Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (37 page)

On Friday 15 July, Rupert Murdoch made a sacrifice he had been resisting stubbornly. He had clung to his chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, despite having to close a best-selling newspaper and abandoning his £7 billion bid for BSkyB, but in four days’ time, he was facing a parliamentary inquisition at which her continued presence would be a major line of questioning. Even his most supportive investor, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Al-saud, whose stake he needed in the boardroom, was questioning her record.

At 9.57 a.m., after eleven days at the centre of David Cameron’s ‘firestorm’, Brooks’s extraordinary twenty-year rise from secretary to chief executive ended with her resignation. During her two years in charge, News International had repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and in a valedictory email to staff, she again denied that she had done anything wrong. But, she explained, her desire to ‘remain on the bridge’ was ‘detracting attention from all our honest endeavours to fix the problems of the past’. Brooks lavished praise on Rupert Murdoch’s wisdom, kindness and advice, James Murdoch’s loyalty and friendship and News International’s staff, who she said were talented, professional and honourable. She wrote: ‘I am proud to have been part of the team and lucky to know so many brilliant journalists and media executives. I leave with the happiest of memories and an abundance of friends.’ She also left with a reported pay-off of £1.7 million, a free office and a car.
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Politicians welcomed her departure, but it failed to end questions about the company’s conduct and the extent of Rupert Murdoch’s power. Indeed the fact that Brooks had stayed in post so long had weakened his position. In her remarks to
News of the World
staff, Brooks had cryptically referred to being ‘a conductor’ for the scandal. Now the Murdochs were left to feel the heat alone.

Ed Miliband had taken a gamble in rising up against Murdoch; now, enjoying a poll boost and, perhaps, fearing that a wounded but intact News International could try to bring him down, he fired directly at Rupert Murdoch. In a personal attack unthinkable a fortnight beforehand, he issued a statement saying: ‘Rupert Murdoch says that News Corp has handled these allegations “extremely well”. He still hasn’t apologized to the innocent victims of hacking. He clearly still doesn’t get it.’ At the Downing Street lobby briefing, David Cameron’s spokesman would not say whether Cameron still considered Brooks to be a friend, but replied that the Prime Minister did think that the relationship between politicians and the media had been ‘too cosy’. In the Lords, the Tory grandee Lord Fowler said that one of the lessons of the affair was that political parties had been fearful of Murdoch:

The aim of both main parties has been to get his support. Mr Blair famously flew to Australia in search of his support and Lady Thatcher also had the same goal, although at least she expected him to come to her … It is one of the extraordinary features of the whole phone hacking scandal just how long it has taken to agree that a public inquiry was necessary. Since January I have asked questions on the floor of this House. And on five occasions I’ve been told more or less politely to jump in the Thames.

Brooks’s successor was not Will Lewis, the general manager, but a low-key figure who had been heading Sky Italia’s tussle against Silvio Berlusconi, the 56-year-old New Zealander Tom Mockridge. With Brooks gone and Mockridge not yet in charge, the public relations professionals took over. News Corp had failed to grasp the scale or the significance of its difficulty, and now, instead of denial, it offered apology. Over the coming days, the Murdochs and News International would be a picture of contrition, humility and hurt feelings. James Murdoch emailed staff displaying the new emollient tone. ‘The company has made mistakes. It is not only receiving appropriate scrutiny, but is also responding to unfair attacks by setting the record straight.’
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News International ran full-page advertisements in national newspapers apologizing for its behaviour and wrote to advertisers outlining its remedial action. Mark Borkowski, an entertainment PR specialist, described the adverts as ‘classic damage limitation mode’.
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The text of the News International apology read:

We are sorry.

The
News of the World
was in the business of holding others to account. It failed when it came to itself.

We are sorry for the serious wrongdoing that occurred.

We are deeply sorry for the hurt suffered by the individuals affected.

We regret not acting faster to sort things out.

I realize that simply apologizing is not enough.

Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society. We need to live up to this.

In the coming days, as we take further concrete steps to resolve these issues and make amends for the damage they have caused, you will hear more from us.

Sincerely,

Rupert Murdoch.

Private Eye
parodied the ad thus:

We are sorry.

We are sorry that we have been caught.

We are sorry that we had to close down the
News of the World
.

We are sorry that we can’t take over BSkyB.

We deeply regret that our share price has gone down as a result of previous wrongdoing by some individuals in our employ.

I was personally shocked and appalled to find out the kind of thing that had been going on in my business.

Another act of contrition took place on Friday afternoon when Rupert Murdoch met Milly Dowler’s parents, Bob and Sally, at a central London hotel, One Aldwych. As photographers and reporters waited outside, Murdoch apologized abjectly to the Dowlers. Mark Lewis – the lawyer who had taken on the Gordon Taylor case four years earlier – emerged shortly before 6 p.m. to tell reporters that Murdoch was ‘very humbled and very shaken and very sincere’. Lewis said: ‘I think this was something that had hit him on a very personal level and was something that shouldn’t have happened, I don’t think somebody could have held their head in their hands so many times and say that they were sorry.’

News Corp exploited Brooks’s resignation and Murdoch’s meeting with the Dowlers to dump more bad news. Of all the Fridays in the phone hacking scandal, 15 July was the biggest of what PRs term ‘put out the trash day’. For days the
Independent
and ITN’s Keir Simmons had been chasing Wapping for confirmation that Jude Law had launched a phone hacking lawsuit against the
Sun
. News International desperately wanted to contain hacking to the now closed
News of the World
, but Law, a major Hollywood star, was dragging Murdoch’s daily redtop into the mire. At 7 p.m., News International leaked the story to Sky News, giving the Murdoch outlet an exclusive and helpfully burying the story under the bigger corporate meltdown.

