Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (35 page)

The 8,674th edition of the
News of the World
was headlined: ‘Thank You and Goodbye’ and the strapline: ‘After 168 years, we finally say a sad but very proud farewell to our 7.5 million loyal readers’. The paper was defiant, proud and a little remorseful, saying:

We praised high standards, we demanded high standards but, as we are now only too painfully aware, for a period of a few years up to 2006 some who worked for us, or in our name, fell shamefully short of those standards.

It trumpeted its successful campaigns on the military covenant, toys for soldiers’ children and compensation for 7/7 victims. Mazher Mahmood recalled how he had nailed ‘scores of paedophiles, arms dealers, drug peddlers, people traffickers, bent doctors and lawyers’. A forty-eight page pullout celebrated the paper’s front pages, including the sinking of the
Titanic
, the Profumo Affair, the Great Train Robbery, the death of Princess Diana and – in its more prurient modern incarnation – ‘Chief of Defence Staff in Sex and Security Scandal’ and ‘Beckham’s Secret Affair’. Missing from the pantheon were David Blunkett’s affair and Max Mosley’s ‘Sick Nazi Orgy’.

News International was worried that the paper’s departing journalists might insert rude messages into the final edition. Fleet Street had a history of parting shots: on his last day at the
Daily Express
in 2001 before heading to
The Times
, the first letters of leader writer Stephen Pollard’s final column spelled out: ‘Fuck You Desmond’. Two
Sun
executives combed through the
NoW
’s last edition. They did a good job of checking the news stories, but less so with the crosswords, whose clues included: brook, stink, catastrophe, pest, less bright, woman stares wildly at calamity, criminal enterprise, string of recordings and mix in prison. Answers included disaster, stench, racket and tart. The answers to 1 across, 4 down, 10 across and 7 down were Tomorrow, We, Are, Sacked.

Roy Greenslade felt that the final
News of the World
had played down its ‘villainy’. ‘It’s a bit rich to claim integrity while working for a paper that has engaged in the dark arts – entrapment, subterfuge, covert filming, the use of agents provocateurs and phone hacking – for the best part of twenty years.’
⁶

On Sunday 10 July, the Murdoch empire was under attack unusually from its rivals. The
Mail on Sunday
carried a piece from an anonymous ‘News International Insider’ claiming that Rebekah Brooks had turned the
Sun
from an ‘abrasive, aggressive paper known for breaking big stories’ into a title afraid of upsetting politicians, whom she ‘love-bombed’. ‘She sold the soul of the
Sun
and the
News of the World
to PR snake-oil merchants.’ Relationships with PR firms such as Freud Communications – run by Rupert Murdoch’s son-in-law Matthew Freud – were so close that ‘if they rang the newsdesk with a story, you had to run it’.
⁷

Carrying a detailed report on the scandal for the first time,
The Sunday Times
revealed that an ‘internal report’ in 2007 had uncovered evidence of potential widespread phone hacking and police corruption. The ‘report’ had not been passed to police at the time, but had been found by Wapping executives in 2011. The
Sunday Times
carefully added that James Murdoch had not been told about the ‘report’. In fact, the evidence was not a report but the Harbottle & Lewis file unearthed in March. As revealed by Robert Peston, the file had been passed to Scotland Yard in June, prompting its corruption inquiry.

At Scotland Yard, John Yates finally admitted that he had made a hash of the phone hacking affair. Ahead of a forthcoming appearance before the Home Affairs Committee, he told the
Sunday Telegraph
: ‘I regrettably said the initial inquiry was a success. Clearly, now it looks different.’ His decision not to reopen the case was a ‘pretty crap one’, he confessed, and he now wished he had looked at Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. ‘In hindsight, there is a shed load of stuff in there I wish I’d known. The Milly Dowler stuff is just shocking beyond anything. It’s a tipping point and quite rightly so.’
⁸

In Westminster, an anti-Murdoch coalition was cohering around a Labour motion in the Commons against the BSkyB bid. The Liberal Democrats, the Conservatives’ smaller Coalition partners, were intending to support the symbolic vote the following Wednesday. On Sunday, the first signs emerged that the Conservatives were wobbling when Philip Hammond, the Transport Secretary, said: ‘If the motion is sensibly formed that would be one thing, but if it called on the government to ignore the law that would not be possible.’

