Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (2 page)

The legendary Fleet Street names whose reputations have been tarnished could almost (but not quite) be considered tiny pawns. This is a power game played out in the boardrooms and dining salons of the elite, and every political party, mine included, has had an inner circle of people on the Murdoch invitation list. Ultimately this scandal is about the failure of politicians to act in the interests of the powerless rather than themselves. As the book shows, I hope beyond any doubt, prime ministers, ministers, Parliament, the police, the justice system and the ‘free’ press became collectively defective when it came to investigating the activities of NewsCorp. Now that Murdoch’s corrupt grip on our national institutions is loosening, and thanks to the laser-beam focus of Lord Justice Leveson, who leads the public inquiry into this affair, these individuals and public bodies are belatedly starting to clean up their acts.

I know from personal experience what it’s like to be attacked by Rupert Murdoch’s organization. In the book, I give a first-hand account of some of the worst moments – though they were infinitely less bad, of course, than others have suffered. Sometimes, now, I can laugh at my former situation: a well connected ex-minister in parliament, altering his route home at night, fearful of someone who might be in pursuit. But the affair has taken its toll: the failure of my marriage, the loss of friends and intense stress over many years. Even though the mechanisms of intimidation have now been exposed, I still obsessively memorize the number plates of unfamiliar vehicles parked outside my house. That’s what it does to you when you’re at the receiving end of the Murdoch fear-machine – the threats, bullying, covert surveillance, hacking, aggressive reporting and personal abuse make you permanently wary.

That was the state I was in – suspicious and paranoid – when Martin Hickman called me in October 2010, for the first time in ten years. I was distrustful of most reporters and at a low ebb, but Martin was an old friend: we had known each other well at Hull University, where he’d set up a newspaper and I’d become president of the Students’ Union, my first elected position. At that stage, a trusted journalist seeking to investigate a media cover-up was rare. Regularly from then on, we would meet quietly at the Fire Station bar next to Waterloo station in South London, often for black coffee and breakfast before work, or occasionally late at night over a beer. Whilst the commuters tapped into their laptops and the revellers partied, we would sit in the corner, away from prying MPs and journalists, talking about developments as they happened. Martin was always a great person to bounce things off.

Of course, I wasn’t working in isolation. Many individuals, most notably the
Guardian
’s Nick Davies, the BBC’s Glenn Campbell and lawyers Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris, played critical parts in unravelling this complex scandal. Even so, in the early days, it was a lonely pursuit. We became close in the face of opposition from Murdoch’s UK executives, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Press Complaints Commission and many of my fellow politicians. We were all helped by the brave whistleblowers who summoned the courage to share key information with us. Though still too frightened to go public, they know who they are, and believe me, they are heroes.

Because I was involved, I come into the book myself from time to time, as Martin does occasionally too. But though the story is inevitably coloured by personal experiences, we didn’t want to overemphasize our roles, and for that reason it is written in the third person: I am not ‘me’ or ‘Tom’ but ‘Tom Watson’; similarly Martin is ‘Martin Hickman’.

Martin is calm and cautious. I am not. I hope our contrasting characters have created an accurate and informative account, albeit one which leaves you in no doubt as to what we think of the events and organization we are writing about. Many of the events are public knowledge, but they have become so in fits and starts and the connections between them have not been made. We believe that seeing the story whole, as it is presented here for the first time, allows the character of the organization to emerge unmistakably. Please tell us what
you
think. We’re on Twitter at @tom_watson and @Martin_Hickman.

This story is not yet over, but it extends deeper into the past than some may realize. For most, it really began when a newspaper story about the hacking of a missing girl’s phone prompted a national wail of outrage so loud it was heard in the lofty world of Rupert Murdoch, and the mighty proprietor had to account for his actions to representatives of the people for the first time. So this is where our story begins – in the middle of those tumultuous days.

