Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (4 page)

The following morning, Siôn Simon took a call from Watson that he remembers as unlike any other:

At first I thought something really cataclysmic had happened, like someone had died or got arrested. He’s been one of my closest friends for a long time, and I’ve never heard him sound like that before or since. He was literally raving. Struggling to choke back tears most of the time, his voice was broken and distorted, and he was just talking crazy. Usually the most hard-headed hyper-rationalist you’ll come across, he was just saying ridiculous things: ‘I’m going to resign, today or tomorrow; I’m completely innocent of everything they’re saying. It’s all just lies and bile, but I’m going to resign anyway, just to show them. I’ll resign with a hard-hitting statement of exactly what they are like, all the lies, all the things they do, the way they just do what they want.’

I told him that it would have no impact, that in any other circumstances, he wouldn’t even be thinking like that, not for a second, but he was massively upset and just looking for a way out of the pressure, to make it go away. I told him he had to keep going. He held it together and didn’t resign. We talked it all through again a few days later, and he was still just saying: ‘Yes, yes I know. Yes, you’re right. Yes I know. I know.’ But he didn’t sound like he really knew anything any more.
⁷

At the next reshuffle, in June 2009, Watson returned to the backbenches, hoping to stabilize his family life. He had had enough; most political commentators thought he was a Brown toady and a thug. By coincidence, five weeks later, he found himself investigating a scandal rooted in Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling empire.

Wapping’s News Factory

Our motto is the truth

–
News of the World
, 1 October 1843

The
News of the World
started with a moral purpose. Founded in 1843 as a digest of news for ‘respectable tradesmen’, its first edition proclaimed: ‘Our motto is the truth; our practice is the fearless advocacy of the truth.’ Circulation rose steadily from a few thousand at launch to 4 million by 1939. By the 1950s, with sales at a high of 8.5 million, the paper was best known for its salacious chronicling of fallen women, adulterous vicars and deviant scoutmasters. After Rupert Murdoch bought it in 1969 with circulation at 6 million, the ‘carnal business’ moved steadily from the inside pages to the front, aided by its proprietor’s grasp of newsstand success. Attacked for buying the memoirs of the Profumo scandal call-girl Christine Keeler in the first months of his ownership, Murdoch responded: ‘People can sneer as much as they like, but I’ll take the 150,000 extra copies we’re going to sell.’
¹

By the mid-1990s onwards, the
News of the World
newsroom, in a converted rum warehouse in London’s docklands, was extreme, even by Murdoch’s standards. Exhorted by him to smash its closest competitors, the
People
and the
Sunday Mirror
, its management fostered an ultra-competitive atmosphere. Reporter was set against reporter and executive against executive. Two competing teams of journalists – the news desk and the features desk – connived and backstabbed to land the front-page story, or ‘splash’. Fearful about the consequences of carrying out their orders, reporters sometimes illictly taped the briefings they received from news editors.
²
Management regularly totted up the numbers of bylines and those who failed to provide an adequate dose of sex and scandal were sacked.

How the newspaper landed its circulation-boosting scoops was not of the utmost importance. While Rupert Murdoch disliked receiving unfavourable judgements from the industry-financed watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), he cared more about grinding his rivals into the dust. What mattered most was the proprietor’s opinion: ‘When you work for Rupert Murdoch you do not work for a company chairman or chief executive: you work for a Sun King,’ recalled Andrew Neil, editor of
The Sunday Times
between 1983 and 1994. ‘You are not a director or a manager or an editor: you are a courtier at the court of the Sun King – rewarded with money and status by a grateful King as long as you serve his purpose, dismissed outright or demoted to a remote corner of the empire when you have ceased to please him or outlived your usefulness.’
³

Although Murdoch sometimes left Neil alone for weeks, he regularly made menacing calls peppered with expletives during Neil’s eleven years as editor: ‘Since nobody is ever sure when the next autocratic intervention will take place (or on what subject), they live in fear of it and try to second-guess what he would want, even in the most unimportant of matters.’ After one of his many talks with Neil, Murdoch did not expect to see his particular views immediately reflected in the next edition of
The Sunday Times
: ‘But he had a quiet, remorseless, sometimes threatening way of laying down the parameters within which you were expected to operate … stray too far too often from his general outlook and you will be looking for a new job.’
⁴

Rather than bring in senior people with experience outside News International to edit his titles, Murdoch generally preferred to appoint young journalists whose outlook had been shaped by his business and who would forever be grateful to him, the Sun King. In particular he promoted ruthless showbusiness hacks whose speciality was becoming ever more important in shifting copies – journalists such as Piers Morgan, Rebekah Wade and Andy Coulson. In their late twenties and early thirties, they were pitched into a lucrative, adrenaline-charged whirl, the backseat of chauffeur-driven limousines and – to their delight and surprise – the dining chairs of Downing Street.

