Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (48 page)

Myler replied: ‘Absolutely, sir.’

On 29 November, Paul McMullan, the former
News of the World
features editor, painted a hilarious world: car chases, at least when Princess Diana was alive, were ‘great fun’. He blamed executives for making scapegoats of Clive Goodman and other reporters. But he was unrepentant about the tabloid world, or his role in it. He suggested the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone was ‘not a bad thing’ because reporters ‘were trying to find the little girl’.

McMullan clearly reckoned the best method of defence was attack: ‘I have a huge amount of cynicism for both Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan who have really done quite well by banging on about their privacy. All you have to do is jump off the stage for five minutes and people lose interest every quickly. Privacy is for paedos.’

Giving evidence, Stuart Hoare said his late brother Sean’s sole motivation in speaking out about phone hacking was ‘trying to put wrongs right’. Stuart Hoare said in his statement:

The reality was that phone hacking was endemic within the News International group (specifically Sean identified that this process was initiated at the
Sun
and later transferred to the
News of the World
) … undoubtedly, one of the major issues during Sean’s employment with the
News of the World
was that the news desk was out of control and that stories were obtained with very little or no ethics because of the pressure put on journalists to deliver.

In his written testimony on 19 December, Matt Driscoll, the sacked sports reporter, agreed:

It seemed to me that any methods that could stand a story up were fair game. It was also clear that there was massive pressure from the top to break stories. It was largely accepted that this pressure came from the proprietors and editors on the basis that big, sensational stories sell papers and therefore make more money.

There were times when I would return from interviewing a prominent Premier League football manager only to find the paper using material from a months old interview in order to obtain a better headline.

He added:

I feel that for many years some newspapers have been on course for destruction. Editors were handed far too much power and their egos were allowed to run wild. Some that I worked for often became pampered peacocks who only wanted to hear the word ‘yes’ and would shout and scream if they heard anything else. An example was when one editor I worked for sent his chauffeur fifty miles back to his home to pick up a bow tie he had left behind. No doubt the power and lucrative lifestyle that gives them front-row seats and free holidays helped to corrupt them – so that some editors totally lost sight of reality … As a result of this aggressive and grotesque arrogance, those in charge – the proprietors and the editors – came to believe that they could do and say whatever they wanted and remain untouchable.

In my years at News International, I came to believe – along with other journalists – that the newspaper group were indeed confident that they were untouchable because they were sure they had the government and police fighting their corner. Thus, they felt that they were almost beyond the reach of the law. These powerful contacts were the reason why some on the
News of the World
felt they could leave their morals and their respect for ethics at the door when they clocked in each morning. The next front page was all that mattered, however it was obtained.

22

Darker and Darker

Hugely in the national interest

– Mr Justice Vos

As the Leveson Inquiry swept into 2012, News International’s problems deepened – and spread to its other titles. Confronted with overwhelming evidence of the wrongdoing of its parent company,
The Times
could no longer avoid confronting its failings – though it still maintained that those failings were not the fault of the Murdochs. In an 1,800-word leader on 17 January arguing against stronger regulation,
The Times
paid a back-handed compliment to the investigative journalism which unpicked the deceit:

As the evidence of wrongdoing came to light, News International, Rupert Murdoch’s company that also owns
The Times
, was unable or unwilling to police itself. This was a disgrace. It was, of course, the press that put Fleet Street in the dock. The dogged investigative reporting that unearthed the phone hacking scandal deserves respect, even if the story was exaggerated and key details misreported.

In his evidence to Lord Leveson that day,
The Times
’s editor James Harding said: ‘I certainly wish we had got on the story harder, earlier.’ He disagreed with the views of the paper’s star columnist David Aaranovitch (see page 195) that the failure was linked to the Murdochs’ ownership. A failure to understand the significance of the story rather than proprietorial influence was to blame, Harding explained.

In the courts, News International strove to avoid a show trial that would put its executives in the witness box and publicly disclose countless incriminating documents, settling thirty-seven cases on a single day, 19 January. John Prescott received £40,000, Chris Bryant £30,000 and Sara Payne undisclosed damages. In an accompanying statement of brazen doublethink, News Group Newspapers said: ‘Today NGN agreed settlements in respect of a number of claims against the company. NGN made no admission as part of these settlements that directors or senior employees knew about the wrongdoing by NGN or sought to conceal it. However, for the purpose of reaching these settlements only, NGN agreed that the damages to be paid to claimants should be assessed as if this was the case.’ News Group was in essence admitting responsibility for its actions, but at the same time maintaining the legal fiction that it was not.

Claimants settled for two main reasons: the Part 36 offers they had received were unlikely to be bettered in court and pressing ahead to hearings would leave them facing substantial legal costs; and the Metropolitan Police and the Leveson Inquiry were now properly investigating what News International had done to them. Many, however, were still disgusted by their treatment. In a statement after his case was settled for £130,000 on 19 January, Jude Law’s anger was palpable:

For several years leading up to 2006, I was suspicious about how information concerning my private life was coming out in the press. I changed my phones, I had my house swept for bugs but still the information kept being published. I started to become distrustful of people close to me. I was truly appalled by what I was shown by the police and by what my lawyers have discovered. It is clear that I, along with many others, was kept under constant surveillance for a number of years.

