Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (28 page)

One especially sensitive target was Ian Hurst, a former intelligence officer in Northern Ireland. While in the British Army’s Force Research Unit, Hurst had handled Britain’s most valuable agent in the IRA – Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed ‘Stakeknife’ – who had infiltrated the IRA’s notorious ‘Nutting Squad’, which hunted down, tortured and killed suspected informers. Hurst wanted to expose what he said was the dirty work done by the British in Northern Ireland. In 2004, he wrote a book with a former
Independent
journalist, Greg Harkin,
Stakeknife: Britain’s Secret Agents in Ireland
, which alleged that in order to maintain Scappaticci’s cover the British Army allowed him to commit murder. In 2006,
Panorama
discovered, Jonathan Rees had introduced the
News of the World’
s Alex Marunchak, now editing its Irish edition, to a computer hacker, who sent a Trojan virus to Hurst’s computer. Once opened, Hurst’s emails were faxed to Manchurak’s office in Dublin.

Panorama
filmed Hurst as he was shown faxed copies of the emails that had arrived at the
News of the World
. ‘The hairs on the back of my head are up,’ he said. Hurst subsequently secretly recorded a meeting with the alleged hacker, who explained: ‘It weren’t that hard. I sent you an email that you opened, and that’s it … I sent it from a bogus address … Now it’s gone. It shouldn’t even remain on the hard drive. I think I programmed it to stay on for three months.’ Questioned about who had asked him to do the hacking, he replied: ‘The faxes would go to Dublin … . He was the editor of the
News of the World
for Ireland. A Slovak-type name. I can’t remember his fucking name. Alex his name is. Marunchak.’

In the run-up to
Panorama
’s broadcast, News International complained about the programme, claiming it was part of an attempt by the BBC to damage News Corp’s bid for BSkyB. In letters to the BBC on 10 and 11 March, Farrer & Co’s Julian Pike – who the previous year had threatened to injunct Mark Lewis for representing phone hacking victims – accused the corporation of ‘running a campaign’ against the BSkyB bid. The corporation had ‘an obligation to avoid embroiling itself in a political and commercial battle that it should have nothing to do with’, he added, protesting that the programme was ‘yet another attempt to undermine News Corp’s bid for Sky’. The BBC faced down the complaints and
Panorama
was broadcast on 14 March, giving millions of viewers an insight into the range of covert techniques used by News International. Marunchak made no comment to
Panorama
, but later denied its allegations in a statement to
UK Press Gazette
.

News International records showed that the
News of the World
paid Rees more than £4,000 for research on Stakeknife in 2006.

Inside Wapping, someone was becoming concerned at what happened at News International during the early days of the cover-up. On 24 March 2011, an anonymous executive at News International (believed to be the ambitious general manager Will Lewis) asked Harbottle & Lewis for a copy of its work for NI in 2007. Harbottle & Lewis had carried out the review of
News of the World
emails for Clive Goodman’s employment appeal, and had printed off some copies of the emails – which contained evidence that News International journalists had been bribing Metropolitan Police officers. The payments were not £50 for the occasional tip-off, but totalled more than £100,000, for handing over such sensitive data as the Queen’s phone numbers. On 1 April, Harbottle & Lewis gave its file containing the print-outs to News International’s lawyers Burton Copeland. One anonymous News International executive later told
The Sunday Times
: ‘We were sitting on a ticking timebomb.’
²
Instead of immediately contacting the police, with whom it publicly said it was ‘fully co-operating’, News International sat on the documents for three months, while it was bidding for BSkyB. But its request for the Harbottle & Lewis file may have influenced what happened next. Six days after the emails were requested, on 30 March, Rupert Murdoch promoted his son James to the newly created post of deputy chief operating officer of News Corp. Although James would retain control of the company’s Asian and European operations (and his chairmanship of BSkyB and News International), he would now be based at News Corp’s headquarters in New York. He had been airlifted out of Wapping.

