Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (23 page)

At the relevant time, Mr Hayman had reason to fear that he was a target of Glenn Mulcaire and the
News of the World
. It became public knowledge that throughout the period of the investigation into voicemail hacking, Mr Hayman was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Independent Police Complaints Commission and was claiming expenses which were subsequently regarded as unusually high. The same, of course, is also true of John Yates who, we now know, at the time when he responded to the
Guardian’
s stories about Gordon Taylor’s settlement with News Group, was involved in a controversial relationship with a woman who worked for the Met press bureau.

Lewis offered no evidence that the officers’ behaviour towards the
News of the World
had been unduly influenced by fear, and Yates and Hayman both later denied that their conduct had been compromised by their relationships.

With pressure building on the Met, News International became ever more determined to marginalize those making its life uncomfortable. At the Labour Party conference at the end of September 2010, even after turning against Labour the year before, Wapping’s executives were out in force. On the night of the Labour leader’s speech News International always held a lavish reception at which there was no shortage of ambitious guests; that year it provided a useful environment in which to try to destabilize Tom Watson. Referring to a planning extension to the Watson family home, a member of the
Sun’
s political staff told Kevan Jones MP: ‘Tell that fat bastard of a mate that we know everything about his little planning difficulty.’ At another event, within Watson’s earshot, Colin Myler referred to him as a ‘fat bastard’. At a BSkyB reception a
Times
journalist told the Labour MP Stephen Pound that Watson was about to check in to the Betty Ford clinic because of heavy drinking.

Stung by the comment, Watson stopped drinking for six months. He intensified his efforts to unravel the scandal, but in the absence of interest from the mainstream media, all he could do was tweet, fire off letters to the authorities and write regular articles for Labour Uncut. Despite the website’s low circulation Watson knew that those implicated in the scandal would read his pieces, while the tweets fanned out among thousands of followers, some of them with much bigger followings than himself. Graham Linehan, the comedy writer, used to distribute new developments to his tens of thousands of followers, while Jonathan Ross and George Michael would tweet the occasional message of support – bringing the story to their hundreds of thousands of followers. With newsworthy revelations not getting reported in newspapers, the only way to get the story to a wider audience was through social media.

At News Corp’s annual meeting in New York on 15 October 2010, Rupert Murdoch flatly dismissed the idea that wrongdoing had been rife at his newspapers, telling investors: ‘We have very strict rules. There was an incident more than five years ago. The person who bought a bugged phone conversation was immediately fired and in fact he subsequently went to jail. There have been two parliamentary inquiries, which have found no further evidence of anything at all. If anything was to come to light, we challenge people to give us evidence, and no one has been able to.’ Nearly every claim in that statement was incorrect.

A week later, on 21 October, delivering the inaugural Margaret Thatcher speech at Lancaster House in London, Murdoch struck a more cautious note. News Corp’s chief executive defended the ‘turbulent, inquiring, bustling’ press required by a free society, and said he often had cause to ‘celebrate editorial endeavour’, but added: ‘Occasionally, I have had cause for regret. Let me be clear: we will vigorously pursue the truth – and we will not tolerate wrongdoing.’ His message was that no one else needed to pursue wrongdoing at Wapping, because he and his company would hunt down the facts. The billionaire was heading towards his eightieth year, dominant across three populous and wealthy nations – America, Australia and Britain – yet he knew that there were unanswered questions about the methods by which he had accrued his power and wealth.

For the meantime he had kept the scandal at bay and could push ahead with the BSkyB bid. Once in office, the Conservative-led government had remained in tune with Murdoch’s media agenda. In his first Budget as Chancellor, George Osborne announced the BBC would have the licence fee frozen at £145.50 for six years, have to take over the £300 million annual cost of running the World Service and the Welsh language broadcaster S4C, and contribute £150 million a year towards the roll-out of rural broadband. The settlement was a 16 per cent real terms cut in the BBC budget. The government also deferred until 2013 Gordon Brown’s intention to force Sky to give up its exclusive live rights to home Ashes tests.

But one obstacle lay in Murdoch’s path towards taking over BSkyB: a Liberal Democrat not on his social circuit, whose party had long been ignored by his papers – the Business Secretary, Vince Cable. Under the Enterprise Act, Cable would make the ‘quasi-judicial’ decision whether to refer the £7.8 billion takeover to Ofcom for investigation on the grounds that it might be against the public interest. Ofcom could then advise whether Cable should refer the bid to the Competition Commission, which had the legal authority to block it. Unfortunately for News Corp, Cable was decidedly unclubbable – or, more correctly, unbiddable. In an attempt to push him into making the right decision, Wapping launched a ‘campaign of bullying’ against LibDems: one unnamed cabinet minister was told that if the Liberal Democrats did not do as Wapping wanted, the party would be ‘done over’ by Murdoch’s papers.
²
On 4 November, Cable refused to buckle and asked Ofcom to assess whether the deal threatened ‘media plurality’, bluntly, whether it would give Murdoch too much power. His decision went against the flow of pro-Murdoch decisions made by the Cameron government.

A few weeks later Cable was visited at his surgery by two female ‘constituents’ who were, in fact, undercover reporters from the
Daily Telegraph
. ‘You may wonder what is happening with the Murdoch press,’ he told the women. ‘I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win. I didn’t politicize it, because it is a legal question, but he is trying to take over BSkyB … I have blocked it. His whole empire is now under attack.’ The
Daily Telegraph
, a vociferous opponent of the BSkyB deal, only reported Cable’s comments after they were leaked to the BBC’s business editor, Robert Peston. News International issued a statement saying it was ‘shocked’ by the comments, which, it said, raised questions ‘about fairness and due process’.

