Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (30 page)

Police action against Rupert Murdoch’s British news empire was growing rapidly: January had brought Operation Weeting; now June brought Operation Tuleta. Eight officers were working on the new inquiry. Overall more than fifty detectives at Scotland Yard were investigating the dark arts of Fleet Street.

At the same time, Watson was becoming anxious about the situation of Tommy Sheridan. On the day the new police inquiry into phone hacking was launched, 26 January, Tommy Sheridan was jailed for three years for perjury. Passing sentence, the judge, Lord Bracadale, told him: ‘By pursuing, and persisting in the pursuit of, a defamation action against the proprietors of the
News of the World
you brought the walls of the temple crashing down not only on your head but also on the heads of your family and your political friends and foes alike.’ Watson feared that Sheridan had gone to jail because of misleading evidence, and decided to make contact with him. On 26 May, he wrote to Sheridan in HMP Barlinnie. Watson began his letter: ‘We’ve never met but I feel I know you … I think the hacking saga will continue for at least another year. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better.’ In a clear-sighted handwritten letter dated 29 May, Prisoner 32057 wrote back:

Dear Tom,

Many thanks for your warm, welcome and encouraging letter. As you say we haven’t met personally yet throughout the News International hacking scandal and my three-month trial you have shown yourself to be a reliable and courageous ally with real backbone. Sadly you are the exception among your colleagues, far too many of whom are frightened of the power and influence wielded, unaccountably, by the Murdoch empire. I believe you share my opinion of that reactionary stable with their anti-trade union, sexist and racist agenda. They are bullies of the worst kind and as with any bully running away only invites them to become more aggressive. They have to be confronted not accommodated. The truth is criminality is at the heart of that beast and but for the complicity and sometimes collusion of the Met they would have been exposed before now. Several of their senior executives and former executives should face prosecution, including Coulson and Bird [Bob, editor of the Scottish edition of the
News of the World
], but Murdoch himself must not be allowed to assume the role of Pontius Pilate in the whole sorry affair. I can only admire your commitment to expose them and encourage you to continue to do so.

As for me in here I am fine. The staff and prisoners alike have treated me with nothing but support and respect since the day I was admitted. Their response and the support of my family, friends and the general public, has kept my head up and spirits high. My appeal is being processed and may bear fruit but whatever happens to me personally is less important than ensuring the Murdoch empire is exposed for its criminality and stripped of its billionaire-purchased authority.

I hope we can meet up personally when I am released Tom. I look forward to that. Take care comrade and stay strong.

In solidarity, Tommy

14

Summer’s Lease

No other country in the world would allow somebody to have so much power … apart, perhaps, from Italy

– Chris Bryant, House of Commons, 30 June 2011

Publicly, June was a quiet month in the phone hacking scandal: a summer’s lull. Though events in the spring had lifted the lid, News International had started to weld it back on again. Wapping had made a public apology and concluded the civil cases of both Sienna Miller and Andy Gray (paying him a modest £20,000 damages and costs of £200,000). The talk in Westminster was that there was no significant opposition to the BSkyB takeover. News Corp enjoyed the solid support of the Conservative Party. Privately Will Lewis, Wapping’s general manager, was saying that the company’s three-year recovery plan was on track.

As usual, on Wednesday 15 June,
*
Rupert Murdoch hosted his annual summer party at the Orangery in the grounds of Kensington Palace in London. Traditionally the party attracted luminaries from the media, politics and showbusiness; so important was it in the political and media worlds that one former Wapping executive had it written into their redundancy package that they would receive an annual invitation to demonstrate that they were still part of the family. The previous summer, the new Conservative Prime Minister had walked hand in hand with his wife Samantha to the party – where the other guests included his Home Secretary, Theresa May, Richard Desmond, proprietor of the
Daily Express
, the TopShop tycoon Sir Philip Green and the comedian James Corden. With the allegations swirling around Murdoch’s empire, gossip columnists speculated who would turn up in 2011. Downing Street had refused to say whether the Prime Minister would attend, but News Corp’s chairman need not have worried – David Cameron arrived discreetly by car at a drop-off point sealed from the public, his brief emergence captured by a photographer’s long lens. The shadow cabinet was present too – Ed Miliband, the Labour leader (who had called for an inquiry into phone hacking in April but did not mention phone hacking to the News Corp boss during their conversation), the shadow Chancellor Ed Balls and his wife, the shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, and the shadow Foreign Secretary Douglas Alexander. The newly elected Labour MPs Gloria de Piero and Michael Dugher turned up. Guests drank Moët & Chandon champagne and Becks beer, and ate oysters.