Less than a week later, on 5 April, the Metropolitan Police underlined the robustness of its new investigation by making the first arrests for phone hacking for five years: Ian Edmondson and Neville Thurlbeck were held at Kingston and Wimbledon police stations respectively after arriving for interview by appointment. The men, assistant editor and chief reporter, were central to the news operation at the
News of the World
. They were released on police bail, pending further inquiries.

By coincidence, the British Press Awards were being held that evening at the newly re-opened Savoy Hotel in the Strand. Despite the embarrassment of having its chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck make the wrong kind of headlines earlier in the day, it was a good night for the
News of the World
. The ‘Fake Sheikh’, Mazher Mahmood, won the award for News Reporter of the Year and the
News of the World
Scoop of the Year for his exposé of corruption in the Pakistani cricket team.
News of the World
staff rose alone to give him, and themselves, a standing ovation, whooping and hollering. As he accepted the scoop award, Colin Myler described the
Screws
as ‘the greatest paper in the world’. The cricket sting was indeed the paper at its investigative best and later led to the jailing of three Pakistani cricketers and a sports agent. But, although this latest coup had been achieved without the use of phone hacking, the alleged extent of the paper’s dark arts left many journalists shuffling uneasily in their seats.

On 6 April, Lord Fowler, a former Conservative cabinet minister and chairman of the Lords Communications Committee, rose from his seat in the House of Lords to challenge the government. ‘My Lords, leaving aside the two arrests yesterday,’ he said, ‘is it not already clear that there has been a total abuse of power involving some parts of the press in this area? Have we not also seen a five-year delay in the investigation, a public dispute now taking place between the DPP and the Metropolitan Police and the utter failure of any system to prevent such wrongdoing?’ He asked for an assurance that there would be an independent inquiry once criminal proceedings were complete. A government minister, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, hinted for the first time that the government might just look into the affair: ‘He [Lord Fowler] raises some broad questions about the future relationship between the press and politics and it is fair to say that we will need to return to those questions once current investigations are complete.’ Fowler was one of the senior figures of David Cameron’s Conservative Party; his views could not be lightly dismissed.

As the public began to grasp the seriousness of the goings-on at Wapping, the Hollywood actor Hugh Grant, an implacable critic of the tabloid press, turned the tables on one of its defenders. Grant, who never gave interviews to the redtops, secretly taped a conversation with Paul McMullan, the former
News of the World
features executive who, in the mid-1990s, had stolen the picture from the woman who reputedly took John Major’s virginity. Just before Christmas Grant’s car had broken down in Kent and McMullan had happened to drive by in his van. Sensing the chance for a bit of freelance work, McMullan asked the actor to pose for pictures by his broken-down car, just for a personal memento. McMullan cheerily invited Grant to pop by his pub, then sold the breakdown pictures to the
Mail on Sunday
. Now Grant exacted his revenge by calling in at the Castle Inn in Dover and recording his conversation with McMullan for a feature, ‘The bugger, bugged’, in the
New Statesman.
During their encounter McMullan, who did not know he was being taped, claimed that Rebekah Brooks was so friendly with David Cameron that she went horseriding with him – and that every political leader since Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s had had to ‘jump in bed with Murdoch’.
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Grant said later that the phone hacking scandal was confirmation of what he had been claiming to friends for years: that the popular press was out of control. ‘I used to sue a lot and the libel lawyers would say: “By the way you should be careful of this or that” and “Do you realize that the
News of the World
have a white van that sits outside people’s houses?” In the old days with listening devices, they could put things on your wall – and you would think: Can that really be true?’
⁴

