Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (49 page)

Their alleged crimes? To act as journalists have acted on all newspapers through the ages, unearthing stories that shape our lives, often obstructed by those who prefer to operate behind closed doors.

A huge operation driven by politicians threatens the very foundations of a free Press. Before it is too late, should we not be asking where all this is likely to lead?

At the same time,
The Times
was becoming embroiled in its own long-buried scandal: the hushed-up hacking of the emails of the police blogger ‘Nightjack’, DC Richard Horton (see page 86). Confronted with a standard question from the Leveson Inquiry about computer hacking,
The Times’
s editor, James Harding told the law lord in his first statement on 14 October: ‘
The Times
has never used or commissioned anyone who used computer hacking to source stories. There was an incident where the newsroom was concerned that a reporter had gained unauthorized access to an email account. When it was brought to my attention, the journalist faced disciplinary action.’ That statement was disingenuous since Harding knew that the paper’s reporter, Patrick Foster,
had
used computer hacking on the Nightjack story. Over the coming weeks the truth was slowly dragged out of
The Times
. Its legal director, Alastair Brett, and its managing editor, David Chappell, had known by 4 June 2009 that Foster had used hacking, but the paper had published his story days later regardless after seeing off a legal attempt by Horton to prevent its publication. In that High Court case,
The Times
had made no mention of the hacking to the judge, Mr Justice Eady, who was told that Foster had identified Horton by painstaking detective work. At the Leveson Inquiry on 7 February 2012, Harding said he did not think the paper’s testimony to the High Court had been truthful, but he insisted that he had not personally known about the hacking until several days after publication of the story – despite being alerted to it in an email prior to publication (which he claimed he had been too busy to read). Harding disciplined Foster over the incident, but promoted him a year later to media editor. Cheeks flushed, Harding told Lord Leveson: ‘When you look back at all of this, sir – I really hope you understand – it’s terrible. I really hope you appreciate that. I know that as keenly as you do.’ Operation Tuleta, the Metropolitan Police’s inquiry into computer hacking, began investigating the Nightjack affair.

Battered on all sides, morale among journalists at Wapping sank. On 16 February, however, Rupert Murdoch jetted into London to reaffirm his faith in the papers that built his empire. With Lachlan Murdoch by his side, he toured the newsroom, revoked the suspensions of the arrested staff and announced the imminent launch of a Sunday edition of the
Sun.
On 20 February, the
Sun
ran a 484-word story proclaiming that it would rise the following Sunday, without mentioning the
News of the World
. (The
News of the World
had been written out of the past, just as James Murdoch was being written out of the future.)

But Murdoch, the grand manipulator, could no longer control events. On 27 February, the police chief Sue Akers – irritated by criticism that her officers were arresting journalists merely for trivial offers of hospitality to the police – responded by explaining that the paper was being investigated for paying tens of thousands of pounds of bribes to staff across a swath of public life, including the police, military, prisons and health service. Lest anyone be in doubt, she added the officials were being bribed not for public interest stories but for ‘salacious gossip’ and that the
Sun
had tried to cover its tracks by paying cash and channelling the payments to friends and relatives of public servants. In her witness statement she said:

The payments have been made not only to police officers but to a wide range of public officials. There are other categories as well as police: military, health, government, prison and others. This suggests that payments were being made to public officials who were in all areas of public life. I have said that the current assessment is that it reveals a network of corrupted officials. When I say ‘network’ I don’t necessarily mean that the officials are in contact with each other; more that the journalists had a network upon which to call at various strategic places across public life.

There also appears to have been a culture at the
Sun
of illegal payments, and systems have been created to facilitate those payments, whilst hiding the identity of the officials receiving the money.

At the end of February, News Corp announced that James Murdoch, once the heir, was standing down from the chairmanship of News International. On 3 April he gave up the even more powerful position of chairman of BSkyB, saying optimistically: ‘I believe that my resignation will help to ensure that there is no false conflation with events at a separate organisation.’ At the time this book went to press, he was still a director of News Corporation.

