Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (22 page)

The New York Times allege key evidence was withheld from the Crown Prosecution Service. Please confirm that all evidence was provided to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Your conduct of this matter is being scrutinized all over the world. So far, it is bringing shame – as has News International – on our country.

I await your early response.
*

Yours sincerely, Tom Watson MP

Later that day, 3 September, Tessa Jowell, Labour’s former Culture Secretary, added to the political pressure by disclosing that her phone had been hacked by the
News of the World
– the most senior political target to date. During the original investigation into Goodman and Mulcaire, the Met had told her that her phone had been intercepted twenty-eight times but later informed her, she said, that she was not needed as a witness. Sean Hoare also went on BBC Radio 4’s
PM
programme, leaving listeners in no doubt about the methods used at Wapping: ‘There is an expression called the culture of dark arts. You were given a remit: just get the story. Phone tapping hadn’t just existed on the
News of the World
. It was endemic within the whole industry.’ He added that reporters dared not question the technique: ‘Such was the culture of intimidation and bullying that you do it.’

On the Saturday, the
Guardian
and the
Independent
both splashed on the previous day’s developments, which were tucked on the inside pages of bigger papers. On Sunday, the
Independent on Sunday
’s political correspondent Matt Chorley disclosed that the phone numbers of two former Labour ministers – Tony Blair’s cabinet minister Peter Mandelson and the former Defence Minister Peter Kilfoyle – had been found in Mulcaire’s notes, while the
Guardian
’s sister paper, the
Observer
, disclosed that the Met possessed clear evidence suggesting that John Prescott had been hacked while he was Deputy Prime Minister. But still the government would not budge. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary and a former
Times
journalist whose wife still worked for the title, dismissed the
New York Times
article. Appearing on the BBC’s
Andrew Marr Show
, Gove said its disclosures ‘seem to be a recycling of allegations we have heard before’, adding it may have been a product of ‘circulation wars’ in the US.

Despite Downing Street’s support for the police’s position, Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who had long insisted that the original police inquiry had been conducted properly, was under growing pressure to re-examine the case. On Monday 6 September, the day before he was due to make a prearranged appearance at the Home Affairs Select Committee, he sought to take some of the sting out of the new disclosures in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s
Today
programme. Yates stuck to his line that ‘this was a very, very thorough inquiry’, but added that he was willing to consider the new evidence in the
New York Times,
saying: ‘We’ve always said if any new material, any new material comes to light, we’ll consider it and that’s what we are going to do in this case.’

A few hours later, the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow – himself a victim of intense tabloid interest, and who consistently allowed MPs to air allegations about the scandal – granted Tom Watson an ‘urgent question’, forcing a statement from the Home Secretary, Theresa May. She repeated the official story that there was nothing to worry about: two men had been jailed and the investigation had been reviewed by Scotland Yard and the Director of Public Prosecutions. The prosecution of Goodman and Mulcaire, she assured MPs, had ‘appropriately represented the criminality uncovered’. In the angry debate that followed, Watson and Bryant attacked the government and police’s position and the shadow Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, demanded Andy Coulson’s resignation. Several Conservative backbenchers, including Philip Davies – the Culture Committee member who in February had accused Labour MPs of trying to hijack its report – said: ‘Everything that we have heard today has been thoroughly covered in the Select Committee report; there is absolutely nothing new.’

At the Home Affairs Select Committee hearing, John Yates again emphasized that, while he would consider Sean Hoare’s evidence, there probably were very few victims of hacking. Hacking, he said, was ‘very, very difficult to prove’ under RIPA, which required the police to show that voicemails had been intercepted prior to being heard by the phone’s user. He said: ‘We can only prove a crime against a very small number of people and that number is about ten to twelve people.’ Asked whether Lord Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, was on the list of the victims, he replied firmly: ‘He is not on that list and he has never been hacked to my knowledge and there is no evidence that he has.’ After hearing Yates’s evidence, the Home Affairs Committee opened an inquiry into Scotland Yard’s handling of phone hacking.

The following day, Tuesday 7 September, the
Guardian
revealed that the previous summer after the Gordon Taylor story, Stephen Rimmer, the Home Office director general for crime and policing, had warned the then Labour Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, against asking Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary to investigate the Met’s record on phone hacking – apparently after taking soundings from Scotland Yard. In an email to Johnson’s private secretary, Richard Westlake, Rimmer wrote: ‘My own advice on this remains that there are insufficient grounds to do so … and that the Met would deeply resent what they would see as “interference” in an operational investigation which could, of course, be revived at any given time.’ To his subsequent regret, Johnson heeded the advice.

The Met’s position was being bombarded on a daily basis. On Wednesday 8 September, the
Guardian
disclosed that Ross Hindley, the
News of the World
reporter who had transcribed Taylor’s hacked voicemails in the ‘For Neville’ email, offered to talk to Scotland Yard. The following day, Nick Davies finally persuaded the former
News of the World
showbusiness editor, Paul McMullan, to step out of the shadows. McMullan had been the anonymous reporter who had corroborated Sean Hoare’s information to the
New York Times
. Now McMullan spoke out in public, telling Davies for a front-page story on Thursday 9 September that phone hacking was ‘so routine’ at the paper that its journalists didn’t realize they were doing anything wrong. ‘People were obsessed with getting celebs’ phone numbers,’ said McMullan, now a pub landlord in Kent. ‘There were senior people who were really scared when the Mulcaire story came out. Everyone was surprised that Clive Goodman was the only one who went down.’ Another staffer, Davies wrote, claimed that Glenn Mulcaire could hack all thirteen of David Beckham’s mobile phones.