He had no complaint about the reporting of his arrest for lewd behaviour in Los Angeles in 1995 because that was a matter of public record, but once he had returned to London he suspected he had fallen victim to dirty tricks. There was a ‘fishy event’ when his flat was broken into. ‘It was quite a violent break-in, they smashed the front door down, and nothing was taken; the only thing that happened was that the details of what the inside of my flat looked like and a few personal details appeared in the papers in the subsequent days. It became clearer and clearer in the mid to late 1990s, to me and whoever else was in the public eye, that if you had a burglary, or you got mugged or your car was broken into, you had to think really hard about whether you were going to call the police – because the first person that came round was always a pap or a journalist, not a policeman.’
⁵
Grant developed ‘permanent paranoia’ and had his car and phone checked for listening devices: ‘And then you get paranoid about every engineer that comes into the house – you look very carefully at their card and all that. When I would say this to people, normal people, they would slightly roll their eyes and think “fame’s gone to his head”, especially when I started to say: “You don’t know how powerful they are, they’ve corrupted the police, and they’ve corrupted the government, successive governments, they’re completely in their pockets.” ’
⁶

Journalists on News International’s four titles had long dismissed the hacking scandal as celebrities whinging about reporters eavesdropping on their gossip – and that the police response was disproportionate. ‘With this whole story I just hear the shrill shriek of axes being ground,’ Roger Alton, executive editor of
The Times
, complained to his former colleague, the
Independent’
s Archie Bland, for the May issue of the
Columbia Journalism Review
: ‘People have gone to prison. Coulson’s resigned twice. It’s not as if any perceived wrongdoing hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. For me it’s roughly on a par with parking in a resident’s parking bay in terms of interest.’ On 7 April, the
Sun’
s columnist and former editor, Kelvin Mackenzie, protested that the allocation of forty-five Scotland Yard officers to the phone hacking inquiry was ‘incredible’, adding: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if any of them might be spared from their piddly, politically motivated witch hunt to come round when your tools are nicked from the garden shed?’

Now in possession of the emails returned by Harbottle & Lewis, NI’s executives on the tenth floor of Thomas More Square knew total denial was no longer an option. On Friday 8 April they put into action a plan they had been kicking around for weeks. Five years, nine months and eighteen days after Goodman and Mulcaire were jailed for phone hacking, Rupert Murdoch’s News International admitted for the first time that the rogue reporter defence – advanced by its executives for years – was bogus. But it was still not ready to admit the full scale of the wrongdoing. In an anodyne press release, the company apologized for phone hacking, admitted its own inquiries had been flawed and announced it would settle civil cases brought by several claimants. The statement carefully limited wrongdoing at the
News of the World
to Andy Coulson’s editorship between 2004 and 2006. It was headed: ‘News International statement with regard to voicemail interception at the
News of the World
during 2004–2006’:

Following an extensive internal investigation and disclosures through civil cases, News International has decided to approach some civil litigants with an unreserved apology and an admission of liability in cases meeting specific criteria. We will, however, continue to contest cases that we believe are without merit or where we are not responsible. That said, past behaviour at the
News of the World
in relation to voicemail interception is a matter of genuine regret. It is now apparent that our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence and we acknowledge our actions then were not sufficiently robust.

At 4 p.m., the BBC’s Robert Peston, again apparently using his close contacts at Wapping, named eight individuals whose cases the company intended to settle: Sienna Miller, her stepmother Kelly Hoppen, Sky Andrew, Andy Gray, Tessa Jowell and her estranged husband David Mills, Max Clifford’s secretary Nicola Phillips, and Joan Hammell, John Prescott’s chief of staff. In all, Wapping expected to settle up to ninety-one cases – the number of PINs recovered from Glenn Mulcaire. Peston was told that the company had set aside £20 million for the payouts.

In New York that day, James Murdoch explained to Bloomberg interviewer Charlie Rose that everything was going well despite the admission. ‘The interesting thing about this one is,’ Murdoch explained, ‘you talk about a reputation crisis [but] actually the business is doing really well. It shows what we were able to do is really put this problem into a box. If you get everybody sucked into something like that, then the whole business will sputter, which you don’t want.’
⁷