Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (42 page)

Aware that the company was potentially facing corruption charges in the US for bribing police in Britain, News Corp’s directors began to take ever tougher action to identify and isolate the scandal. On the afternoon of 20 July, Wapping’s Management and Standards Committee terminated News International’s agreement to pay Glenn Mulcaire’s legal fees and in the evening, under pressure from Cameron’s comments earlier in the day, finally released Harbottle & Lewis from client confidentiality. Previously News International had always looked after fallen members of the family, as it had when Clive Goodman was jailed.

On 21 July the two former
News of the World
executives, Colin Myer and Tom Crone, struck back. Myler and Crone had defended the company to the Culture Committee but had, in effect, been accused by James Murdoch of failing to inform him of the full background to the Gordon Taylor settlement. On 19 July James Murdoch had told the Culture Committee that he had not known about the ‘For Neville’ email when authorizing the pay-off for Gordon Taylor. Now, two days later in a joint statement, the
News of the World’
s last editor and lawyer said:

Just by way of clarification relating to Tuesday’s Select Committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch’s recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken. In fact, we did inform him of the ‘For Neville’ email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers.

This was not the only challenge to James Murdoch’s assertion that he had had only a minimal role in approving the settlement. The lawyer Mark Lewis claimed that during negotiations with Farrer’s Julian Pike, over the Gordon Taylor case, Pike had told him that he was negotiating ‘with Murdoch’. According to a company official with direct knowledge of the settlement who spoke to the
New York Times
, News International’s chief financial officer, Clive Milner, who made the financial arrangements, was told the case was very sensitive and ‘the cheque is for James Murdoch’.
³
In a statement News Corp said: ‘James Murdoch stands by his testimony to the committee.’

As the Culture Committee decided how to respond to this clash of evidence, Robert Peston again intervened to send the news in a different direction: he reported that the
Sun
had abruptly sacked its features editor and former
News of the World
features executive, Matt Nixson, whose computer was seized, over allegations of serious misconduct while at the
Screws
. Nixson said he had not been told the reason for his dismissal.
*

On Twitter, Watson complained to Robert Peston: ‘Why Sun story now Peston? More spin to deflect Myler/Crone statement? Where’s your dignity?’, to which Peston responded: ‘Tom, this is an outrageous and untrue allegation.’ As the spat played out in front of tens of thousands of computer users, Watson shot back: ‘I’m sorry Peston but you are being spoonfed stories. The Myler statement creates a crisis at NI. You have form. Stop being a patsy.’ Peston responded: ‘That is not worthy of a response.’

On Friday 22 July, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service confirmed that Strathclyde Police had begun a full investigation into claims of phone hacking and breaches of data protection in Scotland. The investigation would cover allegations that witnesses gave perjured evidence in the trial of Tommy Sheridan, and that there were breaches of data protection legislation, phone hacking and police corruption.

Meanwhile another newspaper group – Trinity Mirror – and its most famous former editor, Piers Morgan, who had become a prime-time chatshow host on CNN, were dragged into the controversy. Following a slump in its share price, the Mirror Group launched its own review of editorial practices. Trinity Mirror said: ‘In the light of recent events, we thought it was timely to look at our controls and procedures,’ though its inquiry was focused on current procedures rather than identifying previous wrongdoing. Taking to Twitter, Piers Morgan responded to suggestions that he had known of phone hacking while at the
Mirror
by denouncing his detractors as ‘liars, druggie ex-bankrupts and conmen’. Huffpost UK had reprinted a transcript of Morgan’s appearance on the BBC’s
Desert Island Discs
in 2009 when he defended the dark arts by saying: ‘A lot of it was done by third parties. That’s not to defend it, because obviously you were running the results of their work. I’m quite happy to have to sit here defending all these things I used to get up to.’ In the
Daily Mail
in 2006, Morgan had written: ‘I was played a message of a tape Paul [McCartney] had left for Heather on her mobile phone. It was heartbreaking.’
⁴
Now Morgan said: ‘I have never hacked a phone, told anyone to hack a phone, nor to my knowledge published any story obtained from the hacking of a phone.’
⁵

