Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (21 page)

It bothered me that he was there [Downing Street]. I also felt a certain hubris that came with having no skeletons in my closet. It had been well and truly emptied by all the tabloids. I had a conversation with Matthew Freud whom I had counselled for advice. ‘Do you really want to make enemies of these people?’ he had asked – advising me that my action was unwise. It made me angry and intrigued me. I don’t like bullies; playground ones or Australian ones in suits. Almost everyone in my life cautioned me against it. The only one who said go for it was Martin Sixsmith, a friend, who said: ‘You could walk away but you’re a bloody-minded northerner, you like a fight.’
⁴

Another case was also progressing. In March 2010, the Labour MP Chris Bryant had finally been informed by the police that his name had appeared in Glenn Mulcaire’s files. At the same time the Met had told him – as it had almost all victims – that there was no evidence that his phone had actually been hacked. Bryant contacted his lawyer, Tamsin Allen at Bindmans – who in 2006 had won him £10,000 damages from the
Guardian
over a spoof diary – and asked what action he could take. By chance, Allen also had another client, the former Metropolitan Police commander Brian Paddick, who had been told by the
Guardian
in 2009 that his name and mobile phone number appeared in Mulcaire’s notes. Together Allen, Bryant and Paddick began to plan a judicial review of the Metropolitan Police’s failure to inform them that they had been victims of the
News of the World.

Crucially, Sienna Miller had also decided to take action. In October 2009 Scotland Yard had finally informed her that her name was in Mulcaire’s files, while again adding there was no evidence her phone had been hacked. On 1 June 2010, her lawyer, Mark Thomson, sought an order in the High Court requiring the Metropolitan Police to disclose the evidence about her in Mulcaire’s files. In July, the High Court granted the order and Thomson began preparing a case.

The cover-up at Wapping was deepening. In November 2009, four months after the Gordon Taylor settlement became public, the company had drafted a framework email deletion policy. Under the heading ‘Opportunity’, court documents filed two years later showed its aim was, among other matters, ‘to eliminate in a consistent manner across NI (subject to compliance with legal and regulatory requirements) emails that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation in which an NI company is a defendant’.
⁵
However, not all had been going well. The masterplan appeared to have been dogged by incompetence. On 29 July 2010, a senior executive
*
at Wapping asked: ‘How come we haven’t done the email deletion policy discussed and approved six months ago?’ By 4 August, however, the policy was back on track and the executive, in an email referring to ‘email deletion’, warned colleagues that ‘everyone needs to know that anything before January 2010 will not be kept’. News International’s emails contained a hoard of material that could have been useful to the police and to the civil courts, but NI had no intention of keeping them.
*

Over the summer the visiting
New York Times
reporters tracked down more than 100 people, mostly journalists and police, and conducted on-the-record interviews with Mark Lewis, Charlotte Harris, Max Clifford, Tom Watson and Phil Hall, Brooks’s predecessor as editor of the
News of the World
. The Americans also spoke to former
Screws
reporters. Many were nervous about speaking out, even off the record, but, sometimes after several face-to-face meetings, the
NYT
team won their confidence. ‘I think a few may have trusted us more because we were US journalists,’ Don van Natta Jr said, ‘but that wasn’t the case with all our sources. Some appreciated the fact that we wanted to get the story exactly right, and that we had the time to really dig into the truth.’
⁶

In late June, the
New York Times
journalists flew back to the US to write up their findings. On 1 September, their damning verdict was published in 6,167 excruciating words for the Manhattan-based Murdoch, under the headline ‘Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond’. Most significantly, two former
News of the World
staffers claimed that Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking. For the first time, one
Screws
journalist was willing to speak out in public: Sean Hoare, the showbiz reporter Coulson had put in a perspex box for twenty-four hours during the David Blaine stunt. Hoare had been angered by the abandonment of Clive Goodman and by his old boss’s new berth in Downing Street. With the encouragement of the sacked football writer Matt Driscoll, Hoare claimed that at the
Sun
he had hacked messages and that his managers at the
News of the World
had ‘actively encouraged’ him to do so
.
A second, anonymous reporter claimed phone hacking had been rife at the redtop: ‘Everyone knew. The office cat knew.’ The Americans also spoke to the former
NoW
journalist Sharon Marshall (author of
Tabloid Girl
), who said:

It was an industry-wide thing. Talk to any tabloid journalist in the United Kingdom and they can tell you each phone company’s four-digit codes. Every hack on every newspaper knew this was done.

The
New York Times
team shed new light on the Metropolitan Police’s investigation in 2006: ‘Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the
News of the World
.’ A detective told the Americans that when Dick Fedorcio’s Scotland Yard public affairs directorate realized the
News of the World
was under investigation following the raids on Goodman and Mulcaire, a police press officer started waving his arms in the air, saying: ‘Wait a minute, let’s talk about this’ and stressed the importance of the Met’s long-term relationship with the newspaper.