In 1994, Murdoch plucked the 28-year-old Piers Morgan from the
Sun’
s celebrity gossip column, ‘Bizarre’, to edit the
News of the World
, then the highest-selling newspaper in the English-speaking world. The proprietor would regularly enthuse, berate and gossip with his young protégé. In his rumbustious account of his own tabloid capers,
The Insider
, Morgan described one of the many calls Murdoch made to him one Saturday. On 1 April 1995, Morgan had obtained a picture of the gangster Ronnie Kray in his coffin. Murdoch roared: ‘What? You’re splashing on a dead body?’ ‘Erm, yes, Mr Murdoch,’ Morgan replied. The grizzled tycoon paused. ‘Look, it’s not my job to edit the papers,’ he said, ‘but one thing I can tell you is that stiffs don’t sell papers.’ Instead, Morgan ran a picture of Earl Spencer’s wife Victoria at an alcohol and bulimia clinic, earning him a public rebuke from the PCC and soon after from Murdoch too. On 22 May, after delivering the slapdown to his ‘young editor’, Murdoch called again. Morgan realized there was no point complaining because Murdoch was not interested in whining: ‘He just wants to hear precisely how you intend to smash the opposition into oblivion.’ ‘I’m sorry about all that press complaining thingamajig,’ Murdoch explained. ‘We had to deal with it the way we did or they’d all have been banging on about a privacy law again and we don’t need that right now. Anyway, it’s done now. How are you going to sell me more papers?’
⁵

Under Morgan, the paper bribed staff on the rival
Sunday Mirror
and the
People
to obtain their newslists.
⁶
He happily stole other papers’ exclusives – including those of other News Corp titles. On 15 October 1994, he sent his cunning new features editor, Rebekah Wade, to hide in a toilet dressed as a cleaner so she could run back to the
News of the World
from Wapping’s printworks with a copy of
The Sunday Times
’s serialization of Jonathan Dimbleby’s new book on Prince Charles. On another occasion he laughed at a letter from the
Mail on Sunday
warning him not to lift a copyrighted interview to be published that night with the rugby player Will Carling and his wife Julia. Morgan consulted Tom Crone (‘superbright, fearless and cunning’), the
News of the World’
s veteran lawyer. He wrote:

To save time I just shouted to our lawyer across the room: ‘Hey Tom, how many fingers will this cost if we nick it all?’ Tom flicked five fingers at me: £50,000 maximum damages. Well worth a front page and two spreads inside. We got the
Mail
at about 7 p.m. and set about excavating every word … At about 9 p.m. we got another fax from the
Mail
legal team, issuing dire warnings about our ‘flagrant breach of copyright’… We laughed again.
⁷

Paul McMullan, the deputy features editor between 1994 and 2001, swindled the source of a story about the actor Robert de Niro. ‘Yeah, I did a story about two girls in a bubblebath,’ he recalled casually in 2011, ‘and one of them was foolish to tell me all about it and give me all the pictures without signing a contract. So, you know – the normal thing is you promise ten grand [£10,000] for a splash or twenty, ten maybe for a spread … and that made a spread … And we didn’t pay her. She was on my back for ages, but because we didn’t pay her, as I recall, I got a 750 quid bonus for ripping off the source of the story.’
⁸

When McMullan found topless pictures of the models Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen and Carla Bruni in a low-circulation French magazine, he told Piers Morgan: ‘ “Here’s Naomi Campbell topless, and Helena Christensen and [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy’s now wife, but we’ll never get them in a million years because the French are precious about that kind of thing.” And he said: “It’s okay, we’ll just nick them.” ’ On another occasion, McMullan was asked to find the woman in France who had supposedly taken John Major’s virginity: ‘We found her but couldn’t get the picture of her with her new boyfriend. I think the cleaner was in so I blagged my way in and pinched it off the mantelpiece. Rebekah [Wade] said: “No, put it back, we’re not allowed to nick stuff”, but Piers said: “Well done.” ’
⁹

