Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (41 page)

From March 2011, Tom Watson had been using Freedom of Information requests to obtain more details about the relationship between those in power and the country’s biggest newspaper group. One link was between News International and Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions at the time of Operation Caryatid in 2006. The trail started with a reference in the
Guardian’
s media diary on 18 October 2005 to the Society of Editors conference – at a time when the
News of the World
was regularly hacking phones. Headed ‘No Sleep to Bowness’, it reported: ‘News International arrived in the Lake District mob handed. They tried to leave that way too. The twin tabloid editors Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson were last seen at the gala dinner with the Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald threatening to take him to a nightclub in Bowness.’ Watson’s FoI requests to the Crown Prosecution Service revealed Macdonald had visited the Society of Editors conference as a guest of Les Hinton, then News International’s chief executive. Among meetings with other journalists, Macdonald had several meetings with News International’s editors. On 17 January 2006, a month after Caryatid began – but before the CPS became involved in March – Macdonald was treated to dinner at Gordon Ramsay’s Maze by the
News of the World’
s editor, Andy Coulson. On 10 April 2006, while the police and CPS were discussing what charges might be brought, but before he became aware of the investigation, Macdonald lunched with Rebekah Wade and Trevor Kavanagh at the RAC Club in Pall Mall. His diary contained a reference to a News Corporation reception with Rupert Murdoch at Burlington Gardens on 19 June, but Macdonald later said that he did not attend. On 20 February 2007, a month after the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire, he again lunched with Rebekah Wade at the RAC Club.

Discreetly, the Crown Prosecution Service had agreed in late April 2006 to exclude sensitive (and thus embarrassingly newsworthy) witnesses from any prosecution. A month later, Macdonald had been informed by the prosecutors in the case that there was ‘a vast array’ of potential victims in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. In a letter to the Home Affairs Committee, the then Attorney General Lord Goldsmith, who also received the memo, said that legal convention dictated he himself could not contact the police about the inquiry, but, he pointed out, Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions, could have done so. In a letter to the Home Affairs Committee, Macdonald said that had the CPS been shown evidence that victims of crime, such as Milly Dowler, had been hacked, he was sure that ‘firm … action would have followed’. There was no evidence that Macdonald acted improperly during his meetings with News International (which subsequently employed him to assess the emails showing evidence of police bribery), but it was clear that the CPS had first been run by a director who was friendly with executives at Wapping and who continued to meet them while the organization was under investigation – and then by a man, Keir Starmer, who had not fully read the paperwork but who, when he did a year later, totally reversed the narrow interpretation of the law which the police claimed had hindered their inquiry.

David Cameron had refused to confirm the number and timings of his meetings with the Murdochs and their executives when asked to do so by Tom Watson in June 2010 but on Friday 15 July 2011 – the evening of Rebekah Brooks’s resignation – he had published a list of his contacts with media figures which laid bare his closeness to the Murdochs. In the fourteen months since entering Number 10 in May 2010 – while News Corp was seeking to take over BSkyB – he had met News Corp’s editors or executives fifteen times and attended five events and three parties organized by the company. Twice, Rebekah Brooks had been a guest at his official country residence, Chequers. Most surprisingly of all, perhaps, in March, two months after his resignation, Andy Coulson had also visited Chequers. By comparison Cameron had met the
Daily Mail’
s publishers four times, the
Independent
and
Evening Standard
three times and the
Guardian
twice. He had had no meetings with the BBC’s director general, Mark Thompson. For the first time, rival Fleet Street editors could see exactly how relatively unimportant they were to Downing Street compared with Rupert Murdoch’s empire.