On the surface, all was well. But increasingly, Brooks’s position was being questioned by those inside as well as outside the company. In June, according to one well-placed News Corp source, security staff were ordered to record the times of Brooks’s entry to and exit from Thomas More Square and cleaners were warned to avoid disturbing listening devices placed under her table and by her computer in her office. The chief executive herself was now being bugged.

On the tenth floor, News International’s executives could hear the ‘ticking timebomb’ of police corruption. After being retrieved from storage in late March, Harbottle & Lewis’s file on Clive Goodman’s employment appeal had been handed to Burton Copeland, News International’s solicitors, on 1 April. At some stage it was passed to News Corp’s solicitors, Hickman & Rose. In May, Hickman & Rose arranged for several emails from the file to be reviewed by an eminent barrister. Now in private practice, Lord Macdonald had been the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of the botched inquiry into phone hacking in 2006, when the Crown Prosecution Service had agreed to exclude high-profile witnesses from the prosecution. Examining the file was not a conflict of interest, Macdonald explained later, because the emails Hickman & Rose had placed before him contained not evidence of phone hacking, but of bribery of London’s police force. Macdonald took around five minutes to realize they should be handed to the police. He told the Commons Home Affairs Committee later: ‘I have to tell you that the material I saw was so blindingly obvious that anyone trying to argue that it shouldn’t be given to the police would have had a very tough task.’ The emails were not, however, immediately given to the police. Instead, Lord Macdonald presented his opinion to the News Corp board chaired by Rupert Murdoch. ‘Reasonably shortly afterwards’ – in fact on 20 June, eleven weeks after the emails had been retrieved from Harbottle & Lewis, during which time its bid for BSkyB was progressing – News Corp handed them to the police.
²
In secret, Sue Akers, already leading Operations Weeting into phone hacking and Tuleta into computer hacking, began a third inquiry, Operation Elveden, into police corruption. News International agreed to keep quiet about it so as not to prejudice the investigation.

Approaches were made to Tom Watson. By this stage, friends had been telling him: ‘You’ve done a good job, it’s time to move on’. But in an attempt to keep the issue to the fore, he had made an inflammatory speech at the GMB union’s conference on 5 June, telling delegates his bins had been gone through during the Damian McBride affair and that the
News of the World
had targeted the parents of the Soham children. (He said: ‘You probably didn’t know they targeted the Soham parents. That’s because it’s hardly been written about in a British newspaper. Or ever mentioned by a British broadcaster.’)

Two intermediaries close to News International offered a deal. One told Watson the company would ‘give him’ Andy Coulson, but Rebekah Brooks was ‘sacred’, which Watson took to mean that the company would hand over incriminating evidence on Coulson if he laid off Brooks. He had no idea what evidence that might have been. Over dinner, the other intermediary suggested to the West Bromwich MP that Rupert Murdoch might like to meet him. ‘He’s a charismatic man,’ she said. ‘He’d want to square off these difficulties and put matters right.’ Watson was not interested in cutting a deal. The meeting was never formally offered.

News Corp was unsurprisingly nervous that it was now the subject of three major criminal inquiries by the Metropolitan Police. It did not, however, have to worry about its big upcoming deal. A fortnight after the party at the Orangery, in a written statement on Thursday 30 June, David Cameron’s government announced its intention to wave through the BSkyB takeover.

