Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (29 page)

On Sunday 10 April, Colin Myler, who told the Press Complaints Commission that Clive Goodman’s hacking was ‘aberrational’, publicly apologized to his readers in a 159-word comment on page 2 of his newspaper: ‘Voicemail interception: an apology’: ‘What happened to them [hacking victims] should not have happened. It was and remains unacceptable.’ The
Screws
did not rescind its attacks on the Culture Committee and the
Guardian
, nor comment on their pioneering work in uncovering the scandal.

While News International had now withdrawn from the rogue reporter claim, it had merely retreated to a new line of defence – a few rogue reporters, at the
News of the World
, under Andy Coulson.
The Times
,
Sunday Times
and
Sun
continued largely to ignore the ongoing story. News International continued to behave firmly towards inquiring journalists: pursuing the scandal would ‘not be forgotten’.

Despite its persistent claims to be fully cooperating with the police inquiry, News International, still chaired by James Murdoch, was still seeking to obstruct the police’s efforts – as it had done so successfully in 2006 when it frustrated the police search of Wapping. On 14 April, detectives from Operation Weeting arrested the
News of the World
reporter James Weatherup at his home and then went to Wapping to seize his computer and other material. By the time they arrived, however, executives had bagged up Weatherup’s belongings and sent them to the company’s lawyers, Burton Copeland (though, strangely, Weatherup’s computer – and a hard drive – remained on his desk). Furious, the Met flooded the
News of the World’
s newsroom with uniformed police. Burton Copeland returned Weatherup’s belongings. Shortly afterwards, Sue Akers, the leader of the new investigation, held a summit with the company’s Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg ‘to debate our very different interpretations of the expression “full co-operation” ’.
⁸

However, behind the scenes pressure remained on Scotland Yard. On ‘several occasions’ after Sir Paul Stephenson, the Commissioner, returned to work from his leg operation in April, Kit Malthouse, Mayor Boris Johnson’s right-hand man, urged him to scale down Operation Weeting, telling Stephenson that he should not fall victim to the ‘political media hysteria’ surrounding phone hacking. Stephenson, whose force had disastrously shrugged off calls to reopen the inquiry for two years, resisted the overtures. Malthouse said he was only trying to ensure that policing was proportionate.

News International concentrated on what it could achieve: picking off the civil claimants. The company desperately wanted to settle to prevent executives testifying before a judge. It started with Sienna Miller. Rival newspapers often used her portrait to illustrate stories about the scandal and her claims were especially wide-ranging and damaging; among them that the
News of the World
hacked her computer in 2008, a year after the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire. Despite the strength of her case and the size of the Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford settlements, Miller’s lawyers had surprisingly requested only £100,000 damages. News International offered the full amount in a Part 36 offer.

At a High Court hearing on 12 May, NI’s lawyer, Michael Silverleaf QC, played down the damage done to Miller, saying that most of the
News of the World’
s stories had been about her relationship with Jude Law. He told Justice Vos: ‘It is hurtful, but it is not that hurtful. It does not belittle her in the public estimation.’ What was more, he said, £100,000 was equivalent to the compensation payable for the loss of an eye – and compared favourably to the £60,000 damages awarded to Max Mosley for the
News of the World
story which had ‘ruined’ his life. Despite her desire to air her case in court, Miller was ‘in a box’ and accepted Wapping’s admission of liability and the damages. News International had succeeded in killing off one of the most damaging cases, for an amount far lower than the earlier settlements – and had set the bar relatively low for the cluster of civil cases, all being heard by Mr Justice Vos.