Cameron’s ministers also met News Corp or News International executives more than any other organization. Since the 2010 general election, cabinet ministers had had 107 meetings with Murdoch or his executives. Two ministers were particularly close to the Murdochs – George Osborne and Michael Gove. Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had sixteen separate meetings with News International. Gove, the Education Secretary and former assistant editor of
The Times
, whose wife Sarah Vine still worked for the paper, had met Rupert Murdoch for breakfast, lunch or dinner six times, and had had six other meetings with Murdoch executives
*
. The Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, twice gave confidential defence briefings on Afghanistan and Britain’s strategic defence review to Rebekah Brooks.
¹

A spokesman for Gove said: ‘He did not discuss the BSkyB deal with the Murdochs and isn’t at all embarrassed about his meetings, most of which have been about education, which is his job.’ Osborne pointed out that the proportion of meetings he had had with Murdoch or his executives matched the record of Ed Miliband, eleven of whose thirty-one media meetings had been with News Corp. In total, almost one quarter of all hospitality provided to Number 10 staff in the first seven months of the Coalition government came from News International. David Cameron’s press aide Gabby Bertin had been wined and dined nine times, and also generously taken to Wimbledon. Of 111 events on the Downing Street hospitality register, twenty-six were Murdoch-related in one way or another.

The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, who, while in opposition, had received £195,000-a-year for a column in the
News of the World
and around £300,000 from Murdoch’s HarperCollins between 2002 and 2006 for his biographies of William Pitt the Younger and William Wilberforce, defended the government’s relationship with News International. ‘Personally I’m not embarrassed by it in any way, but there is something wrong here in this country and it must be put right. It’s been acknowledged by the Prime Minister and I think that’s the right attitude to take,’ he said.

On Wednesday 20 July, David Cameron faced his last Commons showdown before Parliament went into summer recess. Very unusually, Parliament’s sitting had been extended by a day so there could be a debate on the scandal. At 11.36 a.m., Cameron began his statement on public confidence in the media and the police with the words: ‘Over the past two weeks, a torrent of revelations and allegations has engulfed some of this country’s most important institutions.’ He outlined the action he had taken, ensuring a ‘well led’ police investigation, publishing his meetings with the media and establishing the Leveson Inquiry. By expressing so clearly its revulsion at the phone hacking allegations, he added, Parliament had helped end News Corp’s bid for BSkyB. Labour MPs groaned at the irony of it.

In a little-noticed aside, Cameron conceded that Andy Coulson’s deputy at the
News of the World
, Neil ‘Wolfman’ Wallis – who had subsequently been arrested on suspicion of intercepting communications – might have provided Coulson ‘with some informal advice on a voluntary basis before the election’. The Prime Minister added: ‘To the best of my knowledge, I did not know anything about this until Sunday night.’

Cameron also distanced himself further from Andy Coulson, his recent guest at Chequers, and who only a week earlier had been his friend. He told the Commons that if it turned out that he had been misled, he would have to offer a ‘profound apology’. He said: ‘With 20:20 hindsight and all that has followed, I would not have offered him the job , and I expect that he would not have taken it. But you do not make decisions in hindsight; you make them in the present. You live and you learn and, believe me, I have learnt.’

Ed Miliband responded:

Given the
New York Times
’s evidence, the public will rightly have expected very loud alarm bells to ring in the Prime Minister’s mind, yet apparently he did nothing. Then in October the Prime Minister’s chief of staff was approached again by the
Guardian
about the serious evidence it had about Mr Coulson’s behaviour. Once more nothing was done. This cannot be put down to gross incompetence. It was a deliberate attempt to hide from the facts about Mr Coulson … He now says that in hindsight he made a mistake by hiring Mr Coulson. He says that if Mr Coulson lied to him, he would apologize. That is not good enough. It is not about hindsight or whether Mr Coulson lied to him; it is about all the information and warnings that he ignored. He was warned, but he preferred to ignore the warnings.

Miliband and Labour MPs asked Cameron thirteen times during the debate whether he had discussed the BSkyB bid with Murdoch’s executives and each time the Prime Minister declined to say, merely repeating that he did not have any ‘inappropriate conversations.’

Before it was over, Cameron had answered 136 questions. Many Conservative MPs pointed out that Labour had not tackled the influence of powerful media groups while in power, and that its leader was employing a former
Times
journalist, Tom Baldwin.

