Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (10 page)

Even though the charges represented only a fraction of the
Screws’
true criminality, they were highly embarrassing for News International: one of its most senior journalists had been caught burgling the secrets of the royal family. As an act of contrition, Andy Coulson wrote to Sir Michael Peat, Prince Charles’s Private Secretary, apologizing and offering to make a substantial donation to charities of the prince’s choosing.

Despite the seriousness of the offences, News International still desperately hoped Clive Goodman would be spared jail, and hired one of the country’s most expensive criminal barristers, John Kelsey-Fry QC, to represent him. At sentencing on 26 January 2007, Kelsey-Fry painted a sorry picture of the royal editor: ‘He was demoted, sidelined, and another younger reporter was appointed to cover the royal family. Undoubtedly the newspaper business is a tough business. It is a ruthless business. It was while under that pressure that he departed from those high standards by which he had lived his entire life.’ Seeking to minimize the extent of Goodman’s wrongdoing, Kelsey-Fry made plain that his client had not been embroiled in Mulcaire’s non-royal hacking, saying very briefly: ‘Whoever else may be involved at the
News of the World
, his involvement is so limited.’ Kelsey-Fry argued that his client should be spared the ‘clang’ of the prison gates because of the relative unimportance of the stories he had written, prison overcrowding and his public disgrace. On 26 January 2007, the judge, Mr Justice Gross, jailed Goodman for four months and Mulcaire for six for the ‘grave, inexcusable and illegal invasion of privacy’.

Neither the judge, nor the prosecution, nor the hundreds of victims, nor the wider public had any idea of the scale of the lawbreaking at Wapping. That knowledge was confined, for the moment, to News International and Scotland Yard.

Rogue Defence

Goodman’s hacking was aberrational, a rogue exception, an exceptionally unhappy event in the 163-year history of the
News of the World
involving one journalist

– Colin Myler, 22 February 2007

If Clive Goodman had been given a suspended sentence or community service, Andy Coulson might have been able to maintain his position, but that was now impossible. His glorious career at Wapping ended in ignominy at the age of thirty-five. In a statement to the media, Coulson said that although he had not known about hacking, he ‘ultimately’ bore responsibility as editor. In a bad-tempered farewell speech to staff that evening, he remarked that the Home Secretary had recently recommended only the most dangerous criminals be imprisoned, to relieve overcrowding, and that only that day a downloader of child pornography had been spared jail. Terribly unjust it may have been, but the award-winning editor was now out of work.

Rupert Murdoch quickly replaced him with an old tabloid hand, Colin Myler, executive editor of his aggressive
New York Post,
who was hurriedly flown over from New York. Until then Myler had been best known in Britain as the editor of the
Sunday Mirror
who, in 1992, published intimate pictures of Princess Diana working out in a private gym.

Despite Goodman and Mulcaire’s hacking representing a serious invasion of privacy, the newspaper industry was seemingly relaxed about the case – only the
Daily Telegraph
put the sentencing on its front page. But the wrongdoing was regarded as so serious by the Press Complaints Commission that it began an investigation, as did separately the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which had also been concerned by the ICO’s ‘What Price Privacy?’ report and the harassment by photographers of Prince William’s girlfriend, Kate Middleton.

Surprisingly, as Clive Goodman paced his cell at the maximum security HMP Belmarsh, News International carried on paying his wages. The situation was too embarrassing to continue and on 5 February 2007, a week after sentencing, Les Hinton sacked Goodman: the
News of the World
would not, after all, be honouring Andy Coulson’s promise to give him his old job back. But there was a sweetener – a year’s salary, £90,502. ‘I recognize this episode followed many unblemished, and frequently distinguished, years of service to the
News of the World
,’ Hinton informed Goodman. ‘In view of this, and in recognition of the pressures on your family, it has been decided that upon your termination you will receive one year’s salary. In all the circumstances, we would of course be entitled to make no payment whatever … You will be paid, through payroll, on 6 February 2007, twelve months’ base salary, subject to normal deductions of tax and national insurance.’ Goodman was fuming: he believed he had taken the rap and kept his mouth shut, yet he was now being cast into the cold by his employers.

After firing Goodman, the
News of the World
had to fight off the two external inquiries. The PCC, under its chairman Sir Christopher Meyer, decided that because Andy Coulson had ‘left the industry’, he need not be interviewed, but it wanted to hear from his successor, Colin Myler. On 22 February Myler explained that Goodman had concealed the identity of his mysterious royal source, ‘Alexander’; no one else at the paper had known that he was hacking phones and all of the paper’s journalists understood fully the ‘necessity of total compliance’ with the PCC’s code of practice. Myler wrote: ‘Goodman’s hacking was aberrational, a rogue exception, an exceptionally unhappy event in the 163-year history of the
News of the World
involving one journalist.’ The abandonment of Clive Goodman was complete.

But Goodman was not finished. On 2 March, he wrote to News International’s director of human resources, Daniel Cloke, giving notice of his intention to request an internal appeal against his dismissal, despite being jailed for serious professional misconduct. The letter left News International in no doubt that he could still open his mouth.

Dear Mr Cloke

I refer to Les Hinton’s letter of February 5, 2007, informing me of my dismissal for alleged gross misconduct.

The letter identifies the reason for the dismissal as ‘recent events’. I take this to mean my plea of guilty to conspiracy to intercept the voicemail messages of three employees of the royal family.

I am appealing against this decision on the following grounds:

I) The decision is perverse in that the actions leading to this criminal charge were carried out with the full knowledge and support of [
*
]. Payment for Glenn Mulcaire’s services was arranged by [**].

