Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (34 page)

Observers started to wonder whether the closure was a cosmetic move. Shortly before the Milly Dowler story had broken, News International had appointed a single managing editor to run both its redtops, increasing speculation that it would integrate the two papers. Would a
Sun on Sunday
soon roll off the presses? Speaking at the première of a new Harry Potter movie, the TV presenter Jonathan Ross said: ‘Clearly this is a cynical move, clearly it is an excuse to carry on.’ The National Union of Journalists described the decision as ‘an act of damage limitation to salvage Murdoch’s reputation and that of News International – both of which are now tarnished beyond repair’. On the BBC’s
Question Time
that night, 7 July, Hugh Grant said:

Clearly the
News of the World
was going out of business anyway. People were not going to buy it on Sunday, advertisers were falling out in their droves – and all credit to them … I think we should see this for what it is: it is a very cynical managerial manoeuvre which has put several hundred not evil people (there were certainly a lot of evil people), but certainly non-editorial staff, out of work and has kept in particular one person who was the editor when Milly Dowler was hacked in a highly paid job.

He was loudly applauded. Some weeks later, he said: ‘That night a girlfriend of mine had a call, an anonymous call, first on her mobile and then on her home phone. She finally picked it up and it said: “Tell Hugh Grant to shut the fuck up”.’
¹²

The
NoW
’s closure made the front pages of
Le Monde
in France,
Bild
and
Die Welt
in Germany,
El País
in Spain and the
New York Times
. In Britain, the
Sun
splashed on ‘World’s End’ and the
Daily Telegraph
‘Goodbye, Cruel World’. Quoting the words of an anonymous
News of the World
staffer, the
Independent
had: ‘Newspaper “sacrificed to save one woman” ’.

Rupert Murdoch’s line had changed, again. For five years News International had insisted there was only one rogue reporter, then only a few rogue reporters. Now it admitted it had been running a rogue newspaper. Murdoch was still not willing to concede, as many people believed, that News International had a rogue chief executive. Increasingly, the British public were beginning to wonder whether it was a rogue corporation.

16

Sky Plus

I’m not throwing innocent people under the bus

– Rupert Murdoch

If the world’s wiliest newspaper proprietor thought changing the defence from one rogue reporter to one rogue newspaper would shut down the hacking scandal and salvage his reputation, he had failed to understand just how disarrayed News Corp and many British institutions had found themselves after the Milly Dowler story. The spasm of outrage that convulsed British public life at that moment had shaken an establishment previously too conflicted or too cowed to keep Murdoch and his newspapers in check. Politicians, media, police and prosecutors all knew they had failed to speak out or act when they should have done, and now, to assert themselves at last, they came to their own conclusion – rather than Rupert Murdoch’s – as to what must be done.

Startlingly, a wave of openness spread over politics. On Friday 8 July, political leaders who had accepted Murdoch’s power as a given began admitting he was too dominant. At a speech at Reuters’ London headquarters that morning, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said: ‘If one section of the media is allowed to grow so powerful that it becomes insulated from political criticism and scrutiny of its behaviour, the proper system of checks and balances breaks down and abuses of power are likely to follow. We must all bear responsibility for that.’

At a press conference in Downing Street an hour later, David Cameron agreed that politicians had become too close to media proprietors, adding: ‘It is on my watch that the music has stopped.’ Coolly and clinically, he cut his close friend Rebekah Brooks adrift, saying that if she had offered him her resignation he ‘would have taken it’. The message to Rupert Murdoch was finally: Brooks must go. For the first time, Cameron confirmed that the public inquiry would be presided over by a judge and suggested the abolition of the Press Complaints Commission, for two decades the newspaper regulator. As to Andy Coulson, the Prime Minister said, no one had given him ‘specific information’ about his director of communications, but he would check if any warnings had been given to his staff. He declined to apologize for hiring Coulson – to whom his gratitude evidently ran deep: ‘He became a friend and is a friend.’ He said he had been in contact with Coulson but ‘not in recent weeks’. The performance of the PR-executive-turned-PM had been assured; he had almost caught up with the public mood. His press conference concluded at 10.23 a.m.