On 13 March, his friend Rebekah Brooks and her husband Charlie, and four other individuals, including Mark Hanna, News International’s head of security, were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The following day, Neville Thurlbeck, the
News of the World’
s former chief reporter, was arrested on suspicion of intimidating a witness. He had written a report on his website that News International had upgraded the home security of Will Lewis, now overseeing the efforts of the Management and Standards Committee to distance the company from corruption, in which he had identified the street Lewis lived on.

By now, News Corp was surrounded in every direction and facing investigations from regulators and the police on both sides of the Atlantic. In secrecy in January, Ofcom – the regulator the Murdochs had hoped to hobble – had begun ‘Project Apple’, an inquiry into whether the stream of disclosures from the Metropolitan Police and the Leveson Inquiry rendered News Corp unfit to own its 39 per cent controlling stake in BSkyB, the broadcaster it had been on the verge of taking over the previous July. In February, the Independent Police Complaints Commission launched an inquiry into whether a police officer had in 2006 inappropriately passed Rebekah Brooks details of Operation Caryatid, the original police investigation into phone hacking (see page 46). Lord Leveson’s inquiry was publicly delving into the relationship between Murdoch’s organization and senior police officers and politicians; dozens of new victims were launching phone hacking cases; and the Commons Culture Committee was preparing a report which would make clear the extent to which News International had misled Parliament. The FBI was intensifying its investigations into bribery, which could result in corporate prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

At Scotland Yard, in March, 169 detectives and support staff were working on the linked Operations Weeting, Tuleta and Elveden, making them together the biggest criminal inquiry in the country. Weeting had discovered the names and phone numbers of 4,375 individuals in Glenn Mulcaire’s notes, of which 829 were likely to have been victims. Elveden was investigating the corruption of a network of police and public officials by the
Sun
. Tuleta was examining more than fifty computers and other electronic devices, including those of the former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain – who may have had his emails hacked while occupying one of the most sensitive posts in government – and the former Labour aide Derek Draper. Ironically, it was Draper who had received the rumour-mongering emails sent by Damien McBride in 2009 which so damaged Brown’s administration, months before News International decisively switched to the Conservatives – the party which was prepared to grant its parent company complete control of BSkyB.

What began with the battle of Prince William’s wounded knee had turned into the worst scandal in British public life in decades, touching almost every pillar of British life: the royal family, the government, the civil service, the courts, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and, of course, the media.

All News International’s titles and many others on Fleet Street had been tainted, but two facts separated Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers from others: the hard evidence and the cover-up. When detectives raided Glenn Mulcaire’s home on 8 August 2006 they found 11,000 pages of notes clearly indicating that the
News of the World
had been systematically engaged in a campaign of illegal phone hacking. The Metropolitan Police failed to tackle that properly for five years, until 2011. Rather than a fearless, impartial investigator, it was meek and malleable. Its senior officers were lunched by the newspaper executives they should have been investigating and, both before and after leaving office, eagerly accepted their largesse. Less senior officers have now been arrested for directly accepting corrupt payments for the supply of stories. Scotland Yard’s reputation for competence and probity has been so badly damaged it will take years to repair. Urgent questions remain about the murder of Daniel Morgan (and in Scotland about the conviction of Tommy Sheridan, which looks increasingly unsafe).

But Scotland Yard was not the only force or regulator to fail. If Devon and Cornwall’s inquiry in 2002 had succeeded, if Surrey Police had prosecuted the blatant phone hacking identified that same year, or if, the following year, the Information Commissioner’s Office had prosecuted the most prolific law-breaking journalists, thousands of people might have been saved from the illegal intrusions into their lives – intrusions which were seldom in the public interest and which often carried a high personal price. Deliberately denuded of the power to levy fines or seize documents, the Press Complaints Commission proved itself inadequate to its task. Under its new chairman the Conservative politician Lord Hunt, it is reinventing itself as a tougher body, but that may not be enough to satisfy Lord Leveson, whose inquiry is likely to end the system of self-regulation which has creaked for decades.