Following a gunman’s tragic rampage in Norway, phone hacking moved off the front pages, where it had been for eighteen days. Inside the
Guardian
on Saturday 23 July, the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, said that the scandal had re-energized a Parliament laid low by the row over MPs’ expenses scandal: ‘Parliament has started to reassert itself. We have rediscovered our collective balls. I would not want to be smug or complacent. We are now out of intensive care, but we are still in the recovery unit.’ After a frantic fortnight, Parliament was in recess and the scandal was again receding, but one more particularly unwelcome victim of phone hacking was about to emerge.

The
News of the World
had long considered that it had a special relationship with Sara Payne, whose eight-year-old daughter Sarah had been abducted yards from her home in West Sussex in 2000, prompting Rebekah Brooks’s ‘For Sarah’ campaign. Within hours of the news that the paper had hacked Milly Dowler, rumours spread that the paper had also eavesdropped on Sara Payne, who, to much relief at Wapping, issued a statement on 7 July saying that she had not been contacted by police.

Despite her concern about the eavesdropping of other grieving parents, Payne still thought warmly of the
News of the World,
which had supported her so steadfastly, and for its final edition she had contributed a column mourning ‘the passing of an old friend
’,
recalling that its managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, and spokeswoman, Hayley Barlow, had spent hours at her bedside in 2009 as she recovered from a stroke. She wrote: ‘God only knows why the
News of the World
has stuck by me for so long and for that you’d have to ask them but the reason I have stayed with them is that they have always been a paper that cares and a voice for the people.’

At 5 p.m. on 28 July, Nick Davies and Amelia Hill at the
Guardian
disclosed that while championing her cause, the
News of the World
had been hacking into her messages to profit from her ongoing grief.

Payne was hit hard by the betrayal. Phoenix Chief Advocates, the charity she ran for victims of paedophilia, said she was ‘absolutely devastated’. Like the Milly Dowler case, the story could hardly have been more damaging for News International and it put the company back in the spotlight just as it was fading from the news after almost three weeks. The ‘Hacked Off’ campaign said the Payne allegations indicated ‘breathtaking hypocrisy and a complete lack of moral sense’.

News International’s spin machine whirred into operation. In a statement issued by her new PR firm, Bell Pottinger (which specialized in representing regimes with reputational issues), Brooks said it was ‘unthinkable’ that the
News of the World
had hacked Payne. ‘The idea of her being targeted is beyond my comprehension,’ Brooks said. ‘It is imperative for Sara and the other victims of crime that these allegations are investigated and those culpable brought to justice.’
*

News International said it was ‘deeply concerned’ by the story.

On the evening of 28 July, Watson told Sky News he would ask the Culture Committee to recall the younger Murdoch; instead, the committee decided the following morning to write to James Murdoch, Colin Myler and Tom Crone asking them to clear up whether Murdoch had been told about the ‘For Neville’ email or not.

As News International continued to battle to restore its reputation, the police operation into its activities daily grew more serious. The day after the Sara Payne story broke, Scotland Yard confirmed it was expanding Operation Tuleta into a full-blown inquiry. Senior officers had been reluctant to take action against computer hacking while they devoted such substantial resources to phone hacking. Now, however, the evidence was too strong to ignore: detectives said that it was clear that computer hacking had been happening for much longer than the three months reported by the BBC’s
Panorama
in March. Ian Hurst, whose computer had been hacked by the
News of the World
trawling for the whereabouts of the IRA informer Stakeknife, expressed concern that the Met had been so slow to act, despite having the evidence from the Daniel Morgan trial. The former army intelligence officer said: ‘Officers do not appear to have investigated these crimes, which, given everything else that has happened, reinforces my belief that the Met is institutionally corrupt.’

On 1 August, further evidence emerged about a possible data clean-up at Wapping. In a letter to the Home Affairs Committee an IT firm used by News international, HCL Technologies, disclosed that, on nine occasions between April 2010 and July 2011, its help had been requested in deleting emails from Wapping’s systems. HCL Technologies had ‘answered in negative’ to one of the requests, in January 2011 – the month Scotland Yard launched its new inquiry. News International, in effect, admitted important data had been deleted, saying in a statement: ‘News International keeps backups of its core systems and, in close cooperation with the Operation Weeting team, has been working to restore these backups.’

The following day, Operation Weeting’s detectives arrested one of the most important figures at the
News of the World
: Stuart Kuttner, its managing editor since 1987. Nicknamed ‘Kuttie’ by reporters for his questioning and trimming of expenses, Kuttner had been the public face of the paper, defending the Sarah’s Law campaign and the secret videotaping of a sting on the Countess of Wessex. When he appeared before the Culture Committee in 2009, Kuttner had denied any knowledge of wrongdoing. He was detained on suspicion of phone hacking and police corruption, and released on bail. The police operation had now arrested all but a few of the senior editorial executives at the
News of the World
between 2000 and 2007.

20

The Ghosts of Wapping

There was no ambiguity about the significance of that document

– Colin Myler

News International had staggered into high summer. Its best-selling Sunday newspaper had hacked into the voicemails of a missing schoolgirl, victims of terrorist bombings and the mother of a murdered child in whose name it had campaigned. The disclosures had revolted readers and advertisers, forcing its closure. At least sixty detectives were investigating phone hacking, computer hacking and the corruption of police officers, and they had arrested most of the
News of the World’
s senior staff. Most worryingly of all for Rupert Murdoch personally, his reputation had been under its greatest assault in his sixty-year career.

Faced with this barrage, on 5 August, News Corp announced that Elisabeth Murdoch – whose TV company it had expensively acquired in February – would not take up her seat on the board. Presenting News Corp’s full year results on 10 August, Rupert Murdoch stressed that he always acted in partnership with his deputy, Chase Carey. ‘Make no mistake – Chase Carey and I run this company as a team,’ he told investors, saying that if he fell under a bus, Carey would take over ‘immediately’. Bolstered by a strong performance from its television interests, full-year profits were up 9 per cent to $982 million and the remuneration committee awarded Rupert Murdoch a $12.5 million bonus, Chase Carey $10 million and James Murdoch $6 million, though James forewent his bonus as contrition for ‘the current controversy’.

While News Corp sought to slough off its autocratic image, problems mounted at its troubled British newspapers. The day Rupert Murdoch was announcing bumper profits, officers from Operation Weeting arrested Greg Miskiw, one of the
Screws
newsdesk’s two veteran Ukrainians, on his return from Florida, where he had been working for the
National Enquirer
.

The following week, on 16 August, the Commons Culture Committee published Clive Goodman’s withering 2007 letter appealing against his dismissal.
*
In 2009, after the Gordon Taylor story broke, MPs had wondered why Goodman had been paid off after being jailed for committing crimes which had damaged his employers; the suggestion that he had a strong case in employment law seemed far-fetched. Now the public learned what News International’s executives had known all along: after his sacking Goodman had written to Daniel Cloke, Wapping’s human resources director, claiming that phone hacking had been so routine at the
News of the World
that journalists openly discussed it at editorial conferences (see page 55).

Dated 2 March 2007, the letter preceded all the evidence given by Wapping’s editors maintaining that Clive Goodman was a lone ‘rogue reporter’. If Goodman’s claims were true, Wapping had mounted a cover-up and its executives had told lie after lie to politicians, journalists and the public. Even if they were false, executives were clearly wrong to tell the Culture Committee that there was ‘no evidence’ of more widespread wrongdoing. This time, News International – employing Edelman PR – did not deny there had been a cover-up, saying: ‘We recognize the seriousness of materials disclosed to the police and parliament and are committed to working in a constructive way and open way with all the relevant authorities.’