After five days in which his British news operation itself had dominated the headlines, Rupert Murdoch finally arrived in the UK at eleven that Sunday morning. After landing at Luton airport, he went straight to Wapping, carrying a copy of the final
News of the World,
then to his flat in St James’s. At 5.35 p.m., Rebekah Brooks arrived and, surrounded by reporters and camera crews, they walked to a nearby hotel for a meal with James Murdoch. When asked for his priority, Rupert Murdoch gestured towards Brooks and said: ‘This one.’ The clip was repeatedly shown on the TV news that evening. Murdoch, the great reader of the public mood, was now clearly out of touch with it.

On Monday 11 July, amid pages devoted to the
News of the World’
s demise, the cover-up and the prospects for the BSkyB bid, the
Mirror
reported a piece of potentially devastating news: the
News of the World
might have hacked the phones of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. Based on an anonymous police source, the claim, if true, would be highly damaging to Murdoch’s New York-based empire, given the sensitivities of the American public to the worst terrorist attack on US soil.

The BSkyB bid was firing the scandal and focusing attention on the government’s close links with the Murdoch empire. More than 300,000 people had now signed the Avaaz petition against the takeover. Finally, the government turned against it, when Jeremy Hunt asked Ofcom to assess whether the
News of the World’
s wrongdoing meant that News Corp’s guarantees about the TV network’s independence could not be trusted. In a text of the letter to Ofcom’s executive director Clive Maxwell, released by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport that morning, Hunt wrote:

As you are aware, my consultation on the revised undertakings in lieu offered by News Corporation closed on Friday at midday. I am now considering the responses to that consultation, but as I stated on Friday, I anticipate this taking some time.

However, given the well-publicized matters involving the News of the World in the past week, and which have led to the closure of that paper, I should be grateful if you could let me know whether you consider those revelations and allegations cause you to reconsider any part of your previous advice to me, or otherwise give rise to concerns, on the credibility, sustainability and practicalities of the undertakings offered by News Corporation.

Although I anticipate it taking some time in order to consider consultation responses, it would be of assistance if you could let me have your response as swiftly as possible as you are able in order that I can factor this into my thinking.

Hunt and the government had insisted since his letter to Tom Watson in February that Ofcom could not consider News Corp’s criminal history when assessing its takeover bid for Britain’s most profitable broadcaster. Political expediency had now changed that. Hunt’s message to Ofcom was clear: ‘Please now give me an excuse to block this takeover.’

After the text of the letter was released, BSkyB shares went into freefall, dropping 7 per cent. Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians fell in behind the new position against the bid, which was still on the table. John Whittingdale, Tory chairman of the Culture Committee – who had deemed the bid to be an entirely separate issue the previous week – said: ‘The best thing would be if it could be put on hold until we have a much clearer idea of who knew what, who was responsible.’
⁹
Shortly after an emotional fifty-minute meeting with Bob and Sally Dowler in Downing Street, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, said: ‘I would simply say to him [Murdoch]: look how people feel about this; look how the country has reacted with revulsion to the revelations. So do the decent thing and reconsider, think again, about your bid.’

Breaking off from a speech about public service reform in Canary Wharf, east London, at 3.30 p.m. David Cameron confirmed that the government wanted to kill the takeover. He said: ‘All I would say is this: if I was running that company right now with all the problems and the difficulties and the mess frankly that there is, I think they should be focused on clearing those up rather than on the next corporate move.’