Cable had undoubtedly given the clear impression that he would not be an impartial judge: it was an own goal. On 21 December, David Cameron stripped him of the BSkyB decision and handed it to Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary, a self-made publishing millionaire who had previously expressed considerable admiration for Rupert Murdoch.
*
Murdoch would find the ambitious, spiky-haired Hunt – tipped as a future Conservative leader – more amenable to his business plans than Vince Cable.

Having undermined its own corporate opposition to the BSkyB bid through its sting on Cable
,
the
Daily Telegraph
hired the world’s biggest detective agency, Kroll, to hunt the mole who leaked his injudicious comments. Kroll’s report of March 2011 to the
Telegraph
has not been made public, but according to the news agency Reuters Kroll suspected that a
Telegraph
employee had orchestrated the leak through Will Lewis, a former editor of the paper and a friend of Robert Peston. Lewis – one of the many high-powered guests at Rebekah Brooks’s wedding the previous summer – had recently been appointed general manager of News International. Kroll reported: ‘In the period between 9 and 21 December there was extensive telephone, text and social contact between [the former
Telegraph
employee] Lewis, and individuals within the authorized circle of knowledge.’ The
Telegraph
employee, who has not been publicly identified, was later employed at Wapping. News International did not respond to Reuters’ request for a comment.
³

While the BSkyB controversy was rumbling on, the phone hacking scandal veered off northwards – to Scotland. By November, one of the longest-running legal battles in Scottish history, between the
News of the World
and Tommy Sheridan, was edging towards a conclusion. In 2006 News International had appealed its libel defeat to Sheridan, complaining that the jury had disregarded the evidence of independent witnesses. The following year, 2007, Sheridan and his wife, Gail, were charged with perjury. One of the questions of the ensuing criminal trial, which began in October 2010, was whether the
News of the World
had hacked Sheridan’s phone and withheld information about its financial dealings with witnesses who testified against him. On 17 November, Bob Bird, the editor of the
Screws
’ Scottish edition, told the court that many emails about Sheridan had been lost while being transferred for storage to India.

Tom Watson, who had been following the case closely, had knowledge of data protection laws from his spell at the Cabinet Office. Though at the time he knew nothing about the email deletion policy at Wapping, the day after Bird’s testimony, 18 November, Watson wrote to the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, demanding an investigation into whether News International had breached Principle 7 (requiring the safe storage of data) and Principle 8 (restricting the transfer of personal information abroad) of the Data Protection Act. It was an obscure complaint, but it placed News International in a quandary: either its executives admitted that it had a full archive of emails – potentially revealing its newsgathering crimes – or it risked the Information Commissioner launching an investigation and seizing its computers, as it had in the raid on Steve Whittamore in 2003. Watson wrote an article on the complaint on Labour Uncut, while James Hanning also covered it in the
Independent on Sunday
.
⁴

On 10 December, Sheridan, who was conducting his own defence, called Andy Coulson, the Prime Minister’s spokesman, to give evidence. Days before, Tom Watson had briefed Sheridan’s team on phone hacking. During a three-hour interrogation, Sheridan asked the Prime Minister’s spokesman about Mulcaire, whose notes contained Sheridan’s mobile phone number, address and PIN code. Coulson denied knowing anything about phone hacking. He told the court he had not heard of Mulcaire until he had been arrested. ‘I’m saying that I had absolutely no knowledge of it,’ he said. ‘I certainly didn’t instruct anyone to do anything at the time or anything else which was untoward.’
⁵
As he left the witness box, Sheridan thought he saw Coulson winking at him.
⁶

One of the consequences of the Sheridan case was that the BBC’s
Panorama
team began investigating phone hacking. The Corporation had so far failed to devote much – or indeed any – of its investigative resources to unpicking the scandal, but an experienced
Panorama
reporter, Glenn Campbell, now started looking into the links between News International and private investigators. From his time as the crime reporter of ITV’s
London Tonight
programme in the 1990s, Campbell had excellent contacts inside the Metropolitan Police and other forces. He began delving into the relationship between News International, corrupt former police officers and the private detectives prepared to break the law by blagging or hacking bank accounts, media records and mobile phones. His disclosures would darken the scandal, but his programme was still months away.

Publicly, in December Scotland Yard was still sticking to its position that its inquiries had been complete. Following the
New
York Times
investigation and a Channel 4
Dispatches
on 4 October – which suggested that News International had too much power over ministers and police – Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, began to re-examine the affair more closely. On 29 October, to the surprise of parliamentarians, he completely reversed his earlier interpretation of the law on phone hacking when he told the Home Affairs Committee that the police and prosecutors should treat all interceptions of messages as crimes – regardless of whether they had already been heard. Although RIPA had been untested in the courts, Starmer wrote, ‘a robust attitude needs to be taken to any unauthorized interception and investigations should not be inhibited by a narrow approach’. The change was deeply significant. Scotland Yard had been maintaining it could not bring cases on behalf of many victims because of the narrow interpretation of the law. That excuse was now swept away.

Four years after the raids on Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, on 5 November the Metropolitan Police – under pressure to take its investigation seriously – finally interviewed Andy Coulson. Unlike Sean Hoare, the Prime Minister’s communications director was not interviewed under caution, but as a witness by appointment at the offices of his solicitors. The arrangements suggested that rather than believing Coulson had to explain Hoare’s allegations in the
New York Times
, the police may have believed that he could give useful information that would implicate Hoare, the whistleblower. Number 10 stressed the police’s conduct of the interview, telling political reporters: ‘Andy Coulson voluntarily attended a meeting with Metropolitan Police Officers yesterday morning at a solicitor’s office in London. Mr Coulson – who first offered to meet the police two months ago – was interviewed as a witness and was not cautioned or arrested.’ Despite Downing Street’s spin, a confidant of the Prime Minister undergoing a police interview was deeply embarrassing.