Tom Watson

April 2012

The Wrong Headlines

They caught us with dirty hands

– Rupert Murdoch, 19 July 2011

On a clear summer’s day in July 2011, a black chauffeur-driven Range Rover weaved its way through the streets of London towards the House of Commons. As it stopped at a red light diagonally opposite Big Ben, photographers crowded round the rear window and snapped its eighty-year-old VIP passenger. His thickly lined jowly face offered up a weak smile. Rupert Murdoch was three hours early for his first appointment with British democracy.

For decades, the most powerful media mogul in the world had orchestrated public life from the shadows, hugely influential but hidden. Now he had been hauled before a parliamentary committee to do something peculiar for him: explain himself. In a single tumultuous fortnight, the global business he had accumulated over sixty bustling years had fallen into a deep crisis. His moralizing tabloid newspaper, the
News of the World,
had been caught systematically and illegally spying on the rich, the powerful and the famous. For years, his British executives had covered up its crimes. They had destroyed evidence, run smear campaigns, lied to Parliament and threatened and intimidated journalists, lawyers and politicians. Despite their efforts, the truth about the ‘dark arts’ of newsgathering at Murdoch’s UK newspaper empire, News International, had slowly surfaced.

Trawling for scandal, a private detective working for the
News of the World
, Glenn Mulcaire, had been hacking into the mobile phone messages of princes, pop stars, TV presenters, Hollywood actors, Premiership footballers, cabinet ministers and their friends, relatives, agents and advisers. News International’s lawbreaking involved not just phones, but everything electronic, including personal computers and state archives. Through a network of corrupt police officers and public officials, Murdoch’s muckrakers could obtain private phone numbers, emails, vehicle registrations, and tax, income, employment and medical records. But their targets were not just the wealthy and famous. If misfortune called, the grieving and even the dead could be swept into the sights of his clandestine news-gatherers. On 4 July 2011, the
News of the World
created a scandal bigger than any it had ever investigated – when the public learned it had hacked into the voicemails of a missing thirteen-year-old schoolgirl, and shortly afterwards, those of parents of murdered children and survivors of terrorist bombings. There was national revulsion; gutter journalism had sunk into the sewer.

Amid the outrage, Murdoch tried to manoeuvre himself out of trouble, but such was the outpouring of disgust that Britain’s political leaders, for so long servile to the Australian tycoon who took US citizenship in 1985, rose up against him and opposed his biggest ever business deal, the intended takeover of the BSkyB TV network, from which he was forced to withdraw.

As the scandal swirled around Britain and the world, it cost Murdoch tens of millions of pounds, ruined the reputations of several of his most trusted lieutenants, and damaged the wider press, police, prosecutors and UK government. In London, the Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced a judge-led inquiry to investigate the delinquency of British newspapers. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation launched an investigation into the possible hacking of the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Shares in Murdoch’s multimedia conglomerate, moored in a black skyscraper in New York, fell 19 per cent, wiping $10 billion from its value. Commentators began whispering that the octogenarian billionaire might be deposed and his quick-tempered son James might never inherit the crown. Shareholders might even force the sale of his British papers. In all his years in business – mostly of breakneck expansion – these were the heaviest blows to rain down upon Rupert Murdoch.

Yet at first, increasingly remote and with his powers failing, he had not realized the seriousness of his predicament. While his troubled news empire dominated the radio and TV bulletins, he had stayed in the US and tried to shrug off the fuss, as he had done in the past whenever touched by controversy, which was often. When he had arrived in London on 10 July, he had smiled for the cameras. As if to underline his position in an elite space above democracy, he had refused an invitation to appear before the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which had – along with a few journalists and lawyers – unpicked the connections between his executives and the politicians and police who had protected his interests. The committee’s MPs then did something unimaginable two weeks before: they dispatched one of Parliament’s ancient-office holders, the Deputy Serjeant-at-Arms, to Murdoch’s newspaper headquarters in Wapping, east London, where he delivered the order to testify. Theoretically the Australian born chief executive
*
could have been thrown into jail if he had disobeyed the summons, but its true significance was that Parliament was asserting its will against a figure it had never dared to challenge before. In an instant, Murdoch’s four-decade spell over British public life was broken.