Murdoch finally got the message. Shortly before 4 p.m., faced with the prospect of an embarrassing Commons vote, News Corp withdrew its commitment to spin off Sky News, forcing the government to refer the bid to the Competition Commission. But though this looked like a major setback, News Corp had actually staged a tactical retreat. An investigation by the Competition Commission would take months, during which time the political row would probably cool. The company might then be able to proceed with the bid. It was still definitely on the table.

At 4.16 p.m. in a Commons statement, Jeremy Hunt duly confirmed he was referring the bid. The minister, who for months had vigorously defended the deal (once only days before the Milly Dowler story broke) explained his motivation:

Protecting our tradition of a strong, free and independent media is the most sacred responsibility I have as Culture Secretary. Irresponsible, illegal and callous behaviour damages that freedom by weakening public support for the self-regulation on which it has thrived. By dealing decisively with the abuses of power we have seen, hopefully on a cross-party basis, the Government intend to strengthen and not diminish press freedom …

Angry MPs were in uproar at his audacity; the Speaker had to call for order.

Referring the bid, however, did not dull the clamour for its death. The Labour Party refused to withdraw its Commons motion, set for two days later, and support for it among Liberal Democrats – whose party had been ignored by Murdoch’s newspapers for years – was hardening.

The opposition was bolstered by further reports of the alleged corruption at Wapping. In his latest bulletin from News International that morning, Robert Peston revealed that internal emails appeared to show payments of £1,000 to a royal protection squad officer for the phone numbers of senior members of the royal family, their friends and relatives. He quoted a ‘source’ inside Wapping as saying: ‘There was clear evidence from the emails that the security of the royal family was being put at risk. I was profoundly shocked when I saw them …’ In total, Peston said, the paper had paid Metropolitan Police officers £130,000 for information. The
Evening Standard
also leaked details of the payments, sending 1 million copies onto the streets of London with a front page reading: ‘Queen’s Police Sold Her Details to NoW’.

Scotland Yard responded angrily to the leaks, which appeared to come from Wapping. In a three-sentence statement personally authorized by Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met said it believed that information in media stories that day was ‘part of a deliberate campaign to undermine the investigation into the alleged payments by corrupt journalists to corrupt police officers’ – adding ‘and divert attention from elsewhere’. The force said that News International had agreed to keep information confidential so the police could pursue the culprits without alerting them. ‘However we are extremely concerned and disappointed that the continuous release of selected information – that is known only by a small number of people – could have a significant impact on the corruption investigation.’

On Tuesday 12 July, at the Home Affairs Committee, senior police officers had to account for their slow progress in bringing Murdoch’s hackers to justice. Andy Hayman, the police chief who had joined
The Times
, denied that when he was at the Met there had been any impropriety in his social and professional contacts with NI’s executives. Asked whether he had ever received any payment from a news organization while in the police, he cried: ‘Good God, absolutely not.’ Pulling an astonished face, he added: ‘I cannot believe you suggested that.’ Keith Vaz, the committee chairman, felt Hayman’s performance had been ‘more Clouseau than Columbo’. (Hayman later described the committee’s treatment of him as ‘appalling’. ‘To be accused, as I was, of being a dodgy geezer, which is probably on the basis of my accent, I think that’s a really poor show.’)
¹⁰
Peter Clarke, the former Deputy Assistant Commissioner who led the 2006 investigation, accused News International of deliberately thwarting its inquiry. ‘If there had been any meaningful cooperation at the time we would not be here today. It is as simple as that,’ he said.

In a move unthinkable even a week before, the Culture, Media and Sport Committee called Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks to give evidence, the following Tuesday, 19 July. Since buying the
News of the World
in 1969, Rupert Murdoch had appeared before a parliamentary committee only once, at the private session of the Lords Communications Committee in September 2007, when he had confirmed he exercised editorial control over his tabloid newspapers (see Chapter 5). John Whittingdale said that a figure like Murdoch being brought before a Commons select committee was ‘unprecedented’. BBC political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg described it as ‘something we simply could not have imagined seven days ago – even twenty-four hours ago’. News International declined to confirm that the Murdochs would turn up.