Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (47 page)

Another star, the TV presenter Anne Diamond, also had a brush with Murdoch. Testifying on the same grim day for News Corp as Church, 28 November, Diamond recalled that in the 1980s she had told Murdoch that his newspapers seemed intent on ruining people’s lives. Earlier in 2011, Murdoch’s former butler, Phillip Townsend, had explained to a Channel 4 documentary that Murdoch had called together a number of his newspaper editors and ‘possibly indicated to his editors that I was a person from that point on to be targeted’. Diamond said: ‘When you look back now in the knowledge of what Mr Townsend had said … well, it would suggest it becomes evident from that point onwards there were consistent negative stories about me in Mr Murdoch’s newspapers.’

Hours after visiting a private clinic in 1986 fearing that she was losing her first baby at the eight-week stage, she explained, a
Sun
reporter called asking if she was pregnant. Not having told her parents, and not being sure that the baby would actually survive a potential miscarriage, she denied she was pregnant. ‘They ran the story anyway …’ Then the labour: ‘I was actually in labour in the hospital and at one point an administrator came in and said: “Very sorry to interrupt, we don’t really want to alarm you but you do need to know that we have just caught somebody who was a reporter for the
Sun
who was impersonating a doctor and we’ve had to eject him from the hospital, but we do feel you ought to know.” ’ The
Sun
subsequently obtained a story from her first nanny – offering her £30,000 – about life with the Diamonds. Although the nanny later wanted to ditch the deal, the paper ran her comments from a lunchtime interview with a journalist – and didn’t pay her the £30,000. In December 1987,
Today
(Rupert Murdoch’s now closed fifth national newspaper) printed the details of Diamond’s new home: ‘It wasn’t just a dreadful invasion of privacy of my new home, it was a burglar’s charter.’

The most shocking episode came in 1991, when Diamond lost her new baby, Sebastian, to cot death. Diamond and her then husband wrote to every newspaper editor asking them not to cover Sebastian’s funeral in a small family church. All journalists stayed away apart from a freelance photographer, who took pictures from the road. Diamond recounted:

Within a few hours of the funeral, the editor of the
Sun
[Kelvin Mackenzie] rang my husband and said: ‘We have a picture. It’s an incredibly strong picture. We would like to use it.’ And my husband said: ‘No, we’ve asked all of you to stay away. No.’ And the editor said: ‘Well, we’re going to use it anyway. We’ll use it without your permission.’

The next day the paper put the story on the front page and rang to say that it had received such an enormous response that it wanted Diamond to launch a fundraising campaign. She felt ‘emotionally blackmailed’ but relented, because she knew ‘the power of the press’.
*

The tricks of the redtops continued to be laid bare. Steve Coogan recalled:

In August 2002 I received a phone call from Rav Singh, a reporter with Andy Coulson’s ‘Bizarre’ column in the
Sun
. He tipped me off that I was about to be the target of a sting from Coulson’s office. He told me I would receive a call from a girl with whom I had spent some time and that she would try to lure me into talking about intimate details of my life. The call would be recorded and Andy Coulson would be listening. When the call came I deadpanned it and nothing was printed.

Naturally I felt grateful for this tip-off, but this episode was probably a ruse to gain my trust or a sense of debt to Rav Singh, presumably on the basis that the story they actually had did not appear to be very much and wanted a ‘better’ story in the future.

In April 2004, Rav Singh, who now had his own gossip column in the
News of the World
, phoned me. He wanted to ‘negotiate’ about an article that was to be printed the next day about a relationship I had had. Singh said that if I were to admit certain parts of the story the paper would omit other details that I felt would be embarrassing to my family. I trusted him, partly as a result of the earlier tip-off, so I had a conversation with him on what I thought was a confidential basis. Afterwards, Coulson, by then the editor of the
News of the World
, called my publicist and told him they had recorded the whole phone conversation and would publish all the details including those they had agreed not to. The promises had been a sham to get me on the phone and get more details in my own words. I was in a vulnerable state at that time in any event and they knew it and used my vulnerability to their advantage.

