Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (25 page)

Events now moved quickly. Scotland Yard’s already ridiculous story was at breaking point. The previous February it had been forced to admit that thousands of people’s names were in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes; now lawyers were claiming one of them was a senior
News of the World
executive; and more civil cases looked likely to drag further details from the Mulcaire notes in its vaults in coming months. Also looming was the Max Mosley-backed judicial review, which would subject London’s police force to a forensic examination of its treatment of victims. Two days after the news of Edmondson’s suspension, on 7 January, Scotland Yard asked News International to hand over any new evidence about phone hacking.

On 14 January, Keir Starmer renewed his tougher approach by launching a ‘comprehensive review’ of the evidence in the Yard’s possession by a highly regarded senior lawyer, Alison Levitt QC. In a letter to Starmer published the same day, John Yates welcomed the review, saying there remained ‘outstanding public, legal and political concerns’ surrounding phone hacking.

The following day a copy of the email chain sent to James Murdoch during the Gordon Taylor case in 2008 (suggesting phone hacking was ‘rife’ at Wapping) was deleted from his laptop by News International’s IT department. The company later told the Commons Culture Committee that the deletion was part of an ‘email stabilization policy and modernization programme which saw a number of users’ accounts being prepared for the migration to a new email system’.
²
Coincidentally, on 8 March, the email chain was also deleted from Colin Myler’s desktop computer due to ‘a hardware failure’.
³

Pressure built on Downing Street and Scotland Yard. After receiving information from a government source, Watson asserted in his Labour Uncut column of 12 January that ‘the working assumption for Andy Coulson’s departure announcement is now 25 January’. The Prime Minister’s official spokesman dismissed Watson’s claim as ‘rubbish’. On 18 January, the comedian Steve Coogan and the football pundit Andy Gray lodged an application in the High Court demanding that Mulcaire disclose who had commissioned him. On 19 January, it was revealed that David Cameron had been a guest of Rebekah Brooks at her home in the Cotswolds over Christmas. Downing Street did all it could to close down the story and refused to give any details of the meeting, which it justified on the basis that Brooks was a constituent of Cameron’s – though that was undermined when it later came out that James Murdoch had also been present. Brooks and the Prime Minister had been socializing around the time David Cameron had stripped Vince Cable of the BSkyB decision. No one could say whether Brooks and Murdoch used their personal connection with the Prime Minister to lobby him but for the first time the relationship with News International had become an embarrassment to the government. The heat was now on the Prime Minister and his director of communications.

Andy Coulson could take no more. On 21 January, he resigned. In what would become a familiar refrain, he maintained he had done nothing wrong, but regretfully had become a part of the story. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the
News of the World
has made it difficult to give the 110 per cent needed in this role. I stand by what I’ve said about those events but when the spokesman needs a spokesman, it’s time to move on.’

Denying that his judgement was called into question by his appointment of Coulson, the Prime Minister said:

I am very sorry that Andy Coulson has decided to resign as my director of communications, although I understand that the continuing pressures on him and his family mean that he feels compelled to do so. Andy has told me that the focus on him was impeding his ability to do his job and was starting to prove a distraction for the government. During his time working for me, Andy has carried out his role with complete professionalism … He can be extremely proud of the role he has played, including for the last eight months in government.

Speaking to
Channel
4
News
later that day, Cameron said he felt Coulson had been ‘punished for the same offence twice’. Given the very serious allegations made by the
New York Times
nearly four months earlier, it is unclear exactly when Cameron decided that Coulson would be right to resign.

The parliamentary lobby, the collective term for political reporters with special access to Downing Street, was shocked by Coulson’s departure. Nearly every lobby correspondent had failed to report adequately the emerging problems for Coulson for fear of angering him. A senior BBC journalist claimed that they had to ‘build a relationship’ with the Prime Minister’s spokesman. In admitting that, they gave the game away: lobby correspondents were spoon-fed stories and didn’t want to jeopardize the servings.

Piers Morgan, who had highly praised Coulson on his appointment in 2007, tweeted: ‘Very sad to hear news about Andy Coulson – good man, good friend. How many times does @guardian want people to quit over the same thing?’ The Conservative blogger Tim Montgomerie suggested that Rupert Murdoch, currently visiting London, had ordered the resignation. Montgomerie explained later: ‘A very senior cabinet minister who was in a position to know told me that Murdoch was an influence on Andy Coulson’s decision to quit. Within minutes Andy Coulson rang to say the suggestion was rubbish.’
⁴

If Murdoch had instigated the resignation in the hope that it would lance the boil, he was wrong; it only increased attention on it further. Until then, despite newspaper reports, TV bulletins, the launch of civil law suits and the protestations of a small number of parliamentarians, the affair had had little tangible impact. The campaigners had been heckling from the margins; now they had more credibility and it was harder for political correspondents to ignore them.

Gordon Brown, who had kept his own counsel on hacking despite growing concern, used the opportunity to go public with his concern that his own communications had been eavesdropped. On 23 January, the
Independent on Sunday’
s front page read: ‘Exclusive: Brown asks Scotland Yard to investigate if he was hacked’. James Hanning, the paper’s deputy editor, disclosed that the former Prime Minister had written to Scotland Yard asking if his messages had been targeted by the
News of the World
. Brown only occasionally used his mobile phone while in Number 10 for security reasons, but he asked whether his messages on other people’s phones had been intercepted, or whether his phone had been hacked while he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Tom Watson believed that only if News Corp’s directors and investors were affected would the cover-up at Wapping finally be smashed. He decided that one way of grabbing their attention was to explore the BSkyB takeover, since that was News Corp’s biggest deal. Watson spent the afternoon of 24 January batting back and forth between his long-suffering assistant Paul Moore and Siôn Simon a draft of a letter to the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, asking him to expand Ofcom’s consideration of News Corp’s bid for the rest of BSkyB. Under the public interest provisions of the Enterprise Act, Watson pointed out, Ofcom’s investigation was entitled to study ‘whether the acquirer has shown evidence of bad practice in its other media companies’. Two individuals had already been imprisoned for phone hacking at the
News of the World
, he reminded Hunt, while another had been suspended as a result of civil actions against News Corp’s British newspaper subsidiary. Watson added that he believed more evidence of wrongdoing would emerge.

Whatever the outcome of Hunt’s current quasi-judicial deliberations, this was a new legal argument: that the systematically criminal activities of News Corp newspapers were a valid legal reason to oppose its tightening grip on British broadcasting. Jeremy Hunt eventually replied, on 8 February, that such an inquiry could not be mounted because only media plurality could be studied (he would later dramatically change that view). More interesting to Watson than the official response his letter prompted was what happened when it was published on Labour Uncut. A check on the server addresses revealed that those who viewed the story included Downing Street, the House of Commons, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, the Department for Business, all the UK political parties, the White House, the US Congress, the Assemblée Nationale, the Italian Parliament, and what seemed like every major law firm and bank in London, Paris, New York and Hong Kong. Many people, apparently, were interested in the ambitions of News Corporation.

On 25 January, the day after Watson wrote to him, Jeremy Hunt announced his formal support for the BSkyB bid – despite the reservations of Ofcom. On the same day as he declared his provisional backing for the bid, the Cabinet minister published Ofcom’s report to him of 31 December 2010, which suggested that the takeover could operate against the public interest because ‘there may not be a sufficient plurality of persons with control of media enterprising providing news and current affairs to UK-wide cross-media audiences’; in other words, too few people would own the news. In its analysis, the regulator warned that the deal would increase News Corp’s share of regular news consumers from 32 per cent to 51 per cent and recommended an inquiry by the Competition Commission. This would have taken at least six months and would have hurt Rupert Murdoch because by the time it reported – even if its findings were favourable – he would almost certainly have to pay a higher price because BSkyB’s financial results were improving. Instead, Hunt told the Commons, he had paused the referral while he asked News Corp if it could provide safeguards that would render one unnecessary; specifically, News Corp would be asked to distance itself from the ownership of BSkyB’s loss-making Sky News.

Rupert Murdoch had been buffeted by the steady revelations emerging from the hacking scandal ever since the publication of the
New York Times
’s damning story the previous September, but now, seemingly, he had weathered the storm and his friends in the Conservative-dominated government were being wonderfully supportive. Despite Andy Coulson’s resignation and the suspension of Ian Edmondson, the fallout from hacking was not, crucially, cross-contaminating his wider business ambitions.

On 26 January 2011, Tom Watson decided he should increase further the pressure on the police and, in his Labour Uncut column, asked why Scotland Yard had been so reluctant in 2006 and subsequently to examine the Mulcaire files. He concluded:

It may be that all the officers concerned acted in good faith and with consummate professionalism throughout. But, if I have understood [the criminal law guide] Archbold correctly, it is hard to conclude other than that the Metropolitan Police Service could itself be guilty of perverting the course of justice and/or misfeasance in public life and/or conspiracy [and this now] requires urgent investigation by an independent police force.

Later, at Prime Minister’s Questions, watched live by 3 million TV viewers, Watson told David Cameron that the Met should be stripped of responsibility for investigating phone hacking: ‘The former investigating officer is now on the payroll of News International and three senior editors have been identified in relation to phone hacking: is it not time that another police force took over the inquiry? You have the power to make it happen, Prime Minister, what are you afraid of?’

Cameron’s anger rose. ‘Let me be absolutely clear,’ he said. ‘Phone hacking is wrong and illegal, and it is quite right that the Director of Public Prosecutions is reviewing all the evidence.’ He added that it was ‘not necessarily fair’ to say the police had not been active because there had been prosecutions, convictions ‘and indeed imprisonments – but the law is quite clear and the prosecuting authorities should follow it wherever it leads’.

Back in his office in Portcullis House, a small TV set blared out a Sky News newsflash: four years after Goodman and Mulcaire had been jailed, the Metropolitan Police was launching a new inquiry into phone hacking. Watson stared at the screen in amazement. He flicked over to BBC 24, which was covering another story, then back to Sky News. Within ten minutes, he was inundated with requests for interviews from the likes of BBC News, Radio 4, Reuters and Bloomberg.

The new inquiry had been announced by the Met’s Deputy Commissioner, Tim Godwin, while the Commissioner, Sir John Stephenson, was having an operation to remove a pre-cancerous tumour from his leg. Officially, at least, it had been prompted not by Watson’s question in the Commons (although that had clearly embarrassed David Cameron), but by News International handing new evidence to police. This included internal emails culled from News International’s under-investigation IT system concerning Ian Edmondson, the
News of the World’
s suspended news editor. Significantly, the Met said that the new inquiry would be carried out not by the counter-terrorism command (officially, because it was too busy) but by the Specialist Crime Directorate, which dealt with sophisticated organized crime: John Yates had been taken off the case. In his place was one of the Met’s few senior women, Sue Akers, the Head of Organised Crime and Criminal Networks.

A tough woman with a bob of greying blonde hair, Akers had joined London’s male-dominated police force as a twenty-year-old in 1976. She recalled in a rare newspaper interview in 2004: ‘I had attracted unwarranted attention from my boss. There was no culture of whistleblowing then so you had to think of creative ways to protect yourself. I was very conscious that I was a woman.’ She had risen steadily through the ranks, joining the Flying Squad, becoming a trained siege negotiator and tackling drug gangs. (She had been interviewed by the
Prime Suspect
actress Helen Mirren during her research for the role of DCI Jane Tennison.) Now aged fifty-five, she was, importantly, unsullied by any history of long lunches with Fleet Street editors.