Shortly after 9 p.m. UK time, another News Corp star disintegrated. Les Hinton, loyal servant of Rupert Murdoch for fifty years, resigned as chief executive of Dow Jones. Hinton – who had apparently remembered almost nothing of critical events at News International when questioned by Parliament two years before – apologized while also distancing himself from any wrongdoing. He had seen hundreds of news reports about misconduct, he said, and had watched events unfold at the
News of the World
with sorrow. ‘That I was ignorant of what apparently happened is irrelevant,’ he added, ‘and in the circumstances I feel it is proper for me to resign from News Corp and apologize to those hurt by the actions of the
News of the World
.’ News International also disclosed that its legal affairs director Jon Chapman had left the company. Chapman had told the company he was leaving on 23 June, three days after NI passed to police the corruption emails that he had reviewed four years earlier.

On Saturday 16 July, journalists and politicians who had dismissed the scandal finally began to grasp the scale of the original wrongdoing and the cover-up, which raised much broader questions about the probity of national institutions and the dominance of the Murdochs. Seeking to explain the disclosures of the past twelve days, the
Daily Telegraph
pointed out in a leader: ‘Large swathes of the British establishment have been implicated in this scandal. And the shady characters who have been exposed – policemen, politicians and News International executives – have so far revealed only one aim. That is, to avoid giving a straight answer to the public. The suspicion is that they are living in fear of what might be revealed.’
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The Murdochs’ resilience was nevertheless on display on Sunday 17 July, both through the agenda-setting power of their papers and from fresh evidence of the spread of the family’s tentacles into the power-making elite. The
Independent on Sunday
disclosed that the man who would lead the Commons inquisition two days hence, John Whittingdale, was friendly with Les Hinton and Liz Murdoch. On Facebook, among Hinton’s ninety-three friends and Elisabeth Murdoch’s 386, the only MP was Whittingdale (who in 2007 had received £3,000 for his local cricket club from BSkyB). Committee members felt that Whittingdale’s chairmanship had been decent and he had turned down an invitation to Hinton’s wedding in 2009 – the year his committee was investigating hacking. Nonetheless the reach of the Murdochs was apparent. ‘I wouldn’t say they are close friends,’ Whittingdale said, ‘but you can’t do the job I’ve done for six years without having them as acquaintances.’
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Murdoch’s
Sunday Times
carried two exclusives which helped relieve the pressure on his embattled business
.
Its front page directed attention towards the police, revealing that while recuperating from his leg operation in early 2011, Sir Paul Stephenson and his wife had accepted a twenty-day free stay at the £598-a-night Champneys health spa in Hertfordshire as a guest of its owner, Stephen Purdew, his friend of Sir Paul’s. While the commissioner’s acceptance of thousands of pounds of free hospitality might have raised eyebrows in its own right, what made the story explosive was that Champneys’ part-time publicist was the Outside Organisation, whose managing director was – Neil Wallis.
The
Sunday Times
did not mention that among Purdew’s many acquaintances were Rebekah and Charlie Brooks.

In his column
,
Jeremy Clarkson disclosed what had been discussed between David Cameron, James Murdoch and Brooks at her home in the Cotswolds on 23 December, hours after the Conservative leader had stripped Vince Cable of the BSkyB decision: sausage rolls. They had all been planning to go for a walk, Clarkson wrote, and Brooks had wondered what they would eat: the Prime Minister had suggested sausage rolls. ‘In other words, it was like a million other Christmas-time dinners being held in a million other houses all over the world that day. BSkyB was not mentioned. Nor was phone hacking.’

Within hours of the latest revelations, Scotland Yard robustly demonstrated its independence by arresting Brooks. On Friday morning, she had been running the most powerful media organization in the country; at noon on Sunday she was in police custody, detained on suspicion of phone hacking and corruption. Brooks was shocked because she had turned up by appointment to a London police station expecting only to be interviewed. The BBC’s Robert Peston put out that when News International had been discussing her resignation it had ‘no inkling’ of her imminent arrest.

Stephenson, the police chief whose force had carried out the arrest, found himself facing questions of his own. He said he had not known of Wallis’s connection to Champneys, but his position came under pressure from Coalition ministers, whose own links to Rupert Murdoch had been under intense scrutiny. Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said he was ‘incredibly worried’ about the impact of the hacking scandal on London’s police force and offered Stephenson less than full support. The Home Secretary who had repeatedly rejected calls for a public inquiry, Theresa May, announced that she would make a statement to Parliament the following day about Scotland Yard’s relationship with Wallis. By the evening, Stephenson – still recovering from his operation – could take no more. At 7.30 p.m., reporters were summoned to a hastily called press conference. At Scotland Yard, Stephenson, the shoe salesman who had risen to become the country’s top police officer, announced he was quitting.

In the space of a fortnight, the scandal had horrified the public, closed the country’s best-selling Sunday paper, sunk a £7.8 billion takeover, forced out Rupert Murdoch’s favourite bosses in Britain and the United States and now cost London’s police chief his job. Senior officers felt Stephenson was carrying the can for the Yard’s close relationship with the press forged during Sir John Stevens’s tenure from 2000 to 2005. Sir Hugh Orde, the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, described Stephenson as ‘one of the finest officers I have worked with.’
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