Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (17 page)

But it did not. Many members of the committee felt that they had been misled and after the summer recess, they called Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner, John Yates, to give evidence. On 2 September, ‘Yates of the Yard’ stuck rigidly to his position that the original investigation had been a success. ‘As I said previously,’ he maintained, ‘there is essentially nothing new in the [Taylor] story other than to place in the public domain additional material which had already been considered by both the police investigation into Goodman and Mulcaire and by the CPS and the prosecution team.’ Rather ludicrously, he said he could not know the identity of the Neville in the ‘For Neville’ email because ‘It is supposition to suggest Neville Thurlbeck or indeed any other Neville within the
News of the
World
or any other Neville in the journalist community.’ Even if Thurlbeck had been interviewed, he added, it was ‘99.9 per cent certain’ he would have said nothing to the police, just like Goodman and Mulcaire. Paul Farrelly protested: ‘But there is a series of transcripts of phone conversations.’ ‘Perhaps in 2006 it ought to have been done,’ Yates replied, ‘I do not know – but in 2009 that is going to take us absolutely nowhere.’

The committee recalled Les Hinton, who was now running Murdoch’s new acquisition in the US, Dow Jones. Like others, Hinton had tried to avoid giving evidence, but the committee agreed to conduct the hearing by live video link from New York. On 15 September 2009, Hinton could recall few details of his time running Murdoch’s multibillion-pound empire, at least about the events which led to the jailing of a senior journalist. On thirty-two occasions he said: ‘I don’t know,’ ‘I did not know’ or ‘I just do not know.’ Had Wapping paid Goodman and Mulcaire’s legal fees? ‘I absolutely do not know,’ Hinton replied. ‘I do not know whether we did or not. There were certainly some payments made afterwards, but on the matter of legal fees I honestly don’t know.’

Hinton – who had been sent Goodman’s letter alleging the
NoW
routinely hacked phones and authorized his pay-off – said, ‘There was never any evidence delivered to me that suggested that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.’

As the committee continued its work, News International had another assignment for a surveillance expert who had worked for the
News of the World
since 2003, Derek Webb, whose firm was called Silent Shadow. The former policeman had legally watched dozens of pop stars, footballers and royals. Among many others, in 2005 he had followed Angelina Jolie, Delia Smith, Gordon Ramsay and the Home Secretary Charles Clarke (whose responsibilities included the police); in 2006 George Michael and the comedian Rik Mayall; and in 2007, the Duke of Westminster. Typically, his work would involve him tailing a target for five days and then noting down where they had gone, who they had met and what they were wearing.

From 28 September until 2 October 2009, at the last Labour Party conference before the general election, Webb was ordered to follow the every move of Tom Watson. He had difficulty tracking the MP down. Ironically, on the first night, 28 September, Webb would have been more successful had he phoned the
News of the World’
s political editor, Ian Kirby, who had spent the night drinking with Watson, the
Sunday Mirror
’s Vincent Moss and the
Mirror
columnist Kevin Maguire in the bar of Brighton’s Grand Hotel, where they sang songs round the piano until the early hours. Tight security because of the presence of the cabinet made following Watson difficult, but Webb billed the paper for seven and a half shifts, £1,125. Before and after following Watson (who was unaware of the surveillance) he tailed Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary.

As well as its covert work, News International had a public wrecking role at the conference. With the next general election less than a year away and both Labour and Conservatives vying for its approval, the company was working from a position of strength. For months under its newly-married chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, it had been moving firmly towards her friend David Cameron, who evidently agreed with its corporate agenda. The
Sun
now used Gordon Brown’s leader’s speech on 29 September as the moment to abandon its wholehearted twelve-year support for Labour. Its front page yelled ‘Labour’s Lost It’. In his hotel suite that night with Peter Mandelson, Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Tom Watson (still oblivious he was being followed), Gordon Brown was shocked at the brutality: Britain’s best-selling daily paper had clearly intended to sabotage his last conference before polling day. The paper wrote:

Twelve years ago, Britain was crying out for change from a divided, exhausted government. Today we are there again.

In 1997, ‘New Labour’, shorn of its destructive hard-left doctrines and with an energetic and charismatic leader, seemed the answer. Tony Blair said things could only get better, and few doubted him. But did they get better? Well, you could point to investment in schools and shorter hospital waiting lists and say yes, some things did – a little.

But the real story of the Labour years is one of under-achievement, rank failure and a vast expansion of wasteful government interference in everyone’s lives.

If Labour ministers had any doubt about what was to come, it was now dispelled. Over the coming months
,
the
Sun
harried and goaded Brown, deriding him in the same way it had the Conservative Prime Minister John Major before switching its support to Tony Blair in 1997. In October the
Sun
’s front page screamed ‘Bloody Shameless’, denouncing the blind-in-one-eye Prime Minister’s alleged misspelling of the name of a young soldier killed in Afghanistan in a handwritten letter to his mother.

Back in the House of Commons, Tom Watson suspected hacking had been widespread at the
News of the World,
but it was only at the beginning of the new parliamentary session in October that he learned just how rampant the ‘dark arts’ were at Wapping. The Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik, a friend for years since they had competed against each other on TV’s
Ready Steady Cook
, had brought Charlotte Harris, his lawyer, along for a drink in the Strangers’ Bar, where he bumped into Watson. Watson and Harris arranged to have lunch the following day at the Adjournment restaurant in Portcullis House, where during a five-hour conversation, Watson realized many victims of the
NoW
had not been informed by police, and Harris (who could not understand why Parliament was so supine) was left in no doubt about the extent of Rupert Murdoch’s political reach. On Harris’s advice, Watson went to Brown, the Prime Minister, urging him to contact the Metropolitan Police to establish whether his own phone had been hacked. He also started to work more closely with politicians who feared they were in a similar position. First he patched up an argument he had had with Chris Bryant two years earlier and then mended his relationship with John Prescott, which had been strained since the latter had described Watson’s resignation in 2006 as the ‘corporal’s revolt’; they began to meet over fried breakfasts in the House of Lords canteen.

Politically, Labour MPs and ministers started to be less charitable towards News International. In November, Brown’s government published a review by the former Football Association executive David Davies into which of the ‘crown jewels’ of sport should be aired on terrestrial TV, which recommended that BSkyB be stripped of its exclusive live rights to screen cricket’s most important fixture, the Ashes. The Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, said he ‘welcomed’ the report. In the relationship between Brown’s administration and Murdoch’s company, the gloves were off.

Under Andy Coulson’s gimlet eye, David Cameron had secured the support of Britain’s best-selling daily paper, but Coulson had done more than that. During the summer of 2009, with his help, Cameron had consistently outplayed Gordon Brown in his handling of the MPs’ expenses row – exposed by the
Daily Telegraph
– when the Conservative leader grasped much more quickly than the Prime Minister how outraged voters would be at the greed of politicians. But as he was moving the Conservatives into power, the past was beginning to catch up with Coulson. First, he had been forced to appear before the Commons Culture Committee; then, on 23 November, Matt Driscoll, the sacked sportswriter, won his employment case against the
News of the World
. A tribunal in east London ordered News International to pay Driscoll the rast sum of £792,736 in compensation for what it very specifically ruled had been a campaign of bullying orchestrated by Coulson, the director of communications for the Conservative Party. It found Driscoll had been disgracefully victimized when he was under strain mentally, stating: ‘The original source of the hostility towards the claimant was Mr Coulson, the editor; although other senior managers either took their lead from Mr Coulson and continued with his motivation after Mr Coulson’s departure; or shared his views themselves.’
³

News International, which was pleased to have Coulson ensconced with Cameron, had refused to settle with Driscoll or include him in any redundancy rounds and had fought his case every inch of the way. Driscoll said bitterly:

Ignoring the medical warnings as to the possible effect on my health, they chose to fight me for two years. They insisted, despite my health situation, on forcing me into a two-week tribunal. Having hired one of the country’s top employment barristers they called no fewer than ten witnesses … they remained relentless toward me. Three times they appealed against my successful claim for unfair dismissal. Though each appeal was thrown out, the ordeal cost me my health, my career, my life savings and £150,000 in legal costs.
⁴

Cameron refused to sack Coulson. He may have been bad in the past, but he was too good to lose.

On 9 November, the Press Complaints Commission, now being chaired by Baroness Buscombe, a 55-year-old former Conservative frontbencher from Oxfordshire, humiliated itself further by again exonerating the
News of the World
. Showing little scepticism or insight, the PCC accepted the police’s and News International’s explanations about the extent of illegality at Wapping, despite the ‘For Neville’ email, the size of the Gordon Taylor settlement and NI’s pay-offs to Goodman and Mulcaire. Its second report into phone hacking (so flawed it was withdrawn two years later) stated:

The PCC has seen no new evidence to suggest that the practice of phone message tapping was undertaken by others beyond Goodman and Mulcaire, or evidence that the
News of the World
knew about Goodman and Mulcaire’s activities. It follows that there is nothing to suggest that the PCC was materially misled during its 2007 inquiry.

Indeed, having reviewed the matter, the Commission could not help but conclude that the
Guardian’
s stories did not quite live up to the dramatic billing they were initially given. Perhaps this was because the sources could not be tested; or because Nick Davies was unable to shed further light on the suggestions of a broader conspiracy at the newspaper; or because there was significant evidence to the contrary from the police; or because so much of the information was old and had already appeared in the public domain (or a combination of these factors). Whatever the reason, there did not seem to be anything concrete to support the implication that there had been a hitherto concealed criminal conspiracy at the
News of the World
to intrude into people’s privacy.

The verdict was a hammer blow to the
Guardian
; not only had the watchdog dismissed its front-page exclusive, it effectively accused it of sensationalism. Alan Rusbridger resigned from the PCC’s code committee in disgust.

Scotland Yard seized the opportunity to lobby the
Guardian
to drop its hostile coverage. On 10 December 2009, the Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, accompanied by his head of public affairs, Dick Fedorcio, visited Rusbridger in the paper’s glass and steel office in King’s Cross and told him that Nick Davies’s coverage was ‘overegged’ and had wrongly implied the force was ‘party to a conspiracy’. Rusbridger, who had joined the paper on the same day as Davies in 1979, kept his faith in his old friend. That evening Stephenson and Fedorcio dined with John Yates and Neil Wallis at what Stepehnson later called ‘a pub/restaurant that I frequented socially’. The occasion was listed in his office diary as a private event.

Undeterred by Colin Myler’s letter in August, the Culture Committee requested further details of News International’s internal inquiries and the pay-offs to Goodman and Mulcaire. In November, Rebekah Brooks wrote back enclosing an explanation from the legal director Jonathan Chapman confirming NI had settled Goodman and Mulcaire’s claims for unfair dismissal, but only because of technicalities, and again declined to disclose the ‘confidential’ sums. Asked how many Nevilles the company employed, Brooks replied: ‘One.’

In answer to the queries about the internal inquiries, she enclosed the letter of 29 May 2007 from Lawrence Abramson, at Harbottle & Lewis, detailing its review of the emails for Clive Goodman’s employment case (see p. 60). Set in the context of an internal inquiry into widespread wrongdoing at the
News of the World
, Abramson’s words looked reassuring. The letter – which would be the subject of controversy later – appeared to indicate that an external law firm had made a thorough check and found no evidence of a wider problem at Wapping. But Harbottle & Lewis had reviewed only a limited number of emails for the employment case and had not given permission for the letter to be sent to the committee.