On the morning of 19 July, the public queued round the block for seats at the inquisition in Portcullis House, a modern annexe to the House of Commons, as Murdoch, looking pale and diminished, arrived on the white upholstery of his four-wheel drive. A global audience of millions watched on TV as he and his 38-year-old son took their seats in front of the MPs shortly after 2.30 p.m. After four days of preparation, the Murdochs had a plan to minimize the bad publicity by reading out a prepared statement apologizing for the wrongdoing, but the MPs barred James from reading it. His eyes flashed with barely suppressed anger. As he blustered, his father touched his arm and said: ‘I would just like to say one sentence …’ and his lips uncurled a headline: ‘This is the most humble day of my life.’

One of the nine Parliamentarians facing the Murdochs was Tom Watson, MP for West Bromwich East. He had spent two years excavating what had been going on in their business, during which time his marriage had disintegrated and he had constantly shuffled between London, his constituency, his family and friends’ homes. He had had whispered conversations with shadowy contacts who spoke of collusion between Murdoch’s news-gatherers and the government, the security services and London’s police force. At one stage he had melodramatically (but not entirely unreasonably) feared for his life. At others he was astonished as evidence of widespread criminality exposed the bullying reality of an out-of-control organization whose family controllers had escaped accounting for their behaviour.

In the oak-panelled Wilson Room, Rupert Murdoch came across not as a modern-day Citizen Kane, but as a deaf, doddery, proud old man, his son as being trapped in a Master of Business Administration presentation, deploying a strangulated American-British accent and tortuously phrased sentences. They were humble and apologetic, but also defiant. They insisted they had not known about the criminality in their midst: they stressed what a tiny part the
News of the World
played in their multimedia empire. ‘My company has 52,000 employees,’ Rupert Murdoch explained. ‘I have led it for fifty-seven years and I have made my share of mistakes. I have lived in many countries, employed thousands of honest and hard-working journalists, owned nearly 200 newspapers.’

So who, wondered the veteran Scottish MP Jim Sheridan, did he blame for his tabloid’s excesses and the loss of the BSkyB bid? Murdoch’s reply was clear – his rivals: ‘They caught us with dirty hands and they built the hysteria around it.’

Just before 5 p.m., the proprietor who had eaten humble pie two hours earlier at the start of the session, received another helping. A ‘comedian’ called Jonathan May-Bowles rose from his seat and, to the shock of MPs and police, strode over to the global entrepreneur and shoved a paper plate loaded with shaving foam into his face. May-Bowles was met by a firm slap from Murdoch’s Chinese-born wife Wendi Deng. The proceedings were called to a halt for ten minutes, and Watson strolled over to father and son. As he did so, he heard one of the Murdoch aides say: ‘Don’t worry, this will play well.’ Watson poured the mogul a glass of water and told him, ‘Your wife’s got quite a right hook.’ He asked James if he would like some water too. ‘No, Mr Watson,’ James replied. Watson poured him a glass anyway. At 5.08 p.m. the hearing resumed.

As the three-hour session drew to a close, Watson had a question for the young heir. He wanted to know about an incriminating document about an extraordinarily large payment to a hacking victim, whose silence was bought. ‘James – sorry, if I may call you James, to differentiate,’ Watson said. ‘When you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the “For Neville” email, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?’ James Murdoch looked straight at Watson and replied: ‘No, I was not aware of that at the time.’ The future of the Murdoch dynasty would turn out to hang on the truthfulness of those ten words.

As he entered his ninth decade, Rupert Murdoch ruled over a media business mightier than any other in history. He was, as the title of a recent biography put it,
The Man Who Owns the News
.
¹
At the start of 2011, 1 billion people daily digested his products – books, newspapers, magazines, TV shows and films – and News Corporation, his holding company, had annual sales of $33 billion.