Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (27 page)

On phone hacking, we believe the police should thoroughly investigate all allegations. But this is not just an issue about News International. Almost every media organization in the country may end up becoming embroiled in these allegations … Frontbench spokespeople who want to talk about their personal experiences of being tapped should make it clear they are doing just that – speaking from personal experience. We must guard against anything which appears to be attacking a particular newspaper group out of spite.

Meanwhile, inside News Corp there was concern about how deeply James Murdoch might become embroiled in the affair given his role in authorizing the Gordon Taylor pay-off three years earlier. On 21 February 2011, News Corp’s chief executive and chairman, Rupert Murdoch, bought his daughter Elisabeth’s TV production company Shine, maker of hits such as
Masterchef
, for $675 million, sixteen times its most recent annual profits. With James at risk, some critics thought Murdoch had overpaid for the company in order to bring Elisabeth back into the fold. In a statement on the deal, Rupert Murdoch said: ‘I expect Liz Murdoch to join the board of News Corporation on completion of this transaction.’

On 1 March, News Corp finalized its undertakings to Jeremy Hunt over the BSkyB deal, offering to place Sky News into a new stock market-floated company, enshrine its editorial independence in articles of association and set up a corporate governance and editorial committee to guarantee its independence. News Corp was offering to amend the ownership structure of a £60 million-a-year business to tie up a £7.8 billion takeover.

With this happy arrangement in place, Hunt unsurprisingly signalled his intention to wave through the takeover. Announcing the deal to rowdy scenes in the Commons on 3 March, Hunt said that he was ‘minded’ to accept News Corp’s takeover without a referral to the Competition Commission, because hiving off the rolling news channel into a new company, together with the assurances about editorial independence, satisfied concerns about media plurality. He put the plan out to public consultation until 21 March. Tom Watson used the debate as an opportunity to allege further widespread wrongdoing at News International which, he claimed, meant its owner was unfit to own the broadcaster. Watson said the BBC had been bullied into delaying its
Panorama
documentary, and that journalists on other News International titles had been involved in wrongdoing. That afternoon News International accused him of making unsubstantiated claims.

On 10 March, Chris Bryant raised the political temperature further by launching a scathing attack on John Yates and News International. In a Commons speech, Bryant disclosed that he had been threatened, indirectly, to deter him from speaking out. He said:

This has been a many layered scandal, but at the heart of the issue is the rationale behind the whole
modus operandi
at the
News of the World
and other newspapers. As one police officer put it to me, the newspapers involved deliberately sought to harass, intimidate and bully people for their own commercial interests. In the pursuit of their victims they were reckless about the innocent bystanders whose personal messages were intercepted, transcribed and relayed to others.

Almost as bad as the original activity – only the tip of which we have yet seen – has been the cover up. Other Members and former Members of the House have said they were warned off pushing the issue in the House and in select committees. When I raised the question of parliamentary privilege in the House last September, my friends were told by a senior figure allied to Rupert Murdoch and a former executive of News International to warn me that it would not be forgotten.

He said he believed that the
News of the World
had hacked phones in 2002, while it was being edited by Rebekah Brooks. In a rare public attack by an MP on a senior police officer, he accused John Yates of misleading the Commons by stating that the Crown Prosecution Service had advised police of a narrow interpretation of the law of hacking during the prosecution of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, when, Bryant said, that was never the case.

Responding, the junior Home Office minister James Brokenshire read out a prepared speech, reassuring Bryant about the extensive action under way to tackle phone hacking, such as the inquiries by the Home Affairs Select Committee and the Metropolitan Police inquiry. For the box-tickers at the Home Office, there was nothing to be concerned about: the authorities were acting. News International declined to comment on Bryant’s claims.

While the
Guardian
led its report the following day on Bryant’s criticism of John Yates, the
Independent
focused on the threat made to the MP by Murdoch’s allies:

MPs were ‘warned off’ pursuing the phone hacking scandal in Parliament as part of a cover-up, a Labour frontbencher claimed last night during an incendiary speech in which he accused the country’s biggest police force of misleading a Commons committee and its biggest newspaper group of engaging in the ‘dark arts’ of tapping, hacking and blagging.

Damning the behaviour of the Metropolitan Police and Rupert Murdoch’s News International, Chris Bryant claimed his friends had been told by an ally of Mr Murdoch that raising the issue ‘would not be forgotten’.

No other newspapers reported Bryant’s speech. Nonetheless, it provoked a response. On 17 March, Rupert Murdoch invited the new proprietors of the
Independent
, Alexander Lebedev and his son Evgeny, to a meeting at his flat in St James’s, London. After a few minutes of pleasantries, Murdoch turned to the apparent reason for the meeting. Why, he asked, was the
Independent
pursuing the phone hacking story, when there had been no scandal: it was damaging not just to Murdoch but the whole industry. He appealed to his fellow proprietors to tone down the coverage, but the Lebedevs had dealt with far more menacing figures back in Russia. There was no diminution in coverage.

Separately, John Yates wrote to the
Independent
and the
Guardian
denying Bryant’s ‘very serious allegation’ that he had misled Parliament. Yates complained that Keir Starmer’s unequivocal advice in 2009 had been that, to establish a crime had taken place, the prosecution must prove that messages had not been heard before they were intercepted. Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, then publicly complained that Yates had taken his evidence ‘out of context’.
⁸
The country’s top prosecutor and one of its most senior police chiefs were having a public spat over who was to blame for the faulty advice that, the police said, hampered their inquiries into phone hacking. Starmer was later asked by the Home Affairs Committee why he had made such a clear statement that it was only a crime to intercept heard messages when he later revised that opinion. He replied that he had been trying to reply quickly to a parliamentary inquiry and that ‘nobody at that stage went through the documents in detail’.
⁹
The Director of Public Prosecutions was in effect admitting that the paperwork had not been properly read.