By 10.30 a.m. his friend Andy Coulson was in police custody at Lewisham station in south London, held on suspicion of conspiring to hack phones and corrupting police. Plain-clothes detectives searched his home in Dulwich, south London, and seized a computer. Seven months before he had been the Prime Minister’s most highly paid member of staff and helped him run the country.

Clive Goodman, too, had been arrested at his home in Surrey on suspicion of police corruption, four and a half years after his jailing for phone hacking. Police raided the offices of the newspaper where he had been working, Richard Desmond’s
Daily Star Sunday
, leaving after two hours with a disc of Goodman’s computer activity.

In the City, analysts began to downgrade the likelihood of the BSkyB deal going through. At the stockbrokers Panmure Gordon, Alex DeGroote told his clients there had previously been 90 per cent plus chance, but now it was no better than 50-50. BSkyB shares fell by 4.8 per cent. (They continued their slide throughout 8 July, closing down 8 per cent at 750p. Over the week, BSkyB shed 11.7 per cent of its value – £1.8 billion.)

Tony Blair, who had always maintained a close relationship with Rupert Murdoch, described phone hacking as ‘beyond disgusting’. Addressing the centre-left Progress pressure group in London at lunchtime on 8 July, he sought to widen the scandal beyond Murdoch’s newspaper group. He said: ‘I think David Cameron and Ed Miliband are right to say this is not just about News International. It’s not just about phone hacking.’ He reminded the audience of his ‘feral beasts’ speech in 2007 when he criticized the demands of a 24-hour media (‘a vast aspect of our jobs … is coping with the media, its sheer scale, weight and constant hyperactivity’) and its tendency to confuse news and comment – exemplified, he said, by the
Independent,
the only newspaper he singled out for criticism.

At 2.30 p.m. on the
Guardian
website, Nick Davies reported that police were investigating whether a News International executive had deleted emails from an internal archive in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s new inquiry. The unnamed executive had deleted ‘massive quantities’ of the archive on two occasions, most recently in late January – around the time the Metropolitan Police had opened its new investigation. There was now a fresh question mark over News International’s assurance to the Information Commissioner that its data was fully intact.

At 4 p.m.,
News of the World
journalists were called to another meeting with Rebekah Brooks. Speculation grew that, this time, she would resign. As News International’s IT department again suspended internal email and the Internet, Brooks explained that the paper was closing because advertisers said it had become a ‘toxic’ brand. Ominously, she told staff: ‘In a year’s time it’ll become apparent why we did this.’ A journalist complained: ‘We’re all being contaminated by that toxicity by the way we’re being treated,’ adding – to applause – ‘Do you think we’d want to work for you again?’ Brooks soothed: ‘There’s not an arrogance about anyone wanting to work for us at all … Sorry if that came across … We haven’t made the decision on any new publications or strengthening or expanding existing media, it’s just too soon.’ She revealed she was being removed from the internal Management and Standards Committee investigating the scandal. The MSC would now comprise Wapping’s general manager Will Lewis, its director of communications Simon Greenberg and News Corp’s general counsel in Europe Jeff Palker, reporting to Joel Klein in New York – who in turn reported to Viet Dinh, chairman of News Corp’s Corporate Governance Committee. News Corp had taken complete charge of its wayward British subsidiary.

That night the comedian Steve Coogan came face to face with one of the tabloid journalists he despised during a studio discussion on
Newsnight
. He told Paul McMullan (still defending the
News of the World
): ‘I think you are a walking PR disaster for the tabloids because you don’t come across in a sympathetic way. You come across as a risible individual.’ Coogan was thrilled at the closure of the
Screws
, which he described as ‘an asylum-seeker hating newspaper’. The clip became a hit on YouTube.

