Hack Attack (11 page)

In an attempt to get the story covered elsewhere, the
Guardian
press office had asked me to brief two broadcast journalists from
Channel 4 News
and the BBC. That Wednesday morning, before we posted the story, I had met them in a café at Victoria Station. The Channel 4 man brought a crew and shot an interview, which they used prominently that evening. The BBC man went off to consult his bosses, who then suffered some kind of nervous collapse and refused to run anything until Channel 4 did and, even then, opted to run it low down in the bulletins.

In the political world, the Labour government might have decided to leap on the vulnerability of Andy Coulson and challenge David Cameron to explain what steps he had taken to ensure that Coulson was clean before he hired him; complain that he had hired Coulson with his eyes shut simply so that he could have Murdoch’s man in his private office; move to set up some kind of inquiry. The government did no such thing. Instead, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, said merely that it raised serious questions; and a Home Office minister, David Hanson, told the House of Commons that these were serious allegations and he would find out more and report back to them. For his part, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, professed to be indifferent: his office briefed reporters that he was ‘very relaxed’ about the affair. (The briefings from his office, of course, were given by people who were working for Andy Coulson.)

There was some sign of action from the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport, to whom the Murdoch executives had given misleading evidence in 2007. I had called the committee chairman, the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, as we published our first story. He and several Labour members were now saying that the committee would recall the Murdoch witnesses. That night, on BBC’s
Newsnight
, Murdoch’s former editor at the
Sunday Times
, Andrew Neil, roundly declared that this was ‘one of the most significant media stories of modern times’.

Murdoch himself surfaced briefly in New York, where a reporter from Bloomberg asked him for a quote about the Gordon Taylor settlement. Shrugging and shaking his head, he declared that his company couldn’t have settled the legal action as the
Guardian
claimed. If they had done, he would have known about it, he said. That raised the interesting possibility that James Murdoch had signed off on a £1 million settlement and decided not to tell his own father in case he went ballistic. There was no word at all from News International.

*   *   *

By the next morning, Thursday 9 July, there was a small storm raging, and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, announced that he had asked his assistant commissioner, John Yates, to look into the whole matter.

I was running on adrenalin. I had slept about four hours and was up at dawn, trying to write follow-up stories while simultaneously taking endless calls from foreign news media and BBC radio stations wanting to interview me, and a steady trickle of calls from lawyers and agents acting for public figures who suspected that they had been targeted by Mulcaire. There were also calls from potentially very useful new sources. Several journalists who had worked at the
News of the World
emerged cautiously from the shadows, talking on the strict condition that their identities never be disclosed for fear that their careers would be ended immediately, explaining in detail how Andy Coulson had commissioned crime and the paper had paid for it. Three people, including one just out of jail, got in touch to name other private investigators who had worked for the
News of the World
.

By five o’clock in the afternoon, with my head buzzing, I had written a story for the next day’s paper, disclosing that the former England football striker, Alan Shearer, and the manager of Manchester United, Alex Ferguson, were among those whose messages had been intercepted from Gordon Taylor’s phone. It was not much of a tale, but it kept the affair alive. Just then, I was surprised to hear that the assistant commissioner, John Yates, was already prepared to make a statement. A small bony hand pinched my heart as it occurred to me that he might rubbish the whole story.

I had never met John Yates nor had anything to do with him, but other journalists said he was intelligent and straight. So, in spite of my anxiety, I was reasonably confident when Yates stepped out in front of Scotland Yard to address a collection of journalists. Dressed in a dark suit, bristling with quiet authority, he explained that that morning the commissioner had asked him to ‘establish the facts’. ‘I was not involved in the original case,’ he said, ‘and clearly come at this with an independent mind.’ He proceeded to gently demolish our work.

We had suggested there were thousands of victims. Yates said that those targeted by Goodman and Mulcaire ‘may have run into hundreds of people, but our inquiries showed that they only used the tactic against a far smaller number of individuals’. We had said a mass of victims had never been contacted by the police. Yates said: ‘Where there was clear evidence that people had potentially been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by the police.’ We had said John Prescott was targeted. Yates said police ‘had not uncovered any evidence to suggest that John Prescott’s phone had been tapped’. This was worrying. I had no way of proving he was wrong. I had good sources – but they were all anonymous and off the record. I had paperwork – but I had promised not to use it. We were wide open to attack.

There was something else that was more worrying. Why was Yates saying this? If he was wrong – if, in fact, what the
Guardian
had published was correct – then this smelled very rotten, as if he thought it was all right to cover up the failures of the original inquiry and/or to do a favour for Murdoch’s newspapers. But supposing he was right! Supposing the two sources somehow had misunderstood the number of hacking victims. Supposing Glenn Mulcaire had ‘targeted’ John Prescott by having him followed, not by hacking his phone or doing anything illegal. Supposing there was something wrong with that paperwork: it really wouldn’t be difficult to forge the contents of an email … Rusbridger and I had gone in very deep. If Yates was right, if our story was rubbish, we were in a lot of trouble.

Yates went on to say that the whole case had been the object of ‘the most careful investigation by very experienced detectives’ and that the Crown Prosecution Service had ‘carefully examined all the evidence’. Since no additional evidence had come to light, he could see no reason to reopen the inquiry. He finished by acknowledging the real concerns of people who feared their privacy had been breached. ‘I therefore need to ensure that we have been diligent, reasonable and sensible and taken all proper steps to ensure that, where we have evidence that people have been the subject of any form of phone-tapping, or that there is any suspicion that they might have been, that they have been informed.’

Yates’s statement hurt us. And there was a little more pain, too, from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC, another man with a good reputation for straight dealing, who announced that he was ordering an urgent review of the material which police had given to his prosecutors in 2006 but then appeared to prejudge his own inquiry by adding: ‘I have no reason to consider that there was anything inappropriate in the prosecutions that were undertaken in this case.’ And something else to worry about: the select committee had decided not only to call back the Murdoch witnesses but also to call me to give a public account of the story on Tuesday of the following week.

The newspapers who had done their best to ignore our story were now happy to report that there would be no new police investigation. Meanwhile, News International still said nothing. It was like we were beggars at their banquet. Who were we to gatecrash their cosy world? We would be ignored, or perhaps we would be punished. You could almost feel them watching, weighing it up: how much did we know, how much could we hurt them, how much could they safely deny? It took a bad mistake from me finally to give them a clear answer to their questions.

*   *   *

That Thursday night, as John Yates’s statement made its mark, I went live on BBC
Newsnight
with the celebrity PR agent Max Clifford, who had been identified as a hacking victim at the original trial of Goodman and Mulcaire; the former deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick; and John Prescott. The anchor, Gavin Esler, immediately asked me how damaging Yates’s statement was for the
Guardian
, but the conversation bounced harmlessly around the subject – Clifford suggested he might now sue, Paddick said there should be some kind of independent police inquiry, Prescott worried out loud that Yates had taken so little time to come to his conclusion. Then, in the last minute, Esler turned back to me and asked me what else the
Guardian
might reveal. I babbled a bit about possibly naming executives who were involved but told him: ‘You have seen the best of what we’ve got.’ That was my mistake.

For Murdoch’s people, calculating their next move, and looking at our stories with the eyes of experienced journalists, it was already obvious that we had quoted no evidence of any kind. We simply stated the facts, but we used no named sources, no quotes from documents. And if that really was the best of what we had, then they could see that we were not going to produce any sources or documents. In other words, we couldn’t prove a thing.

By Friday morning, our political correspondents in the House of Commons were reporting that Murdoch journalists were briefing Conservative MPs that the
Guardian
could not back up its story. The House of Commons select committee had already told me and Rusbridger that we must appear before them on the following Tuesday, and now we were warned that several Murdoch-friendly MPs on the committee were ‘getting ready to barbecue you’. Then, on Friday evening, the tiger finally showed its claws.

News International released a three-page statement which poured down scorn on the
Guardian
. In the last forty-eight hours, they said, they had conducted a thorough investigation, which augmented the original investigation they had conducted in 2006 when Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested. In addition, the original police investigation, which had included live monitoring of both men, had been ‘incredibly thorough’. Based on all this, they concluded that ‘there is not and never has been evidence’ that
News of the World
journalists had accessed anybody’s voicemails, or instructed anybody to access voicemails, or that there was systematic corporate illegality at News International. ‘It goes without saying that, had the police uncovered such evidence, charges would have been brought against other
News of the World
personnel. Not only have there been no such charges, but the police have not considered it necessary to arrest or question any other member of
News of the World
staff.’ Specifically, the statement continued, it was untrue that police had found evidence that ‘thousands’ of mobile phones had been hacked; untrue that police had found evidence of the involvement in hacking of other staff; untrue that there was evidence of their hacking the phones of John Prescott or any other victims named by the
Guardian
; untrue that their executives had sanctioned payment for hacking. ‘All of these irresponsible and unsubstantiated allegations against the
News of the World
and its journalists are false.’

This was strong stuff. At the same time, they released a letter from Rebekah Brooks to the chairman of the House of Commons media select committee, John Whittingdale. ‘The
Guardian
coverage, we believe, has substantially and likely deliberately misled the British public,’ she wrote, and the allegation that thousands of people were the objects of illegal phone-hacking had been ‘roundly contradicted’ by John Yates. Very strong.

All this ran like water down a mountain through the columns of the Murdoch newspapers and the bulletins of his Sky News channel. It was frightening to watch and, since the statement had been released just as Fleet Street was hitting the deadline for its first editions, it was also very difficult to counter.

I was at home, alone in my study, when this torrent of aggression was released. As I saw it break out on to my computer screen, a feeling of dread swamped me. For a moment or two, my brain just stalled and then, like a malignant cell, a horrible thought silently formed itself – I had screwed up. I’d got the story wrong – a big story, that had gone round the world, that had had politicians and public figures standing up on their back legs shouting for action. And it was wrong, or maybe it was wrong, or I couldn’t be sure, but if it was wrong – on that kind of scale – Rusbridger and I really were in a deep pit of foul-smelling trouble.

And then it got worse. I took a call from the
Independent on Sunday
, who lobbed a highly destructive verbal bombshell in my direction. They told me they wanted to run a story accusing me of paying bribes to police officers, specifically of paying bribes in order to obtain the phone-hacking stories which we had just published. I started gabbling down the phone – I’d never paid a bribe in my life, why were they saying this, who had said this to them, which officer was I supposed to have paid, when, where, why, didn’t they understand they were accusing me of crime, didn’t they understand they couldn’t just publish crap like that? The reporter said they had a good source. It was as if he could not hear me telling him that this just wasn’t true.

I called Rusbridger in his office in London, who told me that he had just taken a call from David Leppard at Murdoch’s
Sunday Times
. Leppard! Of all the reporters in all the newsrooms in all the world, Leppard was the person you least wanted to have on the end of your phone. He was no friend of the
Guardian
and nor was his editor, John Witherow, who had once flared up at a story about his paper in the
Guardian
and told Rusbridger that ‘I will always retaliate and I have many more readers than you do, so I can cause you much more pain.’ I had written harsh things about Leppard in
Flat Earth News
, and he had publicly declared he was suing me, although he never did. Now, he told Rusbridger he planned to run a story that Sunday, accusing him of hiring a private investigator who had illegally hacked into voicemail.