Don van Natta Jr and his colleagues wrote:

Scotland Yard’s narrow focus has allowed
News of the World
and its parent company, News International, to continue to assert that the hacking was limited to one reporter. During testimony before the parliamentary committee in September 2009, Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International who now heads Dow Jones, said: ‘There was never any evidence delivered to me suggesting that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.’

But interviews with more than a dozen reporters and editors at
News of the World
present a different picture of the newsroom. They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors. Andy Coulson … had imposed a hypercompetitive ethos, even by tabloid standards …

Despite the earlier arrest of the private investigator Steve Whittamore, the dark arts were still widely in use. Former reporters said both the news and feature desks employed their own investigators to uncover medical records, unlisted addresses, phone bills and so on.

Wapping wheeled out its standard response of strenuous denial and character assassination. Privately it briefed against Sean Hoare, portraying him as an unreliable witness. In public, News International released a statement accusing the
New York Times
of carrying out a commercial vendetta because of its rivalry with the
Wall Street Journal
:

The
News of the World
repeatedly asked the
New York Times
to provide evidence to support their allegations and they were unable to do so. Indeed, the story they published contained no new credible evidence and relied heavily on anonymous sources, contrary to the paper’s own editorial guidelines. In doing so, they have undermined their own reputation and confirmed our suspicion their story was motivated by commercial rivalry. We reject absolutely any suggestion there was a widespread culture of wrongdoing at the
News of the World
.
⁷

For hours after its publication, those following the scandal were elated because they thought the story would force the government to announce an inquiry. The
New York Times
had independently corroborated the work of the
Guardian
and gone even further in its depiction of an out-of-control newsroom. Rusbridger’s gamble had paid off. Although the US investigation was a feat of newsgathering, any British newspaper could have found the evidence had it looked; but most British newspapers did not want to look and it had been left to an American title to tell the British about their own scandal.

Fleet Street had been doubly shamed, but the government refused to act. In Downing Street, a spokesman for Andy Coulson (by this time, the spokesman needed a spokesman) said he ‘emphatically’ denied any wrongdoing, adding: ‘He has, however, offered to talk to officers if the need arises and would welcome the opportunity to give his view on Mr Hoare’s claims.’ A spokesman for David Cameron said: ‘Andy has made the position clear, and there have been a number of reports over the past few days but none of those reports change anything as far as the Prime Minister is concerned … He has full confidence in Andy Coulson. And he continues to do his job.’

The government would continue to maintain an air of calm for months, while the pressure slowly built. In the Commons, Tom Watson and Chris Bryant were not prepared to drop the
New York Times
’s disclosures in the face of official denial. The day after the story broke, 2 September, Watson wrote the first of many articles about the affair on the Labour Uncut website run by his friend Siôn Simon, asking detailed questions of Scotland Yard, the CPS and News International. By this time, he, Nick Davies and the Manchester lawyers had decided that, while News International would never voluntarily admit its wrongdoing and the Murdoch-backed government was unlikely to budge, it would be harder for the Met to ignore new evidence: Scotland Yard was the weakest link. The following day, Friday 3 September – as the
Guardian
and the
Independent
splashed on ‘Coulson under pressure’ stories – Watson wrote to the Met Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson (publishing the letter on Labour Uncut):

Dear Sir Paul,

I write as a Member of Parliament, a former Cabinet Office minister and a member of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee which took evidence last year from Andy Coulson and Les Hinton about the News of the World’s illegal phone hacking operations.

The Metropolitan Police’s historic and continued mishandling of this affair is bringing your force, and hence our democracy, into disrepute.

Former Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick has requested a judicial review of the Metropolitan Police’s investigation (or lack of it – we do not know) into his phone being hacked by newspapers while he was a serving officer. This is extraordinary.

Indeed, it would appear that the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) may have deliberately withheld from this serving senior officer the information that his phone had been hacked. Please confirm whether this is true.

The phone of a serving Metropolitan Police commissioner was also on a list of numbers intended to be hacked by newspapers. It has been reported that an MPS investigation established that his phone had not been hacked. Please confirm whether this is true.

If it is, please confirm whether the phone of every other name on any list found of numbers intended to be hacked was also investigated.

If not, please confirm who decided, according to what criteria and on what authority, which names to investigate and which to ignore.

Today it has emerged that another senior MPS officer, Michael Fuller, was also on Glenn Mulcaire’s list. Please confirm how many MPS officers were on lists of names to be illegally hacked, which were investigated and which were notified. Much anger and concern centres on your force’s failure to inform people that their names had been found on these lists. Please confirm exactly how many names were on Mulcaire’s and any other lists.

Many Members of Parliament were on these lists. The Metropolitan Police has strongly implied that all Members of Parliament so targeted had been informed. This was not true. Please confirm how many Members of Parliament were on the lists.

Please confirm who decided which Members of Parliament to notify, according to what criteria and on what authority.

Please confirm, in all other cases, who selected which victims should be notified, on what criteria, on what authority and who else had any requisite knowledge. Please confirm who went to seize the materials, where are these materials stored, and what processes the Met go through when answering letters and inquiries about these materials.