II) The decision is inconsistent, because [*] and other members of staff were carrying out the same illegal procedures. The prosecution counsel, the counsel for Glenn Mulcaire, and the Judge at the sentencing hearing agreed that other News of the World employees were the clients for Mulcaire’s five solo substantive charges. This practice was widely discussed in the daily editorial conference, until explicit reference to it was banned by the Editor. As far as I am aware, no other member of staff has faced disciplinary action, much less dismissal.

III) My conviction and imprisonment cannot be the real reason for my dismissal. The legal manager, Tom Crone, attended virtually every meeting of my legal team and was given full access to the Crown Prosecution Service’s evidence files. He, and other staff on the paper, had long advance knowledge that I would plead guilty. Despite this, the paper continued to employ me. Throughout my suspension I was given book serialisations to write and was consulted on several occasions about royal stories they needed to check. The paper continued to employ me for a substantial part of my custodial sentence.

IV) Tom Crone and the Editor promised me on many occasions that I could come back to a job at the newspaper if I did not implicate the paper or any of its staff in my mitigation plea. I did not, and I expect the paper to honour its promise to me.

V) The dismissal is automatically unfair as the company failed to go through the minimum required statutory dismissal procedures.

Yours sincerely

Clive Goodman

cc Stuart Kuttner, Managing Editor, News of the World

Les Hinton, Executive Chairman, News International Ltd

In 360 precise words, Goodman was threatening to explode the company’s defence: he was claiming phone hacking had been carried out routinely, with management’s ‘full knowledge’.

Four days after the letter was sent, Les Hinton gave evidence to the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee into press standards. Hinton had to be careful, since the last time a senior News International executive had appeared before the committee she had admitted that the company bribed police. But he would never make that mistake. On 6 March 2007, the urbane, silver-haired executive chairman assured the MPs that phone hacking had been a one-off case, the result of lax controls on payments, which had been exploited by Goodman. The police had carried out ‘pretty thorough investigations’, with the result that two men had gone to prison, the
News of the World
had paid a substantial sum to charity and the editor had resigned. Hinton looked them in the eye and said: ‘I believe absolutely that Andy did not have knowledge of what was going on.’

Asked by John Whittingdale, the committee’s Conservative chairman, who had authorized the ‘cheques’ that Goodman had spent, Hinton put him right: these were cash payments. ‘There were actually two issues involved in the Goodman case,’ he said:

There had been a contract with Glenn Mulcaire, during which he was carrying out activities which the prosecution and the judge accepted were legitimate investigative work. There was a second situation where Clive had been allowed a pool of cash to pay to a contact in relation to investigations into royal stories. That, the court was told, was where the money came from and the detail of how he was using that money was not known to the editor. That is not unusual for a contact, when you have a trusted reporter – which Clive was …

At the end of the session, Whittingdale checked: ‘You carried out a full, rigorous internal inquiry, and you are absolutely convinced that Clive Goodman was the only person who knew what was going on?’ ‘Yes, we have,’ Hinton replied, ‘and I believe he was the only person, but that investigation, under the new editor, continues.’

A week later, on 14 March, Goodman decided to appeal his sacking and wrote to Daniel Cloke asking him for a long list of documents for the internal hearing, including emails between himself and several executives at the
News of the World
and, tellingly, a transcript of Les Hinton’s evidence to the Culture Committee. News International denied Goodman’s request for the emails. Instead, Cloke and NI’s legal director Jonathan Chapman (who had previously worked at Enron) reviewed 2,500 emails between Goodman and the executives. They were looking for anything which demonstrated that Goodman was right to claim that others had known about phone hacking and that other journalists at the paper were also engaged in the lawbreaking.

In April, the company’s problems intensified when Glenn Mulcaire launched an employment tribunal case claiming that he was due a pay-off on the grounds that he was an employee. As they considered Mulcaire’s claim, Chapman and Cloke found evidence of police corruption in the internal emails requested by Goodman – which they ignored since they were civil lawyers engaged in an employment law case and had no professional obligation to inform the police. They determined that there was no ‘reasonable evidence’ in the emails to support Goodman’s case that management had known about his criminality and that consequently he had been unfairly dismissed. As they pondered what to do with their jailed royal editor, who had already been paid £90,502, the
News of the World
finally took action against another reporter, though one who had always conducted himself legally. On 26 April 2007, the paper sacked Matt Driscoll, still on sick leave with depression. He began an employment tribunal case.

By now News International had another problem: Gordon Taylor, the footballers’ union leader whose phone Mulcaire had admitted hacking in court. More particularly, News International was having a problem with Taylor’s dogged lawyer, 42-year-old Mark Lewis, a combative figure who prided himself on lateral thinking. By the time Lewis had become head of litigation at the Manchester law firm George Davies, he had overcome a difficult childhood, been the first from his working-class family to go to university and, aged twenty-six, been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which disabled his right hand and affected his speech.

As he watched the BBC’s
Ten O’Clock News
report of the sentencing of Goodman and Mulcaire on 26 January 2007, Lewis remembered a curious incident a year and a half before. In July 2005, the
News of the
World’
s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, had turned up on the doorstep of Jo Armstrong, a lawyer at the Manchester-based Professional Footballers, Association, hoping to ask questions about the private life of its chief executive, Gordon Taylor. A passerby had spotted a photographer taking pictures of the pair lunching and had alerted Taylor, who chased after the snapper and discovered he was working for the
News of the World
. Lewis had written to the newspaper on Taylor’s behalf denying the story. In its response, the
News of the Screws
explained it had obtained the story through ‘proper journalistic inquiry’; the phrase stuck in Lewis’s memory, and he was suspicious of it.