Coogan added: ‘Strangely I don’t think it was a malicious personal vendetta against me. My feeling is that it was a dispassionate sociopathic act by those who operate in an amoral universe where they are never accountable.’

At the Leveson Inquiry, the newspaper industry was finally held to account. Almost all the titles had some explaining to do. One of the greatest twists was the
Guardian
’s handling of the Milly Dowler story in July 2011. In a story on 10 December 2011, the paper explained that the
News of the World
might not, after all, have been responsible for the Dowlers’ ‘false hope’ moment.
*
News International and former
News of the World
journalists leapt on this. On 13 December, the
Sun
’s managing editor, Richard Caseby, accused the
Guardian
of ‘sexing up’ its coverage of the Milly Dowler story.
²
After the paper’s columnist Marina Hyde wrongly reported that the the
Sun
had doorstepped one of the Leveson Inquiry’s junior counsel, a couriered parcel arrived from Wapping for Alan Rusbridger, containing a toilet roll and a note which read: ‘I hear Marina Hyde’s turd landed on your desk. Well, you can use this to wipe her arse.’

For the newspaper industry, the witnesses broadly divided into those who admitted they had taken part in wrongdoing and those who did not. Among the innocent was Kelvin Mackenzie, the former
Sun
editor. On 9 January, Mackenzie agreed that his policy while editing the
Sun
was that if something sounded right he would ‘lob it in’. ‘I didn’t spend too much time pondering the ethics of how a story was gained nor over-worry about whether to publish or not,’ he explained. ‘If we believed the story to be true and we felt
Sun
readers should know the facts, we published it and we left it to them to decide if we had done the right thing.’ He denied Murdoch had ever urged his editors to go after Anne Diamond: ‘I have had the advantage as distinct from Ms Diamond of working with Rupert Murdoch for thirteen years closely. And I have never heard him say: “Go after anybody” under any circumstances, whether it is a prime minister, a failing breakfast show host, or anybody.’

On 12 January 2012, the proprietor of the
Daily Star
and
Daily Express
, Richard Desmond, appeared to be bemused at the fuss being made. Asked what interest he took in the ethical conduct of his papers, he replied: ‘Well, ethical, I don’t quite know what the word means.’ He said that his newspapers had been ‘scapegoated’ over their coverage of Madeleine McCann. He apologized for their treatment of the McCanns, but added: ‘If there were 102 articles on the McCanns, and thirty-eight bad ones … you could argue there were sixty-eight or seventy good ones.’ He suggested the McCanns had been ‘quite happy to have articles about their daughter’ on the front page. Robert Jay, the Inquiry’s counsel, described that as a ‘grotesque characterization’.

In stark contrast to Desmond was one of his former reporters, Richard Peppiatt, who repented of his role in the bias, exaggerations and fabrications of the
Daily Star
, where he freelanced full-time for two years, on £118 a day, until March 2011. Spilling the secrets of the
Daily Star
in spectacular fashion on 29 November, he said its reporters wrote to its ‘ideological perspective on certain issues, say immigration or national security or policing’:

And so whatever a story may be, you must try and adhere to their ideological perspective. Say there is a government report giving out statistics. Well, you know, any statistics which don’t fit within that framework you ignore or sort of decontextualize and pick maybe the one statistic which does. If there’s something that comes out saying crime has gone down, you then go and look for the statistic which says knife crime has gone up 20 per cent …

Some stories were ‘dictated more from the accounts and advertising departments than the newsroom floor’, such as one he wrote about Marks & Spencer’s skinny pants.
*
To the amusement (and horror) of the inquiry, he read out the headlines of false
Daily Star
stories: ‘ “Chile mine to open as theme park”; “Angelina Jolie to play Susan Boyle in film”; “Bubbles to give evidence at Jacko trial” (Bubbles was Michael Jackson’s monkey); “Jade’s back in
Big Brother
” (she was dead at the time). Obviously we have the likes of “Maddie’s body stored in freezer”, which we’ve heard already; “Grand theft Rothbury”. That was the Raoul Moat killing, there was going to be a computer game based around it – completely untrue. “Brittany Murphy killed by swine flu”; wasn’t the case; “Macca versus Mucca on ice”, which was that Paul McCartney and his ex-wife were apparently going to showdown on
Dancing On Ice
, never transpired. Then we have the likes of “Muslim-only public loos”… completely untrue as well.’