In what proved to be a miscalculation, Yates offered to give further evidence to the Commons Home Affairs and Culture Committees. At the Culture Committee on 24 March, Tom Watson asked how Scotland Yard had stored Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. Yates replied they were in ‘two or three’ bin bags. This was the exchange that followed:

WATSON: Were they full?

YATES: I did not see them.

WATSON: Did you or your team examine all of the Mulcaire records?

YATES: At what point?

WATSON: When you were asked to establish the facts?

YATES: No.

Yates, by his own admission, had not bothered to look at the available evidence; he had only checked whether the ‘For Neville’ email represented ‘new’ or ‘old’ evidence. Watson pointed out that the Information Commissioner had discovered that Steve Whittamore had obtained phone numbers of the family of Milly Dowler, who was murdered in 2002 (see Chapter 15). Watson asked Yates: ‘If it transpires from the review of the Mulcaire evidence that, when Sky News were broadcasting it round the clock, Glenn Mulcaire was instructed to hack the phones of the family members of children killed at Soham, would that warrant adequate use of police resources to investigate?’ Yates replied: ‘I am sure that it would, but that is the first I have ever heard of that aspect.’ As Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman had accidentally discovered the name of at least one of the Soham parents was indeed in the Glenn Mulcaire files, but John Yates, one of the most senior officers at Scotland Yard, did not know that – because he had not checked the evidence.

13

U-turn at Wapping

It is hurtful, but it is not that hurtful

– Michael Silverleaf QC, on the hacking of Sienna Miller

Away from phone hacking, Jonathan Rees’s trial for murder collapsed on Friday 11 March 2011, when the Crown Prosecution finally abandoned the long attempt to bring Daniel Morgan’s suspected killers to justice. Jonathan Rees and the Vian brothers – Gary and Glen – were acquitted at the Old Bailey. The acquittal allowed the revelation of another of the
News of the World’
s covert techniques: computer hacking.

For Scotland Yard, the collapse of the prosecution was another humiliating defeat in its attempts to right the corruption-riddled initial investigations into the murder of the South London private eye. Eighteen months of legal argument had ensued after Rees and his four co-accused had gone on trial in October 2009, as the defence picked away at the credibility of the prosecution case, particularly on the disclosure of evidence. Despite the Met’s determination to bring Morgan’s suspected killers to justice, there had been problems with the evidence. The murder squad had disclosed 250 crates of notes on the case dating back twenty-four years and the supergrasses it was relying upon to secure a conviction. But in 2010, eighteen crates of further evidence relating to a supergrass from the criminal world, James Ward, were discovered by chance in a disused building and presented to the trial. On 7 March 2011, the police handed over another four crates of evidence inexplicably missed by the exhibits officer. Although the evidence did not strike at the heart of the case, the Crown Prosecution Service felt that the Metropolitan Police’s credibility had been fatally undermined. In February 2010, the case against Rees’s business partner, Sid Fillery, was stayed and, in November 2010, the builder James Cook was acquitted, followed, in March 2011, by Rees and the Vian brothers.

After twenty-four years, five investigations, 750,000 documents and the expenditure of £50 million, Scotland Yard had again failed to jail anyone for the murder of Daniel Morgan. Detective Chief Superintendent Hamish Campbell said: ‘This current investigation has identified ever more clearly how the initial inquiry failed the family and wider public. It is quite apparent that corruption was a debilitating factor.’ Outside court, Jonathan Rees said that he should not have been prosecuted, claiming the police had failed to investigate up to forty other potential suspects.

He also sought to implicate the BBC in his activities, claiming that
Panorama
had paid the police. While
The Times
had been able to find little space to report the phone hacking scandal, despite the growing number of civil court cases, several parliamentary inquiries and a new police investigation, it reported Rees’s claims. On 15 March,
The Times’
s crime reporter, Sean O’Neill, wrote a story headlined: ‘Investigator accused by BBC reporter of “corrupt business” says he worked for
Panorama
.’
The Times
referred briefly to
Panorama
’s allegation about computer hacking at the
Screws
, before dealing at length with Rees’s alleged work for the BBC, though it quoted ‘friends of Mr Rees’ as saying he ‘had no documents or invoices to prove his claim’.
Panorama
later said it could find no evidence it had employed the private detective. The media commentator Roy Greenslade blogged: ‘Note how the
Times
’s story is angled to fit two News International agendas. It throws mud at the BBC, yet again. It minimises the misbehaviour by the
News of the World
, yet again.’
¹

Though a devastating blow for Alastair Morgan and Scotland Yard, the end of the case meant newspapers no longer had to withhold their coverage of Rees’s connections to the
News of the World
for fear of contempt of court. Newspapers could reveal Andy Coulson’s employment of the private investigator and his links to corrupt detectives. The
Independent
ran a story in the following day’s paper headined: ‘Private investigator cleared of murder was on Coulson payroll’. In the
Guardian
, Nick Davies’s story, which referred to Rees commissioning burglaries, was headed: ‘Jonathan Rees: private investigator who ran an empire of tabloid corruption’.

At the BBC,
Panorama
’s Glenn Campbell had already spent five months investigating Rees
,
with the help of police, Alastair Morgan and Nick Davies. By January 2011, he had gathered enough evidence to expose a further and even more serious development in the hacking story: as well as hacking phones and blagging bank and medical details, the
News of the World
had been hacking computers.