Cameron maintained that he had been open about the meeting with Rupert Murdoch in May 2010, though he had not divulged it to Tom Watson in June 2010, doing so only the previous week. He said: ‘In relation to the meeting I held with Rupert Murdoch, the question is not whether he came in through the back door or front door but whether it was declared in the proper way, and yes, it was.’

The former Labour Home Secretary Alan Johnson asked: ‘When the Prime Minister read of the extensive investigation in the
New York Times
on 1 September last year, what was his reaction and what did he do?’

Cameron replied: ‘The question I ask myself all the way through is: “Is there new information that Andy Coulson knew about phone hacking at the
News of the World
?” I could not be clearer about this: if it turns out that he knew about hacking, he will have lied to a select committee, he will have lied to the police, he will have lied to a court of law and he will have lied to me. I made the decision to employ him in good faith, because of the assurances he gave me. There was no information in that article that would lead me to change my mind about those assurances …’

Chris Bryant raised News International’s refusal to release Harbottle & Lewis from client confidentiality. He asked the Prime Minister: ‘Is this not clear evidence that News International, contrary to the pretend humility yesterday, is still refusing to cooperate fully with the investigation?’

Cameron responded: ‘The point I would make is that that information, if it’s germane to the police inquiry, needs to be given to the police and indeed to the Leveson inquiry.’ (The message to Wapping was clear: release Harbottle & Lewis from confidentiality.)
*

Asked whether the
Mail on Sunday
was correct to report that he had hired Andy Coulson at Rebekah Brooks’s suggestion instead of the ex-BBC journalist Guto Harri, Cameron offered another non-answer. He replied: ‘She specifically rejected that point yesterday. Guto now works for my good friend and colleague the Mayor of London, and he does a brilliant job.’

While the debate was continuing, the
Guardian’
s political editor, Patrick Wintour, wrote: ‘Government officials said during the statement that the Prime Minister did not recall any specific conversations with News International about the BSkyB bid, but said he could not stop News Corporation officials from lobbying him about the bid during meetings. The officials stressed that the decision was for the Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, on his own, and he at no point discussed the bid with Cameron. The spokesman said the conversations were “completely appropriate”.’
²
So it was the case that they had discussed the BSkyB bid.

Shortly afterwards, the Labour backbencher John Mann published the response of the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, to his complaint on 18 July that Cameron’s meeting with James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks at Christmas 2010 had broken the rules on conflicts of interest. Unsurprisingly, O’Donnell cleared the Prime Minister of any interference.

When he finally sat down at 2.28 p.m., Cameron had evaded the gravest threat yet to his reputation, and at the backbench 1922 Committee that afternoon he received from his MPs forty seconds of desk banging, the traditional seal of approval. He reportedly told his backbenchers that his action over the phone hacking scandal had been ‘decisive, frank and transparent’. After a tumultuous fortnight in which his close relationship with News International had imperilled his position, the Prime Minister had made it through to the summer holidays.

Rupert Murdoch flew out of the UK on his private Gulfstream jet that afternoon, 20 July, and editors now sought to move the news agenda on to other issues. On 21 July, a cartoon in
The Times
by Peter Brookes titled ‘Priorities’ showed starving African children with grotesquely swollen stomachs saying ‘I’ve had a bellyful of phone hacking.’ (The website Political Scrapbook said it was ‘tasteless’ to suggest that talking about phone hacking had prolonged Somalia’s starvation: ‘No one is stopping
The Times
covering both stories.’). On the same day, the
Sun
centred its coverage on a story about a Unicef official urging the media to focus on the drought in Africa, headlined: ‘UN: forget hacking, kids are starving’. The
Sun
also ran a poll that day: YouGov asked 1,800 people online whether phone hacking was the most important story. Under the headline: ‘Is phone hacking getting too much coverage?’ the paper disclosed the results: Yes, 59 per cent; No 28 per cent, Not sure 13 per cent.