At Bindmans, Tamsin Allen had used her experience of public law to develop the judicial review on behalf of Chris Bryant, Brian Paddick, Brendan Montague and John Prescott. The essence of the case was that, despite their requests, Scotland Yard had breached their right to privacy by failing to inform them they were in Mulcaire’s notes. At a preliminary hearing on 12 May, the Metropolitan Police’s QC James Lewis tried to strike out the claim, denying there had been a conspiracy to avoid contacting the claimants. The police, he said, had been hampered by the untidiness and complexity of Glenn Mulcaire’s scribblings. In Chris Bryant’s case, for instance, Lewis explained, twenty-three numbers associated with him had been found not on the page with his details but on another page elsewhere in the notes. In court for the hearing, Bryant whispered to Nick Davies and Martin Hickman sitting in front of him: ‘They were on the facing page.’ Mr Justice Foskett ordered a full trial.

All the while, Operation Weeting was identifying likely new hacking victims and informing them that they were in Mulcaire’s notes. Wayne Rooney, the Manchester United footballer whose manager, Paul Stretford, had been the target of covert surveillance, tweeted on 28 April: ‘Looks like a newspaper have hacked into my phone. Big surprise.’

By May, Tom Watson had been cultivating a high-ranked and extremely sensitive source, Mr Y. During a meeting at a London apartment, Mr Y alleged that Jonathan Rees, the private investigator recently acquitted of murder, had – using a variety of methods including blagging, corruption and burglary – illegally acquired personal data about royalty, leading politicians and other senior members of the establishment on behalf of the
News of the World
and other redtop newspapers. For the first time Watson glimpsed the real picture of wrongdoing at Wapping, but the more he learned the more he realized that it involved the criminal underworld and some very dangerous characters. At the Birmingham home of his friend Siôn Simon that weekend, the MP was hugely animated as he relayed his discovery, then his tone changed. ‘None of this stuff is written down – it’s all just in my head.’ However ridiculous or melodramatic, he contemplated that he might be killed.

On 11 May he stood up in the Commons and challenged David Cameron to call a judicial inquiry. Softly, he said:

The Prime Minister told me that the hacking inquiry should go where the evidence leads. It leads to the parents of the Soham children and to rogue intelligence officers. He knows more sinister forms of cybercrime. Lord Fowler is calling for a judicial inquiry. Will the Prime Minister please order one now, before the avalanche of new evidence forces him to do so?

Cameron replied there was a real problem of ‘interfering’ with the criminal investigations, adding: ‘The most important thing is to allow the criminal investigation to take place’. The Prime Minister was opposed to a judicial inquiry. Yes, he seemed to be saying, some bad things have happened, but now they are being investigated.

Those following the scandal knew that, despite the thoroughness of the new phone hacking inquiry, Operation Weeting, Scotland Yard was not yet doing all it could to investigate Wapping’s darkest arts. For some time the civil lawyers Mark Lewis, Charlotte Harris and Mark Thomson had been cooperating to concentrate their legal firepower; now reporters from competing media groups also began to cooperate. On 20 May, Tom Watson, the
Guardian’
s Nick Davies and BBC
Panorama
’s Glenn Campbell met at Watson’s flat in south London, where they discussed News International’s use of Jonathan Rees.

On 7 June, at a townhouse in Westminster, another meeting took place, this time between Tom Watson, Nick Davies and Martin Hickman (Glenn Campbell was on holiday). They discussed evidence held by Scotland Yard showing that Jonathan Rees, on behalf of News International, illegally targeted members of the royal family, senior politicians and high-level terrorist informers. The allegations were outside the remit of Operation Weeting, the Met’s inquiry into phone hacking, and were not being investigated. Knowing that some of the media would not report the story if it appeared only in the two newspapers, the trio agreed that Watson would trail the allegations at Prime Minister’s Questions the following day, making it almost impossible for broadcasters to ignore.

On the afternoon of 8 June, Watson said in the House of Commons:

The Metropolitan Police are in possession of paperwork detailing the dealings of criminal private investigator Jonathan Rees. It strongly suggests that he was illegally targeting members of the Royal Family, senior politicians, and high-level terrorist informers yet the head of Operation Weeting has recently written to me to inform me that this evidence may be outside the inquiry’s terms of reference. Prime Minister, I believe powerful forces are involved in a cover-up; please tell me what you intend to do to make sure that that does not happen.