Sex was an obsession at the
News of the World,
so much so that the paper was nicknamed the
News of the Screws.
In the late 1990s, more than 10 million readers – including 4 million from the ABC1 social classes – eagerly consumed its titillating diet of sizzling, lust-filled celebrity romps, ‘kiss and tells’, spanking and perversion. A dedicated team winkled out unusual sexual habits across the UK, infiltrating swingers’ parties to chronicle their deviance. Typically the investigators would obtain sufficient documentary evidence to ‘make their excuses and leave’, but in 1998, under Morgan’s successor as editor, Phil Hall, a senior reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, failed to follow that tradition when visiting a naturists’ guesthouse in Dorset. Suspicious at his voyeuristic demands, the guesthouse’s owners, Sue and Bob Firth had secretly videoed him watching them have sex and recorded him masturbating. Thurlbeck naturally made no mention of his own behaviour in his report, ‘The Guesthouse Where All Rooms Come with En-Suite Pervert’. In retaliation, the Firths posted the pictures to the
NoW
with a request for £250,000 for lost earnings and distress, prompting the paper to hit back with another story that Sunday: ‘The Nudists, Our Naked Reporter and £1/4m Hush Money’, in which Thurlbeck was quoted as saying: ‘If you’re pursuing rats, you sometimes have to go into the sewer.’ The video of his exploits subsequently appeared on the Internet, to the amusement of colleagues in the
News of the World’
s newsroom. An investigation by the Press Complaints Commission and the paper’s management cleared Thurlbeck of wrongdoing and he kept his job. The Firths were not paid off.

After her stint as Piers Morgan’s deputy in the mid-1990s, aged twenty-seven, Rebekah Wade’s charm and ruthlessness were being recognized by Rupert Murdoch. With her burningly ambitious eyes and extravagantly curled red hair tumbling over her shoulders, she cut an enchanting figure and had demonstrated her willingness to succeed at every instance. Her
modus operandi
, explained one former executive, was ‘to solve your problem’.
¹⁰
She became friends with Elisabeth Murdoch and learned to sail – because the Murdochs sailed. Rupert Murdoch promoted her to deputy editor of the
Sun
in 1998 and in May 2000 to editor of the
News of the World,
a heady position for a 32-year-old with no journalism training.

Wade’s notoriously hard-bitten executive news editor was Greg Miskiw, a portly middle-aged man of Ukrainian descent. Neville Thurlbeck, the reporter who had exposed the Firths and himself, was promoted to news editor.

Wade immediately set about repaying Murdoch’s confidence by raising the paper’s profile and sales. On 23 July, she launched a campaign against paedophiles, named after Sarah Payne, an eight-year-old abducted in West Sussex 22 days ealier. The ‘For Sarah’ campaign called for the government to allow parents access to police records identifying local paedophiles. Under the headline ‘NAMED SHAMED’ and the subheading: ‘Everyone in Britain has a child sex offender living within one mile of their home …’, the
Screws
published forty-nine pictures of paedophiles and announced its intention to publish the identities of all of the UK’s 110,000 child sex offenders in following weeks. The campaign provoked a wave of reprisals, most notably in Portsmouth, where more than 100 vigilantes holding up placards saying ‘Kill Paedophiles’ marched through the streets nightly and rioted outside the home of a local taxi driver named by the paper. Another child sex offender, James White, a father of five, committed suicide after a mob surrounded his home in Oldham, Greater Manchester. While White’s case may not have elicited much public sympathy, there were several instances of mistaken identity, such as in Portsmouth, where four innocent families were forced out of their homes; in Plymouth, where a family had to flee their home after the father was mis-identified as a paedophile, and in Manchester, where an innocent man was attacked because he was wearing a neck brace similar to that of an offender pictured in the
News of the World.
In Newport, Gwent, protestors daubed graffiti on the front door of a paediatrician, Yvette Cloete, because of confusion about her job. Police, probation officers and children’s charities warned the campaign would push offenders underground and, amid government unease, Wade suspended it after two weeks, saying the government had agreed to back its demands. The Home Office minister Paul Boateng contradicted that – but Wade’s profile had been raised and the paper had put on 95,000 sales.