No aspect of my private life was safe from intrusion by News Group newspapers, including the lives of my children and the people who work for me. It was not just that my phone messages were listened to. News Group also paid people to watch me and my house for days at a time and to follow me and those close to me both in this country and abroad.

I believe in a free press but … they were prepared to do anything to sell their newspapers and to make money, irrespective of the impact it had on people’s lives.

At the same hearing, News International sought to halt a search requested by litigants of three desktop computers and six laptops belonging to former employees. Wapping’s lawyer, Dinah Rose, said the searches were a waste of time since the company was settling civil cases, telling the judge, Mr Justice Vos: ‘We accept we are the villains. We have the horns and the tails.’ Vos – who had presided over phone hacking cases for a year – rejected her arguments and replied that News International should be regarded as ‘deliberate destroyers of evidence’. Documents he had seen, he said, might lead a court to conclude that it ‘deliberately concealed and told lies and deleted documents and effectively tried to get off scot-free’. He rejected News International’s case, telling Rose:

I am rather hesitant, as you probably notice, about acceding to the ‘Oh, it is all very expensive and difficult and time consuming and the trial is only around the corner,’ because if I had acceded to that last year none of us would be sitting here in the present situation and you just seem a little over-sensitive about these laptops, and they look to me to cover a period when things were going on in your client’s offices …

He said that finding out what had happened at News International was ‘hugely in the national interest’.

On 9 February, another batch of cases was settled: Steve Coogan received £40,000, Simon Hughes £45,000 and Sky Andrew £75,000. An undisclosed payment was made to Sheila Henry, the mother of 7/7 terrorist victim Christian Small. A £110,000 payment was made to Sally King, a friend of the former Home Secretary David Blunkett.
*

Michael Silverleaf QC – still working for News International – expressed its ‘sincere apologies’ for the damage and distress. Charlotte Church – who had wanted her case to be heard in court until NI made it clear that it would seek to cross-examine her mentally fragile mother, Maria – questioned that sincerity. Outside court, the singer, whose family had received £600,000 in costs and damages, said:

I have discovered that, despite the apology which the newspaper has just given in court today, these people were prepared to go to any lengths to prevent me exposing their behaviour, not just in the deliberate destruction of documents over a number of years but also by trying to make this investigation into the industrial scale of their illegal activity into an interrogation of my mother’s medical condition, forcing her to relive the enormous emotional distress they caused her back in 2005. It seems they have learned nothing … In my opinion they are not truly sorry, only sorry they got caught.

Scotland Yard had by now given up any pretence that its original investigation was adequate. On 7 February, it finally abandoned its defence against the Max Mosley-funded judicial review and admitted it had behaved unlawfully towards the claimants John Prescott, Chris Bryant, Brian Paddick, Ben Jackson and HJK by failing to inform them they were victims of Glenn Mulcaire. It apologized and agreed to pay all costs.

Lord Prescott said: ‘Time and again I was told by the Metropolitan Police that I had not been targeted by Rupert Murdoch’s
News of the World
.’ Chris Bryant said:

As I have always maintained, this was a three-headed scandal. First there was the mass criminality, then there was the massive cover-up and then, from 2007, the inexplicable failure of the Met properly to investigate the
News of the World
or even interrogate the material that they had gathered from Glenn Mulcaire.

As the FBI stepped up its investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,
*
News Corporation became ever more desperate to distance itself from its increasingly troublesome newspapers. In a special unit at Wapping sealed off from News International’s remaining journalists, legal and support staff working for News Corp’s Management and Standards Committee were scouring through invoices, expenses claims and emails for evidence of corruption. Detectives embedded with them uncovered the payment of tens of thousands of pounds of bribes to police and public officials, not from the now-closed
News of the World
but from journalists on the
Sun.
¹

At dawn on Saturday 28 January, around forty police officers arrested the
Sun’
s executive editor, Fergus Shanahan (who during the Damien McBride affair in 2009 had described Tom Watson as an ‘unsavoury creature lurking in the shadows’); the news editor, Chris Pharo; the former managing editor, Graham Dudman; the crime editor, Mike Sullivan; and a Metropolitan Police officer. To the fury of
Sun
journalists, an anonymous member of News Corp’s Management and Standards Committee described the arrests as part of a process of ‘draining the swamp’.
¹

On Saturday 11 February, the Metropolitan Police staged a bigger raid
,
arresting on suspicion of bribing public officials: the
Sun
’s deputy editor, Geoff Webster; long-serving chief reporter, John Kay; chief foreign correspondent, Nick Parker; the picture editor, John Edwards; and the deputy news editor John Sturgis. Also arrested were a member of the armed forces, a Surrey Police officer and a Ministry of Defence employee.

Writing in the
Sun
the following Monday, 13 February, the paper’s long-time political pundit Trevor Kavanagh turned on the police (whom the
Sun
usually lauded) in an article headed ‘Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’. Outraged, he complained that the arrests had infringed the journalists’ privacy:

Wives and children have been humiliated as up to twenty officers at a time rip up floorboards and sift through intimate possessions, love letters and entirely private documents … .