As shock spread across the faces of his fellow frontbenchers George Osborne and Theresa May, David Cameron replied: ‘The police are free to investigate the evidence and take that wherever it leads them, and then mount a prosecution if the Crown Prosecution Service supports that. In the case of phone hacking, which is illegal and wrong, there have been prosecutions and imprisonments, and if that is where the evidence takes them, that is what will happen in the future.’ He added: ‘There are no terms of reference as far as I am concerned; the police are able to look at any evidence and all evidence they can find.’

Broadcasters covered the speech, repeatedly running Watson’s warning about ‘powerful forces’. Characteristically, when the
Independent
put the list of Rees’s targets to News International later that same day, its spokeswoman, Daisy Dunlop, warned the paper off writing the story, saying: ‘Be very careful before linking those names to News International.’ In a public statement, the company played down the seriousness of its role. It said: ‘It is well documented that Jonathan Rees and Southern Investigations worked for a whole variety of newspaper groups. With regards to Tom Watson’s specific allegations, we believe these are wholly inaccurate. The Met Police, with whom we are cooperating fully in Operation Weeting, have not asked us for any information regarding Jonathan Rees. We note again that Tom Watson made these allegations under parliamentary privilege.’

The
Guardian
and
Independent’
s stories disclosed a roll-call of Rees’s political, royal, police and financial targets, on whom he had used a variety of techniques (some apparently illegal) to gain information. Among them were Tony Blair and Kate Middleton, Prince William’s fiancée. They also included Blair’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, his Home Secretary Jack Straw, and Peter Mandelson, then his Business Secretary. Several targets had been in charge of media policy: Gerald Kaufmann, the Labour chair of the Culture Committee between 1992 and 2005, and the Tory MP David Mellor, who threatened the press with tighter regulation in the early 1990s. Rees had even targeted the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Stevens, and John Yates, ‘Yates of the Yard’ himself.

While the royal family observed its usual diplomatic silence, politicians responded angrily to the news. Peter Mandelson said he was writing to Scotland Yard to ask what information had been held on him by Rees. Jack Straw suspected he may have been targeted by the
Daily Mirror
in 1997 (under the editorship of Piers Morgan) for its ‘disgraceful sting’ on his teenage son. David Mellor complained: ‘Scotland Yard have been extremely tardy investigating these allegations, perhaps because senior officers were more concerned with protecting their own relationships with News International rather than doing their own duty.’
⁹

By coincidence, the following day, 10 June, Tony Blair gave an interview to the
Times
about his hopes that there would be an elected EU President and had scheduled a TV interview with the BBC. Unlike his former cabinet colleagues, the former prime minister seemed reluctant to find out the extent to which he had been targeted. He said: ‘I assume that if someone’s got something they will get in touch with me.’ In an interview with
Vogue
published in September 2011, Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng, let slip that Tony Blair was godfather to her and Murdoch’s nine-year-old daughter, Grace, and had been present at her baptism in early 2010 on the banks of the river Jordan. The Murdochs, Queen Rania of Jordan and Grace’s official godparents, the Australian actors Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, had all been pictured in
Hello!
’s coverage of the baptism, but Blair, described by Deng as one of the couple’s ‘closest friends’, had been missing from the photocall. His role as godfather had remained a closely guarded secret until the interview. Blair’s office refused to deny or confirm he was a godparent.

Irritated by Watson’s implied criticism of her and her inquiry in the Commons, Sue Akers asked to see the MP. During a forty-minute meeting in her office in the upper floors of the Met’s headquarters, she sought to assure Watson that the force would follow up his allegations about the targeting of senior public figures, but was working out who would take responsibility for different strands of the inquiry. They had a candid conversation which involved very sensitive evidence that Watson had seen showing that Jonathan Rees had a close business relationship with Alex Marunchak, the
Screws
’ executive. Later that day, Scotland Yard disclosed that it had begun a ‘formal assessment process’, Operation Tuleta,
*
to consider potential prosecutions that fell outside the terms of Operation Weeting, such as computer hacking.