Many institutions failed – but there were individual failures too. The holders of high office failed in their duty to protect the public:

– the Scotland Yard detectives who ignored the bulk of the wrongdoing

– the PCC chairwoman who did not understand how the press actually operated

– the Assistant Commissioner who did not open the bags of evidence

– the Director of Public Prosecutions who did not read all the paperwork

– the London mayor who did not demand action from his police force

– the Queen’s solicitors who knowingly continued to act for a lying corporation

– the national newspaper editors who persistently avoided the story

– the BBC executives who failed to devote resources to a national scandal

– the cabinet minister who did not take into account a history of broken promises when supporting a £7 billion takeover

– the Prime Minister who did not listen to warnings about his new director of communications, and whose government prostrated itself in front of a foreign tycoon

Incompetence alone cannot explain all of these failures. Fear allowed the phone hacking scandal to happen – fear of public humiliation for an indiscretion, fear of not winning that glowing endorsement. Politically, given the fixed opinions of much of the press – to the left the
Mirror
, the middle the
Independent
and
Guardian
, and the right the
Daily Mail
,
Express
and
Telegraph –
Rupert Murdoch held the balance of power. He was the ultimate floating voter and five successive governments courted his support. All prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron turned a blind eye when they should have intervened and allowed his dominance to rise, deal by deal, election by election.

From the start of his career in 1950s Australia, Murdoch manipulated politicians and broke rules and promises to accumulate money and power. It may not be possible to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he knew about the wrongdoing in Britain. Many, including the authors, think he is, at best, guilty of wilful blindness. As the head of the company, he shaped its culture. While he depicted phone hacking as an
anomaly
, something set apart from an otherwise virtuous organization, seasoned Murdoch-watchers identified the wrongdoing as part of a
pattern –
the greatest manifestation of a win-at-all-costs diktat which bent and broke the rules at will, as the former
Sunday Times
editor Andrew Neil pointed out:

You create a climate in which people think it’s alright to do certain things. And I would argue that Rupert Murdoch with his take-no-prisoners attitude to journalism – the end will justify the means, do whatever it takes – created the kind of newsroom climate in which hacking and other things were done with impunity on an industrial scale.
²

In a sense, what is most revealing is not that his newspaper company was breaking the law at will and paying off police and officials, but how it responded when it was caught. In 2006 its representatives blocked and intimidated police trying to execute a search warrant and failed to hand over important evidence to detectives. In 2007, Murdoch’s chief lieutenant Les Hinton failed to tell the Commons Culture Committee about Goodman’s claims that hacking was routine, and failed to call in the police to investigate those claims; instead he sanctioned hush payments for Goodman and Mulcaire. When given evidence of more widespread wrongdoing in 2008, Murdoch’s son and heir, James, did not correct Hinton’s testimony, nor inform the police. Instead, he authorized another massive hush payment, to Gordon Taylor. In 2009, under James Murdoch’s chairmanship, News International impugned the reputation of an honest journalist, repeatedly misled Parliament, surveilled an MP, began a smear exercise and intimidated and lied. In 2010, still with James Murdoch in charge, executives ordered the systematic destruction of evidence to cover up its illegal handiwork, ordered surveillance on lawyers challenging the company, and secretly paid off another high-profile victim. Under Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, News International fought civil claimants all the way, denying everything they possibly could at every stage. Even if the Murdochs did only learn of the extent of their employees’ previous criminality at the end of 2010, as they claim, they did not then inform the police, nor correct four years of misleading evidence to MPs, nor apologize to journalists and the public. Only journalistic, parliamentary, police and judicial inquiries prised out the truth. At all times until very recently – and then arguably only under the pressing need to avoid its directors being jailed – News Corp acted to cover up rather than uncover its past.