Ofcom, which previously supported a referral to the Competition Commission, was now satisfied by News Corp’s undertakings on Sky News. The Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said that although nothing had arisen out of the 40,000 responses to the public consultation to alter the acceptability of those undertakings, he had decided to insist upon some of the ‘constructive changes’ suggested: Sky News articles of association would define the role of independent directors and a monitoring trustee would oversee its independence. Hunt, apparently oblivious to Rupert Murdoch’s string of broken promises in the past, said News Corp had ‘offered serious undertakings and discussed them in good faith’. He added: ‘Therefore, whilst the phone hacking allegations are very serious they were not material to my consideration.’ Rupert Murdoch would win control of his big prize – total control of the UK’s biggest broadcaster – after a further, brief eight-day consultation, ending on 8 July.

The government had backed the BSkyB deal despite the new allegations of criminality slowly engulfing Murdoch’s powerful national newspapers. Avoiding a Commons debate by issuing a written statement irritated MPs from all parties, including Mark Pritchard, the independent-minded secretary of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee. Watson put in a request for an urgent statement from the Culture Secretary, which was granted by the Speaker John Bercow. During a thirty-five-minute debate on 30 June Jeremy Hunt set out his case: he had proceeded carefully at all times, following and publishing the independent advice from Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading; he believed News Corp’s promises were serious and robust.

John Whittingdale, the Conservative chairman of the Culture Committee, congratulated Hunt on the ‘meticulous care’ that he had taken in deciding the bid: could he confirm that every single concern of the regulatory authorities had been addressed? Hunt could. Opposition MPs were furious. Barry Gardiner said: ‘He is propping up a crumbling empire. Murdoch is the Gaddafi of News Corporation.’ Tom Watson pointed out that Rupert Murdoch had breached his assurances on
The Times
,
The Sunday Times
, the
Sun
and the
News of the World
and his company was now the subject of three police inquiries. Chris Bryant asked: ‘How on earth did we – and I mean all of us, not just the minister – become so spineless as to allow a company whose directors not only failed in their fiduciary duties to prevent criminality at the
News of the World
, but actually participated in its cover-up, to hold dominion over such a vast swathe of the media in this country? No other country in the world would allow somebody to have so much power.’ The Labour MP Kevin Brennan interjected: ‘Apart from Italy’, prompting Bryant to add reluctantly: ‘Apart, perhaps, from Italy.’

The Murdochs had reason to celebrate. On Saturday 2 July, another of the dynasty’s grand summer events was taking place, in the grandeur of Burford Priory, the Elizabethan home of Elisabeth Murdoch and her well-connected husband Matthew Freud in the Oxfordshire countryside. The Chipping Norton Set was out in force. The guests, according to a report in the
Mail on Sunday
later that month, included News International’s chairman James Murdoch, chief executive Rebekah Brooks (though she reportedly circulated with diminished effervescence), and its general manager Will Lewis. A former
News of the World
editor, Piers Morgan – an old friend of Brooks and Andy Coulson – was there. The BBC was well represented by its director-general, Mark Thompson, business editor Robert Peston and creative director Alan Yentob. Among the political rainmakers were the Education Secretary Michael Gove, the Prime Minister’s director of strategy, Steve Hilton, and his wife Rachel Whetstone, Google’s European head of communications, the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey – a member of David Cameron’s metropolitan Notting Hill Set, who had promised to abolish the BBC Trust – and four Blairite ex-ministers: Lord Mandelson, David Miliband, James Purnell and Tessa Jowell. The current Labour frontbench was represented by Douglas Alexander. Some glamour was provided by the actress Helena Bonham Carter, the explorer Bear Grylls and the TV presenter Mariella Frostrup.
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Andy Coulson himself, however, was absent.

The party continued into the next day. The phone hacking affair had fallen quiet – except that Nick Davies had found a new story.