Lord Leveson, apparently not a
Daily Star
reader, interrupted: ‘Are these all real headlines?’ Peppiatt replied: ‘These are real headlines.’

Among those giving evidence were those who had written raucous accounts of backstabbing and misbehaviour in tabloid newspapers, but who were now testifying about those accounts in a wholly new context suggesting that what they had written previously about tabloid life was little more than gossip.

Giving evidence via videolink from New York, Piers Morgan was asked about
The Insider
, the account of his tabloid days editing the
News of the World
and the
Mirror
. The inquiry wanted to know about the time that Rupert Murdoch rang up and suggested he drop the Kray story (see page 15). In his statement, Morgan wrote: ‘This is my recollection of the gist of our conversation, almost ten years later on. I did not make a contemporaneous note. Mr Murdoch’s recollections and impressions may well differ from mine.’ He added: ‘I would note that my books were not intended to provide a historical record.’

He said he did not believe that phone hacking took place during his editorship of the
Daily Mirror
between 1995 and 2004. He said he could not explain how he came to hear a tape recording Paul McCartney had left for his wife Heather Mills after a row. Suddenly the insider seemed not to know much at all.

Sharon Marshall, who had delved into the devious ways of hacks in
Tabloid Girl: A True Story
, suggested her account had been based on personal recollections and chats with old hacks in the pub. In her foreword to the book, published in 2010, she had written: ‘This is what happened when I worked in the tabloid press. Look back through the newspaper archives and you’ll see my name on these stories. I wrote them. They’re true. I’m not proud of everything we did, but I loved the tabloid journalists I worked with. Every single double-crossing, devious, scheming, ruthless, messed up, brilliantly evil one of them.’ Now, she explained when she said ‘devious’ she was referring to nothing more than probably apocryphal examples of hacks trying to claim camels on expenses and that ‘accordingly, no reliance can be placed upon those stories as providing a statement or an indication of general practice in the journalism industry’.

The
News of the World’
s former executives, of course, had to account for their cover-up. Out of a job and with their paper closed, they no longer had to lie.

Tom Crone, the paper’s lawyer who had stuck doggedly to the rogue reporter defence, now recanted. Giving evidence on 14 December, and still playing the part of the respectable lawyer, he explained languidly: ‘I can’t remember when and by whom the rogue reporter explanation was first put out, but I was of the view that it was erroneous from the start.’

Did that ever cause him concern? ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘My feeling is I thought it would probably come back to bite the people who were saying it, which was the company, sure.’

At the meeting on 10 June 2008 at which James Murdoch authorized the Gordon Taylor payment, he said he had taken in a copy of Michael Silverleaf QC’s damning opinion on a culture of illegal newsgathering at the organization, as well as spare copies of the ‘For Neville’ email. Jay asked: ‘Did you supply any of those documents to Mr Murdoch?’ Laconically, Crone replied: ‘I can’t remember whether they were passed across the table to him, but I’m pretty sure I held up the front page of the email … . I’m also pretty sure that he already knew about it. What was certainly discussed was the email. Not described as ‘For Neville’, but the damning email and what it meant in terms of further involvement beyond – further involvement in phone hacking beyond Goodman and Mulcaire. And what was relayed to Mr Murdoch was that this document clearly was direct and hard evidence of that being the case.’

On 15 December, Colin Myler – who was shortly to accept a new job as editor of the New York
Daily News,
rival to Murdoch’s
Post
– disputed that there had been a cover-up. ‘I don’t think there was a cover-up,’ said the editor who two years previously had told a parliamentary inquiry that there was ‘no evidence’ phone hacking extended beyond Clive Goodman. Lord Leveson inquired: ‘It might be slightly semantic, mightn’t it, Mr Myler? What one person might describe as a cover-up another person would describe as an attempt to limit reputational damage?’