Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (24 page)

It is not known what, if anything, Coulson said in his interview, but John Yates was still unable to make progress. Sean Hoare had not repeated his allegations to the
New York Times
to police since he had been interviewed under caution. (Fragile after half a lifetime of drink and drugs and interviewed by the police under caution, he started drinking heavily again.) Yates also wrote to the former
News of the World
journalist Paul McMullan asking to interview him but when McMullan failed to reply, Yates took no further action.

On 10 December, Keir Starmer reluctantly announced that there was no official, admissible evidence on which to charge anyone. With a degree of frustration, he declared in a statement: ‘The contents of the reports in the
New York Times
and the associated reports and coverage are not enough for criminal proceedings unless those making allegations are prepared to provide the police with admissible evidence to support their assertions.’ The thrust of his remarks was that former
Screws
journalists had failed to stand by their evidence. He had not yet grasped the obvious fact that the key evidence was not new, but old – and already in the possession of the Metropolitan Police.

As 2010 drew to a close, Tom Watson realized that the prospects of charges being brought were, extraordinarily, diminishing. Nevertheless, he fired off a barrage of parliamentary questions, Freedom of Information requests and letters to the Prime Minister, ministers, select committees, the police, the DPP, the PCC and the Information Commissioner. The few replies he received tended to be bland, cursory or contemptuous. But as a former government minister, he knew where the pressure points were, and decided to contact the country’s most senior civil servant. On 22 December, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, had shrugged off a complaint from Labour’s shadow Business Secretary, John Denham, that Jeremy Hunt’s previous support for Rupert Murdoch disqualified him from ruling on the fitness of the BSkyB bid. In a succinct rebuff, O’Donnell, a loyal and genial mandarin, informed Denham that he had consulted government lawyers, whose reassuring advice was that Hunt’s interview with
Broadcast,
the cheerleader reference on his website and his comments to the
Financial Times
about News Corp already controlling the broadcaster were not an impediment to him taking the decision. ‘I am satisfied that those statements do not amount to a pre-judgment of the case in question; indeed the third quotation explicitly states that Mr Hunt would not want to “second guess what regulators might decide”,’ O’Donnell wrote.
⁷

That day, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport had confirmed that Hunt had held a meeting with James Murdoch on 28 June shortly after the News Corp bid was announced, at which no civil servants had been present and no minutes had been taken, and that a second meeting had taken place between Hunt and BSkyB’s chief executive, Jeremy Darroch, on 21 July. No minutes had been taken at that meeting either, despite the fact that an unnamed civil servant had warned the Culture Secretary that Darroch was likely to ask about media regulation.

On 23 December, Watson wrote to O’Donnell pointing out his concerns about impartiality – and putting to him a long list of questions:

Dear Gus,

I have written to you several times in the past few weeks about matters of propriety and the ethics of government. I am now writing to ask about such matters again …

Did you know about Jeremy Hunt’s 28 June meeting with James Murdoch and his 21 July meeting with Jeremy Darroch when responsibility for ruling on News Corp’s proposal to take full control of BSkyB was transferred from Vince Cable to Jeremy Hunt?

What was discussed during Jeremy Hunt’s meeting with James Murdoch on 28 June?

Where was that meeting held, and at what time?

As no civil servants were present at the meeting, can you be entirely satisfied that this meeting will not prejudice Mr Hunt’s judgement when acting in the quasi-judicial role?

Did Jeremy Hunt discuss News Corp’s proposed purchase of the remaining BSkyB shares at his meeting with James Murdoch on 28 June?

In your letter to John Denham yesterday, you said that you took legal advice on the question of whether there was any legal impediment to moving ministerial responsibility for competition and policy issues relating to media, broadcasting, digital and telecoms sectors from BIS to DCMS. You did not say, though, whether you had taken legal advice on Mr Hunt’s conflict of interest.

Did you take legal advice specifically about Mr Hunt’s conflict of interest?

If you did, did the lawyers know about the 28 June meeting between Jeremy Hunt and James Murdoch in providing this advice?

Did they know about Mr Hunt’s 21 July meeting with Jeremy Darroch?

Did they know about his several published highly prejudicial statements?

Did you know about these meetings?

Did you, and any lawyers consulted, know about Jeremy Hunt’s formal meetings with News Corp on 10 June and with BSkyB on 10 July?

Did you know about [Culture Minister] Ed Vaizey’s lunch with Rebekah Brooks on 12 July?

Did you know about the News Corp dinner attended by Jeremy Hunt and [his special adviser] Adam Smith on 20 May?

Did you know that DCMS had denied the existence of some of these meetings in written parliamentary answers to me?

Are you seriously going to attempt to hold the line that Jeremy Hunt has no conflict of interest? He has made unprecedentedly prejudicial public statements. And, in a short and busy time since taking office:

he has had several formal meetings with News Corp and its subsidiaries;

he has been to their dinners;

his junior minister has been to lunch;

he has had several, unminuted, private, secret, ‘informal’ meetings with News Corp, the existence of which DCMS ministers have then denied in written answers to Parliament.

Jeremy Hunt is neck deep in News Corp, and you know it.

Remember, nobody expects the Prime Minister to tell the truth or do the decent thing. But the Cabinet Secretary is supposed to be the government’s conscience.

