in order to assist other clients in bringing further actions against NGN.

I shared those concerns with NGN and in March, I suggested we should consider again whether Ms Harris and Mr Lewis were in a position to continue acting. I also mentioned surveillance.
¹²

In Wapping, Tom Crone initially ‘pooh-poohed’ the idea, but two days later, on 24 March, he asked the
News of the World
’s news editor, Ian Edmondson, to put in place the necessary arrangements.
¹³
The
News of the World
again turned to Derek Webb, the former policeman who had tailed Tom Watson at the previous year’s Labour Party conference. On 1 April, Webb was asked to drive north from Godalming in Surrey where he had been following Grant Bovey, the husband of TV presenter Anthea Turner, and visit an address in Manchester. From the road he videoed a woman with dark hair and followed her, Mark Lewis’s ex-wife, and their fourteen-year-old daughter Orli as they travelled to a garden centre four miles away. Webb finished his work in Manchester on 3 April, billed the
News of the World
for 9.5 surveillance shifts, or £1,425 (though in keeping with his bizarre job, that invoice included some of his work on Grant Bovey), and sent his report and video to Wapping. When the film arrived in the
News of the World
, Tom Crone must have been disappointed since Charlotte Harris was blonde and the woman on Webb’s video was dark-haired; Webb had gone to the wrong house. Oddly, the male lawyer he was asked to follow was not Lewis but someone else entirely – probably due to a mix-up with the names. It was a fiasco.

The
News of the World
persisted. On 12 April it sent Webb back up to Manchester, where for five days he staked out Harris’s office at JMW and that of another firm of solicitors. In 2011, Webb told the Leveson Inquiry: ‘This was in the hope that they would be seen together; after a week, I had failed to get a sighting of either and the assignment was terminated.’ For the second batch of surveillance, which ended on 16 April, he billed £1,350.

News International was not finished with the idea of discrediting Lewis and Harris and on 5 May instructed Julian Pike to commission a private investigation firm to search publicly available databases for information. The firm, Tectrix, checked the birth records of Harris’s two children – then aged two and four – to see if Lewis was their father. He was not. Later, referring to both the Webb and Tectrix surveillance, Harris said:

There can be no justification for this conduct. The motive was to attempt to discredit solicitors who were conducting the phone hacking cases. The reports were prepared in order to find a way to stop us acting in those cases.

From March 2010 to the end of May 2010 the intensity of the litigation was increasing. In my view this organization and its lawyers thought that they could still pursue a strategy that would contain their liability and deter others from pursuing them. I had many conversations with Tom Crone at the time. He was absolutely wedded to the defence that there was only one rogue journalist engaged in phone hacking. My correspondence with Julian Pike had ended when we had a telephone conversation in or around May 2010 when he said something like ‘I know what you are.’ I was not sure what he meant by that at all and I certainly did not know that he had put me under surveillance.
¹⁴

Lewis described the video of his ex-wife’s home and footage of her and his teenage daughter as ‘sickening’.
¹⁵

Aware that News International had extensive surveillance powers (though at the time he was oblivious to the covert operation of the Manchester lawyers), Nick Davies realized he needed to take precautions. At meetings with sources, he and they would remove the batteries from their phones to ensure the phones were not remotely and secretly recording their conversation. He bought untraceable burner phones and shredded documents rather than put them out with the rubbish. As well as being conscious of the danger to his sources, he and his editor were fearful. Davies said: ‘Alan and I were both worried that the
News of the World
might come after our private lives – they don’t just expose, they also distort, so it is a nasty prospect. But we calculated that as long as we kept publishing, they would not go for us, because it would be too obviously vengeful.’
¹⁶

Rusbridger believed that Wapping was seeking to intimidate him:

I think one way they operated was to say things that would get back to you, so they didn’t lift the phone directly to you, but they would drop something menacing to your best friend and of course you would hear about it very quickly – or they would indicate that they knew about you. Occasionally Nick would come round and say: ‘You’ve got to be very careful – they are actively going after people.’ And at one point I had someone in to sweep my house [for bugs] and within two days someone from News International rang up the press office and said: ‘Has Alan Rusbridger had his house swept?’ And I thought: That’s not a story but they’re just letting me know they know. There was definitely a black box operation going on, because other reporters who went to see them would ring me up and say: ‘They’re really badmouthing you and spreading gossip about you.’
¹⁷

Over in west London, Britain’s other liberal daily newspaper, the
Independent
, had been showing less enthusiasm for the story. Under its editor Roger Alton – whose earlier editorship of the
Observer
during the Iraq War had been criticized by Nick Davies in
Flat Earth News
– there was a feeling that the
Guardian
had overplayed its hand. After the Russian billionaire and former KGB economic attaché Alexander Lebedev bought the
Independent
in late March 2010, Simon Kelner replaced Alton – who soon after took a job as executive editor of
The Times
– and the
Independent
became more prepared to challenge the power of News International. In April, in the run-up to the general election, the
Independent
had run an advertising campaign with the slogan: ‘Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election. You will.’ Furious at the reference to Murdoch’s power (or perhaps angered by the suggestion that he would not decide the election), James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks strode into the
Independent
’s offices in Kensington High Street on 21 April, walked briskly through the newsroom towards Kelner (who knew them socially through his second home in the Cotswolds) and shouted: ‘What the fuck are you playing at?’ Kelner ushered them into his office, where they had a frank discussion. Martin Hickman, the paper’s consumer correspondent, was one of the many reporters who watched stunned as Brooks and Murdoch breezed cockily back out of the building.