On Saturday 9 July, most newspapers splashed on hacking. Throughout the day commentators sought to put the extraordinary events of the previous week into context. Like his former political master, Alastair Campbell sought to implicate other papers, saying the
Daily Mail’
s editor Paul Dacre could soon be under pressure. Campbell blogged:

The
Mail
was the biggest user of Mr Whittamore.
*
When police investigating a murder trial involving Mr Rees raided his home, they found invoices totalling thousands and thousands of pounds relating to inquiries into many public figures for many different papers. The inquiries on me, for example, were made by my former paper, the
Mirror
. As for Glenn Mulcaire, well we know a lot about him, but there is a lot more to come. So Mr Dacre and his Mail Group, whose coverage of the phone hacking scandal has been minimal until recent days – wonder why? – will be an important part of any serious and rigorous inquiry.’
¹

In his later evidence at the Leveson Inquiry in February 2012, Paul Dacre denied that the Mail group had ever hacked phones. Writing for
Newsweek
, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein argued that the phone hacking scandal should have come as a surprise only to those who had ignored Murdoch’s ‘pernicious influence on journalism’. He wrote: ‘Too many of us have winked in amusement at the salaciousness without considering the larger corruption of journalism and politics promulgated by Murdoch Culture on both sides of the Atlantic. As one of his former top executives – once a close aide – told me, “This scandal and all its implications could not have happened anywhere else. Only in Murdoch’s orbit. The hacking at
News of the World
was done on an industrial scale. More than anyone, Murdoch invented and established this culture in the newsroom, where you do whatever it takes to get the story, take no prisoners, destroy the competition, and the end will justify the means”.’
²

Saturday was the last day of a conference for media magnates in Sun Valley, Idaho, which Rupert Murdoch had been reluctant to leave. He seemed oblivious to the anger in the country he had called home for many years and whose cash-generating newspapers funded his global expansion. Asked by reporters whether he would change his management team, he replied: ‘Nothing’s changed. We’ve been let down by people that we trusted, with the result the paper let down its readers.’ Rebekah Brooks, his protégée, enjoyed his ‘total’ support: ‘I’m not throwing innocent people under the bus.’
³

As the
News of the World’
s staff prepared the final edition of the paper, Andy Coulson – released the previous day from eight hours in police custody – shared his view that it was ‘a very sad day for the
News of the World
’. ‘More importantly to the staff who, in my mind, are brilliant, professional people and I really feel for them.’

News International doubled the final print run to 5 million. While many readers would buy the
Screws
’ swansong out of habit or curiosity, for others it had become so tarnished that they did not accept the offer of charity from its farewell. Oxfam, the RNLI, RSPCA, Action Aid, Salvation Army and many other charities refused. Paul McNamara, the paper’s defence correspondent, had to make fifty calls before three would agree to take any money: Barnardos, the Forces Children’s Trust and military projects at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity. He said: ‘I had to beg.’
⁴

Inside Wapping, according to one
NoW
journalist working his last day, a surreal atmosphere prevailed.

People can’t comprehend it and are still very angry with Rebekah. Staff were called together for a group photograph this morning and everyone was quite jovial, then someone called ‘smile’ and someone else said ‘What have we got to smile about?’ Someone shouted; ‘Because we are the best’… The phones on the newsdesk have been ringing all week with people shouting the nastiest, most vile abuse, but today people are ringing up giving their support.
⁵

Journalists were given framed front pages with the headline: ‘Best in the World’. Once the paper was ‘off stone’, Colin Myler stood on top of a desk and addressed staff. He told them he could not imagine a more difficult day as a journalist, adding: ‘It’s not a place we wanted to be and absolutely not a place we deserve to be.’ In line with Fleet Street tradition (when printers would whack their hammers against metal benches to mark the departure of a colleague), Myler ‘banged out’ each journalist, clattering a plastic ruler against a desk as they filed out. Shortly before 9 p.m., Myler emerged from the
Screws
’ office block clutching its final front page, and – with his staff massed behind him – said to the bank of reporters, snappers and TV crews: ‘We’re going to do what we should do now and go and have a nice drink – or three.’ The following week, News International said that most
News of the World
staff would be ‘offered employment opportunities’, and that thirty jobs at its colour magazine
Fabulous
would be saved by inserting it into Saturday’s
Sun
.