I look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely

Tom Watson

Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East

From his time in Gordon Brown’s Downing Street, Watson knew O’Donnell to be a tough and clever operator and had no personal animus against him, but he also realized that O’Donnell primarily saw his role as protecting the government. Watson had done enough stonewalling himself during Gordon Brown’s premiership to know how that worked, but he was aware of the psychological effect of applying pressure. For one thing, he knew that O’Donnell would be making a calculated decision that there was nothing in his letter that he couldn’t ignore, but that there were questions he could not answer and questions to which he probably did not want to know the answer. It was all still ‘under control’, but the letter and Watson’s barrage of other interventions were designed to make O’Donnell feel a little nervous and a little more nervous every time. Watson wanted to make this a problem for them all.

Despite this flurry of activity, he was running out of avenues, and was growing increasingly concerned that Wapping might win. He was also struggling personally. His marriage – strained by the Damian McBride affair and his preoccupation with the hacking scandal – had collapsed and his estranged wife had moved back to Yorkshire to be closer to her family. The MP was leading an itinerant life, traversing the country to be in London for Parliament, West Bromwich for his constituents and Yorkshire for his children.

His state of mind was not helped when he began to fear he was being followed. He still did not know that he had been tailed by Derek Webb in Brighton in 2009, but the whispering campaign of threats, the unusual characters sitting in cars and the strange motorbike rider outside his Westminster flat led to a state of constant paranoia. He had found out that the
News of the World
used a white transit van in covert surveillance operations, and, though his rational self told him that the white van outside his rented London home probably belonged to a neighbour with a plumbing business, he was wary. He kept the curtains and blinds closed; his laptop computer never left his side. No letters or personal documents were disposed of in his own bins. Friends were warned not to discuss his work injudiciously, and key contacts were never called on mobile phones. He frequently took different routes to work.

During the parliamentary Christmas break of 2010, the MP woke early – any time between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. – and when he was in Yorkshire he had taken to walking in the hills of the Peak District from where he would phone or text his close friends, David Wild and Siôn Simon. They indulged him as he related his latest idea for the investigation, sometimes listening to him for an hour, as his breathless pounding of hilltops made it difficult for him to complete his sentences. Although they did not say so at the time, they became deeply worried about his mental health: the hillwalking and the investigation were bordering on obsessional.

On 27 December, high up in the peaks of the Yorkshire and Derbyshire border, a phone call transformed Watson’s mood. Over previous weeks, a new source had been tantalizingly close to revealing important information. The source, who had very detailed knowledge of the information technology architecture of News Corp around the world, contradicted Watson’s belief that data had been lost irrevocably. During Tommy Sheridan’s trial, News International had declared that key emails had gone missing when being transferred to Mumbai, prompting Watson’s complaint to the Information Commissioner. The insider, who had read about the complaint on Labour Uncut, patiently explained that personal data would not be archived abroad: News Corp had very strict rules about data storage after changes to American law placed draconian sanctions on firms which failed to maintain adequate records; white-collar laws in America held directors responsible for data loss. The company, he said, would archive in the UK. There were two servers at Wapping: the first was for all emails and for ordinary staff on the company’s four newspapers; the second was a more secure server that allowed executives to share confidential financial information. If an email had been sent to an executive – including an editor – it would be stored on the second secure server as well as the first. Were the first server to be destroyed in some way, the second wouldn’t be. As they talked for over an hour, Watson frantically wrote notes on small pieces of paper in his pockets, taking the names of the senior IT people and those that had recently left. He probed the contact while trying not to betray his increasing sense of euphoria.

Back in 2005 when Mulcaire and Goodman were conspiring to hack phones, the company bosses felt they were untouchable. They had politicians and police in their pockets, and they had no ‘predators’; Watson’s logic was that with that level of power you would feel invulnerable – and if you thought yourself invulnerable, you would become complacent and make mistakes. He already knew that Brooks was complacent with her digital fingerprints because of the text message about him which she had sent in April 2009 to someone close to the Prime Minister. If others shared her arrogance, there would be a rich source of information on that second server that the police could use to crack the case. He He did not know at that point that data had been or was being destroyed. But just as he had been losing hope, this new discovery reinvigorated him.

12

Out of Control

It doesn’t say ‘Fulham’, it says ‘Soham’

– Charlotte Harris

While the police and prosecutors were claiming they were searching for new evidence, the civil litigants had been making progress for months using the old. In September 2010, with the benefit of the Mulcaire notes disclosed to her by the police in July, Sienna Miller had begun a High Court case against News International. For a young woman in the entertainment industry this was a brave step: she was standing up to a powerful mogul who owned a Hollywood film studio. ‘Everyone was scared of Murdoch, even governments,’ she said later.
¹
Miller claimed that the
News of the World
had published eleven articles about her and Jude Law derived from hacking, causing her ‘extreme concern about her privacy and safety as well as enormous anxiety and distress’. Whenever she had changed phones, she told the court, Mulcaire had obtained the number’s PIN codes, as well as phone numbers and PINs for her friend Archie Keswick, publicist Ciara Parkes, Jude Law and Law’s personal assistant, Ben Jackson. On 15 December, Miller’s lawyer, Mark Thomson, played her ace card, by disclosing to the court the name of the commissioning journalist in the top left-hand corner of Mulcaire’s notes: ‘Ian’. On 5 January 2011, the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston broke off from the Davos summit in Switzerland to announce that the
News of the World
had suspended Ian Edmondson, the paper’s long-serving news editor and one of the executives Andy Coulson had hired from the People. In a statement, News International said: ‘The
News of the World
has a zero tolerance approach to wrongdoing.’