10

Our Man in Downing Street

‘Our Only Hope’

–
Sun
front page about David Cameron, 6 May 2010

At the general election in May, there was no surprise as to which horse Rupert Murdoch backed. Politically, his newspapers tended to operate in unison: in 2001 they all backed Labour, in 2005 all but one backed Labour (
The Sunday Times
gave a tepid endorsement to the Conservatives) and in 2010 they all switched to the Conservatives. On polling day, 6 May, the
Sun
ran a stylized front-page picture of David Cameron with the headline: ‘Our Only Hope’. Despite Murdoch’s endorsement and an ailing economy, the Conservatives fell short of an overall majority and formed a Coalition with the Liberal Democrats on 11 May.

Cameron now had to decide which members of the back-office team would join him in 10 Downing Street. By now, he and his team had received several warnings about Andy Coulson’s past. The former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, who had been briefed by Alan Rusbridger on Coulson’s employment and the Morgan murder case, said in 2011: ‘I warned Number 10 within days of the election that they would suffer terrible damage if they did not get rid of Coulson, when these things came out, as it was inevitable they would.’
¹
Nick Clegg, the new Deputy Prime Minister – who had been briefed by the
Guardian
in March – also cautioned Cameron about Coulson’s past, only to be told by the Prime Minister that he deserved a ‘second chance’.
²
Cameron shrugged off all the warnings (and the verdict in Matt Driscoll’s employment tribunal) and appointed Coulson his director of communications on an annual salary of £140,000 – more than any other official including his chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn. Coulson’s instincts for the tabloid world outweighed all other considerations.
*

Within days of Cameron taking power, Rupert Murdoch entered Downing Street through a back door for a secret meeting. As a former Cabinet Office minister, Tom Watson knew that unofficial meetings took place between prime ministers and Murdoch at which no officials were present. He tabled a written parliamentary question asking the new Prime Minister who attended his meeting with Murdoch, which civil servants were present and what was discussed. On 2 June, Cameron refused to say, replying that he met ‘a wide range of organizations and individuals on a range of subjects’. On 14 June, in another parliamentary question, Watson asked about Coulson’s responsibilities and whether he had been given security clearance to view Top Secret documents. Cameron, who presented himself as a campaigner for open government, referred Watson to a list of special advisers and their salaries he had published earlier on 10 June. The Prime Minister made no comment on Coulson’s security clearance.
^†

Weeks after Cameron walked into Number 10, Rupert Murdoch, keen to exploit his honeymoon with the Prime Minister, launched a bid to take sole control of BSkyB, which through aggressive management had become the country’s wealthiest broadcaster, with revenues of £5.9 billion. News Corp already owned 39 per cent of BSkyB and was chaired by James Murdoch, but his father wanted the remaining 61 per cent – giving him total control over its sharply rising profits. BSkyB was throwing off cash and looked likely to make far more in future from 3DTV and digital shopping, pornography and gambling. A wholly owned BSkyB could be fully integrated with News Corp’s Sky Italia and the partially owned Sky Deutschland; News Corp’s newspapers could also be cross-promoted to the broadcaster’s 10 million subscribers – giving the
Sun
,
News of the World
and
Times
titles a significant advantage over other Fleet Street papers. At £7.9 billion, BSkyB and News International’s combined revenues would dwarf the BBC’s £3.6 billion and ITV’s £1.9 billion. A prominent media analyst, Claire Enders, warned that Rupert Murdoch could match in Britain Silvio Berlusconi’s dominance of the Italian media. Britain, she said, faced a ‘Berlusconi moment’.
³
In a rare show of agreement, the BBC, BT and owners of the
Guardian
,
Telegraph
,
Mirror
and
Mail
newspapers objected to Murdoch’s plan. BSkyB’s independent directors rejected News Corp’s initial bid of 700p a share on 15 June and held out for a higher offer. As he prepared to negotiate, Murdoch sought the government’s permission for the bid. At £7.8 billion, the BSkyB deal was, financially, the biggest of his career.

Andy Coulson’s presence at the centre of the new administration insulted the growing numbers of individuals who believed their phones had been hacked by the
News of the World
under his editorship. Among them was the Mancunian comedian Steve Coogan, whose private life had been eagerly covered by the
Screws
. In public, Coogan played the nerdy radio presenter Alan Partridge; in real life he was intelligent, stubborn and politically aware. He suspected that his phone had been hacked because he had been contacted by his phone company in 2005 to say someone posing as him had tried to obtain his personal details. He began planning to sue for breach of privacy. He knew that taking on Murdoch risked a backlash from his newspapers, but he was irritated by seeing Coulson in Downing Street: