Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (46 page)

He had searching questions about the power of newspapers over politicians.

The press have sway over politicians to the extent that it is within their power to endorse particular political parties or causes and certain newspaper groups are seen as floating voters …

On one level, it might simply be said that press proprietors and editors enjoy the wielding of an unaccountable power and that this enjoyment is enough to constitute the price for the bestowing of favour. On the other hand, it may be said that for some the quid pro quo is a higher price, namely the bestowing of commercial favours by government. The unaccountable power of the press, or of certain parts of it, is a consistent theme here, and if that power is concentrated in a limited number of individuals the problem is capable of being visualized as all the more menacing.
¹

Slandered, impugned and damaged, the targets of newspapers appearing before the inquiry could now tell their stories direct to the public. The proprietors, editors and reporters would have to account publicly for their actions.

Appropriately the first witnesses were Bob and Sally Dowler. They relived the moment they believed that their daughter was still alive in 2002 (see chapter 15). They also suspected that their own phones had been hacked at the time because a photographer had been stalking them as they walked along the route their daughter had taken on the day of her disappearance – culminating in a story in that Sunday’s
News of the World
: ‘Mile of Grief’.

On 23 November, Kate and Gerry McCann explained that soon after their daughter Madeleine had disappeared on a family holiday to the village of Praia da Luz on 3 May 2007, a British press desperate for new angles recycled reports from the Portuguese press stating that the McCanns themselves were under suspicion. Gerry McCann said: ‘I do not know whether they [Portuguese police] were speaking directly the British media, but what we clearly saw were snippets of information which as far as I was concerned the British media could not tell whether it was true or not, which was then reported, often exaggerated and blown up into many tens, in fact hundreds of front-page headlines.’ A meeting with newspaper editors stating there was no evidence to support the suggestion that they were involved in their daughter’s disappearance had ‘very little effect’. Photographers would spring out from behind hedges to give Kate McCann a fright; newspapers would then carry those pictures saying she looked ‘frail’ or ‘fragile’. From September 2007 to January 2008, many UK newspapers, but particularly those in the stable of Richard Desmond – the
Daily Star, Daily Star Sunday
and
Daily
and
Sunday Express
(Express Newspapers) – initially fought the couple’s resulting libel claim. Gerry McCann recalled: ‘… they couldn’t agree to our complaint, but they did suggest that we did an interview with [Desmond’s]
OK!
magazine, which we found rather breathtaking.’

Express Newspapers eventually paid £550,000 to Madeleine’s Fund and apologized on the front page of the
Daily Star
and
Daily Express
on 19 March 2008:

… there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Mr and Mrs McCann were responsible for the death of their daughter, that they were involved in any sort of cover-up and there was no basis for Express Newspapers to allege otherwise. Equally, the allegations that Mr and Mrs McCann may have sold Madeleine or were involved in swinging or wife swapping were entirely baseless. Naturally the repeated publication of these utterly false and defamatory allegations has caused untold distress to Mr and Mrs McCann. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a more serious allegation.

Although the McCanns had treated all publications equally for fear of alienating their rivals, they did give an interview to
Hello!
on 29 April 2008, the first anniversary of Madeleine’s disappearance, to publicize a new European alert system for missing children. At the
News of the World
, which had put up a £250,000 reward for Madeleine’s safe return, editor Colin Myler was furious and straight on the phone to the McCanns. Gerry McCann said:

I think it would be fair to say that Mr Myler was irate … and was berating us for not doing an interview with the
News of the World
and told us how supportive the newspaper had been, the news and rewards. And at a time of stress for us on the first anniversary – where we were actually launching a new campaign … he basically beat us into submission, verbally, and we agreed to do an interview the day after.

This cooperation was not repaid as the McCanns might have expected: without warning, on 14 September 2008 Myler’s
News of the World
published extracts from Kate McCann’s personal diary in which she had recorded her intimate thoughts about Madeleine. The Portuguese police had seized the diary and a copy had fallen into the hands of a Portuguese journalist, who had sold it for €20,000 to Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper. The
Screws
printed extracts of ‘Kate’s Diary: In Her Own Words’.

Kate McCann said: ‘I felt totally violated. I’d written those words and thoughts at the most desperate time in my life, most people won’t have to experience that, and it was my only way of communicating with Madeleine, and for me, you know, there was absolutely no respect shown for me as a grieving mother or as a human being or for my daughter, and it made me feel very vulnerable and small and I just couldn’t believe it.’

Stars who for years had felt frustrated or intimidated or harrassed – or all three – by photographers and reporters gave evidence. Several made the point that, while their jobs put them on the public stage, they had not courted tabloid interest, nor did they believe that it should open the gates to their private life. Hugh Grant said ‘hundreds’ of people in the public eye would willingly never be mentioned in newspapers again. He singled out several articles, including an ‘interview’ with him in the
Sunday Express,
explaining: ‘I had not even spoken to a journalist. It was completely, as far I could see, either made up or patched and pasted from previous quotations I might have given in an interview.’

He suggested that an article in the
Mail on Sunday
in February 2007 about his relationship with Jemima Khan being on the rocks because he had been receiving late-night calls from a plummy-sounding woman, might have come from hacking his phone. He had indeed been receiving calls from a plummy-sounding studio executive’s PA while he was in Los Angeles – late at night British time. He had not been having an affair with her, sued for libel and won. ‘But thinking about how they could possibly have come up with such a bizarre left-field story … I cannot for the life of me think of any conceivable source for this story in the
Mail on Sunday
except those voice messages on my mobile telephone.’ That evening the
Mail on Sunday
accused him of spreading ‘mendacious smears’.

He said misreporting and invasions of privacy were still happening. He suspected that a story in the
Sun
and the
Daily
Express
in March 2011, about his visit to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, recording that he was ‘dizzy and short of breath’, had come from someone at the hospital being on a retainer from a tabloid newspaper or picture agency. ‘You know: “If anyone famous comes in, tell us and here’s 50 quid or 500 quid.” ’

The police had told him that the paparazzi were increasingly recruited ‘from the criminal classes’ – who would ‘show no mercy, no ethics, because the bounty on some of these pictures is very high’.

In his written evidence, Grant made the case for press reform, but added: ‘I don’t want to see the end of popular print journalism. And I certainly wouldn’t want a country that was fawning to power or success. I like, admire and would always want to protect the British instinct to be sceptical, irreverent, difficult, and to take the piss.’

Dressed in black with little make-up, Sienna Miller explained that as a 21-year-old woman she had been regularly chased down the street by packs of ten to fifteen big male photographers. She had been spat at. The
Daily Mirror
had printed a picture of her at a charity ball suggesting she was drunk. In fact she had been playing dead in a game with a very sick child, who had been edited out of the picture, making it look as though she was indeed drunk. She sued, won her case and the paper subsequently printed an apology:

Sorry, Sienna. On Saturday 12 March, we printed pictures of Sienna Miller, who is an ambassador for the Starlight Children’s Foundation charity, at the Starlight Children’s Foundation charity for terminally ill children. We said that Sienna’s boozy antics had shocked guests at the event and thereby suggested that she had behaved in an unprofessional manner. We are happy to make clear that Sienna was not drunk and did not behave unprofessionally. In fact in the pictures Sienna was on the floor playing with a seriously ill six-year-old child. We have apologized to Sienna.

She believed that the paper had calculated the cost in money and reputation of printing an apology before misreporting the story.

But Miller’s most significant evidence, given on 24 November, was on the hacking by News International. She could not understand how photographers and reporters kept popping up wherever she went:

I think what was more baffling was the fact that people found out before I’d even arrived where I was going. I did feel constantly very scared and intensely paranoid … Every area of my life was under constant surveillance and instinctively I felt that and felt very violated and very paranoid and anxious … I felt I was living in some kind of video game.

JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, found a reporter had slipped a note into her daughter’s school satchel: ‘It’s very difficult to say how angry I felt that my five-year-old’s school was no longer a place of complete security from journalists.’ In 2003, she felt she was being blackmailed when the
Sun
allegedly offered to return a stolen copy of her fifth Harry Potter book – yet to be published – in exchange for a photo opportunity.

She attacked newspapers for picturing her children. When she asked why a photographer from a Scottish tabloid was outside her home, she was told: ‘It’s a boring day at the office.’ Giving evidence on 24 November, she said: ‘There wasn’t even a sense there was a story. So my family and I were literally under surveillance for their amusement … It’s a very unnerving feeling to know that you’re being watched.’

The singer Charlotte Church recalled that as a teenager she was constantly chased by reporters and photographers, some of whom tried to take pictures up her skirt. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, she was followed by up to eight photographers a day.

She had had particular problems with News International newspapers, and recounted a strange encounter with Rupert Murdoch. When the ‘voice of an angel’ was thirteen, she said, Murdoch’s office approached her to sing at his wedding to Wendi Deng in 1999. According to Church, she was given a choice of rewards – £100,000 or positive coverage in Murdoch’s papers. (News International denies that this offer was made.) Church said: ‘I remember being told that Rupert Murdoch had asked me to sing at his wedding to entertain and it would take place on his yacht in New York, and … I remember being thirteen and thinking: “Why on earth would anybody take a favour or £100,000?” and me and my mother being quite resolute on this point that £100,000 was definitely the best option – but being advised by management and by members of the record company to take the latter option, that he was a very powerful man, I was in the early stages of my career and could absolutely do with a favour of this magnitude.’

Murdoch wanted her to sing ‘Pie Jesu’. She pointed out that it was a funeral song. ‘He said he didn’t care whether it was a funeral song, he liked that song and he wanted me to sing it, which I did.’

If Murdoch’s staff did promise favourable press coverage, it did not arrive. Church said that
The Sunday Times
had fabricated ‘horrific’ comments by her that New York firefighters after the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001 did not deserve their heroic status, when what she had actually said was that TV producers had demeaned them by getting them to present the Best Soap category at the National Television Awards. Unusually, no one from her management or Sony had sat in on or taped the interview. ‘I was only fifteen and to be exposed by a newspaper of this type to ridicule and derision upon such a sensitive subject was a terrible experience. That article then went over to the
New York Post
, which was also owned by Mr Murdoch’s company and the headline was: “Voice of an angel spews venom”. And of course because of the massively sensitive nature of this subject, there was a massive backlash against me in America …’

The
News of the World
published the most grievous story, on 11 December 2005, about her father having an affair, headlined: ‘Church’s three in a bed cocaine shock’. The first line was: ‘Superstar Charlotte Church’s mum tried to kill herself because her husband is a love rat hooked on cocaine and three-in-a-bed orgies.’

Church said:

I just really hated the fact that my parents, who had never been in this industry apart apart from in looking after me, were being exposed and vilified in this fashion. It had a massive impact on my family life, on my mother’s health, which the
News of the World
had reported on before then, on her mental state and her hospital treatment. We also think the only way they could have known about that hospital treatment was either through the hacking or possibly through the bribing of hospital staff. So they knew how vulnerable she was and still printed this story, which was horrific.