That evening, the Speaker granted Chris Bryant another debate on hacking, during which Tom Watson articulated in an eight-minute speech the all-pervasive fear of News International – and redtop newspapers more generally:

The truth is that, in this house we are all, in our own way, scared of the Rebekah Brookses of this world. It is almost laughable that we sit here in Parliament, the central institution of our sacred democracy – among us are some of the most powerful people in the land – yet we are scared of the power that Rebekah Brooks wields without a jot of responsibility or accountability. The barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators. They are untouchable. They laugh at the law; they sneer at Parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do, with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality. Prime Ministers quail before them, and that is how they like it.

And yet, I sense that we are at the beginning of the endgame. Things will get better because, in many senses, they cannot get worse.

That same day, 9 September, another request was made to Wapping’s IT department to destroy emails. In an email later disclosed to civil claimants, an IT employee wrote: ‘There is a senior NI management requirement to delete this data as quickly as possible but it needs to be done within commercial boundaries.’ A month later, on 7 October, a senior executive asked – in an email – ‘How are we doing with the email deletion policy?’ The cover-up was still in full flow.

At Scotland Yard, John Yates’s hapless inquiry was proceeding at a sober speed. Yates asked the
New York Times
’s executive editor, Bill Keller, to hand over its evidence, but Keller refused, saying that the force had declined the paper’s ‘repeated requests for interviews’ and refused to answer a Freedom of Information request the
NYT
had submitted months earlier. Keller said: ‘Our story speaks for itself and makes clear that the police already have evidence that they have chosen not to pursue.’
⁸
‘Yates of the Yard’ – who was concentrating on ‘new’ evidence – would make little progress over the next three months. He interviewed Sean Hoare under caution, meaning that anything he said could incriminate him and lead to his prosecution: understandably Hoare stayed silent. Lawyers, journalists and politicians were furious. It looked as if one of Yates’s first moves following the
New York Times
article had been to scare off other whistleblowers.

Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, was emphatically unconcerned about the controversy. He had been warned by the Met’s inquiry in 2006 that he had been hacked by Glenn Mulcaire, but he had not sued then or later; and though he was chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority (which oversaw London’s police force) he had also failed to do anything in July 2009 on publication of the Gordon Taylor story. Like his fellow Etonian, Bullingdonian and Conservative David Cameron, Johnson was close to Rebekah Brooks – whose new husband was an Eton contemporary – and he dined with James and Rupert Murdoch. Johnson knew he might need the full-blooded support of News International at the mayoral election in May 2012 or if he was to fulfil his long-held ambition to become Prime Minister. At the mayor’s monthly question time on 15 September 2010, Johnson – who had a £250,000 column in the
Daily Telegraph
– shrugged off demands to pressure Scotland Yard, saying he could not see anything new in the
New York Times
story. He said: ‘I think it’s patently politically motivated and unless there are significant new facts brought into the public domain that actually change the police case and make necessary a fresh look at it, then I don’t propose to change my views.’ Looking at his fellow London assembly members, he laughed: ‘This is a load of codswallop cooked up by the Labour Party.’
⁹

11

Losing a Battle

I have declared war on Mr Murdoch and I think we’re going to win

– Business Secretary Vince Cable

Two years after he had been turned over by the
News of the World,
Max Mosley was about to strike again. During the summer of 2010, from Monaco, he had been taking an ever closer interest in the phone hacking story and had become determined to ensure the police would not be able to cover up the
Screws
’ seedy past.

He had started talking to Nick Davies at the
Guardian
and had also acquired a highly confidential source, Mr X, who had told him that Scotland Yard was holding extensive evidence about hacking at the
NoW
. Mosley decided the best way to intensify the pressure was through cases in the civil courts which, through disclosure, would unlock the secrets of Mulcaire’s files. But there was a problem: money. Under English law, litigants could be liable for costs, which could be crippling, and were often a severe deterrent to potential litigants. Mosley agreed to underwrite the risk for several claimants, in both the emerging civil privacy cases against the
News of the World
and in the judicial review against Scotland Yard being coordinated by Tamsin Allen at Bindmans. If the cases were lost, his costs could run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, but Mosley was a multimillionaire. He had decided he would risk half his fortune, if necessary, to fight Rupert Murdoch; ordinarily that half would have gone to one of his two sons, Alexander, but he was a regular drug user and had died of cocaine intoxication in May 2009. By early 2008 Alexander had temporarily managed to come off drugs but the
News of the World’
s exposure of his father’s sado-masochism had devastated him and was, his father believed, a contributory factor in his death. On 12 September, five days before Mosley returned to London at the end of his presidency of the FIA, Allen began judicial review against the Met at the High Court on behalf of Chris Bryant, Brian Paddick and Brendan Montague; they were joined a week later by John Prescott.

Sitting in his London mews house in Kensington in 2011, Mosley said: ‘I saw it as a much bigger thing than giving the
News of the World
a bit of their own back, or privacy generally, because I feel the Murdoch empire is a really sinister presence undermining the whole of our democracy. They are capable of suborning the police, Parliament and the government.’ He suspected that the police had been reluctant to inform the victims ‘because they knew damn well there would be writs flying down to the High Court and their friends in Wapping would be upset’.
¹

In a memo to the Home Affairs Committee in October 2010, the lawyer Mark Lewis suggested several reasons why the police might not have properly investigated hacking in 2006, including a lack of resources, high-priority terrorism cases – and the closeness of the relationship between senior officers and
News of the World
executives. With the benefit of legal privilege applying to parliamentary affairs, he also speculated whether the two officers who had said there were few victims, Andy Hayman and John Yates – both of whose own phones had been hacked – had been fearful of press coverage. Lewis wrote: