Hack Attack (20 page)

As soon as the
Guardian
published that first story about Gordon Taylor, I’d started to get approaches from lawyers who represented public figures, all of whom seemed to have suspected for years that tabloid journalists had been tapping their phones. They were natural allies: I could help them with information; they could help me with a little bit of power. They could follow the path beaten by Mark Lewis on behalf of Gordon Taylor, by suing the
News of the World
and asking the courts to order Scotland Yard to hand over extracts from Glenn Mulcaire’s paperwork and any other relevant evidence which they had gathered during the original 2006 inquiry. That evidence would be confidential until it came to court, at which point I would be allowed to sit there and take notes and write stories – and possibly to get hard evidence that other journalists, including maybe even Andy Coulson, had been involved.

Mark Lewis and Charlotte Harris were both working with Max Clifford, hoping he would be the first client of the law firm they wanted to set up. They were an extraordinary combination. When Lewis first turned up with Harris in the
Guardian
office a few days after we published the Gordon Taylor story, he introduced her: ‘This is Charlotte Harris, who’s ruining my life at the moment.’ What he meant was that the two of them had dived into one of the world’s most volatile romantic relationships.

Charlotte Harris plays a brilliant game. She is small and vivacious, in her early thirties. She wears high heels, low tops and short skirts. She totters through life batting her big bright eyes at men, who make the simplest and most self-serving of mistakes, which is to assume that she is a dim-witted sex object whose primary function is to sleep with them. The truth is that she has a brain like a Rolls-Royce. She is very sharp, absolutely determined to win her point and perfectly willing to allow men to behave like idiots around her if that’s what their egos demand.

She had sailed through university, won a national award as a student drama critic, written a play which reached the finals of the National Student Drama Festival and marked her graduation with a major confrontation with her mother, who demanded that she drop two things from her life – her boyfriend, whom her mother thought undesirable, and her decision to become a journalist, which her mother thought was even worse. Harris cut a deal, kept the boyfriend, dropped the journalism and trained as a lawyer instead. Seven years later, in December 2006, she had started work at the Manchester law firm George Davies, where Lewis was a senior solicitor.

They had collaborated on the early stages of the Gordon Taylor case. Since then, several things had changed. She had left to work for another Manchester law firm; Lewis was on the verge of a terminal fallout with George Davies; Lewis had left his wife; and the two of them had started their double act. That first day, at the
Guardian
office, they staged the opening performance of what was to become a familiar show, a strange and compelling combination of flirtatious sparring and brilliant legal strategy. I liked both of them a lot.

For the Murdoch organisation, they were a perfect nightmare. Lewis simply wasn’t scared of them: the more they snarled at him, the more he liked it. Harris wasn’t scared either: she had a very strong, just about unstoppable tendency to deal with people who tried to mess her about by smiling like a cherub and telling them to fuck off.

Max Clifford’s case was obviously a strong one. Like Gordon Taylor, he had been named in court as a victim, so there was no doubt that the police were holding evidence that he had been hacked. For most of his long career, Clifford had used the
News of the World
as one of his best clients for the sensational stories he brokered, but in 2005, while Andy Coulson was editor, he had fallen out with them and refused to deal with them any more. So the paper had evidently found their own sweet way of monitoring what he was up to.

Lewis and Harris were also in touch with another of the five original non-royal victims, Sky Andrew, whose work as an agent for Premiership footballers and other sporting figures gave his private life an addictive attraction for the
News of the World
. I undertook to tell Lewis and Harris whatever I could find to help with the two cases in the hope that they would prise information out of the police.

One of the other lawyers who had contacted me also started to play a central role. Mark Thomson shares one particular feature with all of those who were eventually to lead the way against Murdoch – he has a rebel streak. As a student at Cambridge, he had toyed with being an anarchist and he had then worked as a courier, racing a van around London and joining street demonstrations against apartheid in his spare time. He had had no interest in spending his life on a treadmill and had gone off on a poor man’s tour of the world before accidentally drifting into law, simply because a friend in London offered him some work as a legal clerk. He liked it, he stayed, he qualified and, twenty-five years later, he had become highly successful, pioneering the development of the new law of privacy in order to protect clients from the aggressive intrusion of tabloid newspapers.

Most of his clients were seriously famous people. For years he had watched them suffering agonies of doubt, trying to explain how a tabloid newspaper could possibly have discovered some detail of their private lives, sometimes accusing close friends or employees of selling them out, occasionally even imagining that the papers must be intercepting their communications in some way. Thomson had no doubt that the papers were playing dirty. On one occasion, he had directly accused a newspaper of listening to a client’s voicemail messages. The paper had immediately killed the story and Thomson later had heard that his accusation had sent the paper’s editors into meltdown. On 1 June 2009, he had opened his own law firm, with cramped offices in Covent Garden. He and his partner, Graham Atkins, had an impressive list of well-known clients including high-profile actors – Sienna Miller, Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Hugh Grant and others – and the former prime minister, Tony Blair, and his family.

Clearly, the immediate target for these three lawyers was Scotland Yard, who were sitting on the stash of paperwork and other records which they had seized from Glenn Mulcaire when they arrested him in August 2006. Their first objective was to identify clients who had been victims and, since the police were refusing to do so, the lawyers had to take the initiative, to use the civil courts to force them to disclose their evidence. Then finally we might see the scale of all this.

Thomson now wrote to Scotland Yard on behalf of a dozen clients, asking if they had any kind of evidence that any of them had been the victims of illegal activity by Glenn Mulcaire. If they got a yes, they would go to the High Court for an order requiring the police to disclose that evidence. Lewis and Harris were already at that next stage, seeking orders on behalf of Max Clifford and Sky Andrew.

Other lawyers who had got in touch with me also wrote to the police on behalf of George Michael, whose private life had been exposed relentlessly by the tabloid press, largely because he was gay; the former champion jockey Kieren Fallon, who had been accused of taking bribes in a
News of the World
story which had fallen apart when police took it to court; and Gwyneth Paltrow, whose sole offence was to have given birth to a baby boy.

Maybe we were getting somewhere.

*   *   *

But doors were already slamming.

On 21 July, Andy Coulson and three current executives from the
News of the World
gave evidence to the media select committee. I had been feeding information to the two most active Labour MPs, Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson; and also to Adam Price, a clever young Plaid Cymru MP who had shown signs of wanting to get to the truth. There were lots of leads to follow. But, according to Coulson and the three other witnesses, none of them led anywhere.

Coulson cut a confident figure, his haircut as neat as his suit, his manner as clipped as his speech. And he knew nothing – nothing about hacking phones, nothing about blagging confidential data, nothing about any form of illegal activity on any of the newspapers he had worked on. ‘I never had any involvement in it at all,’ he said.

He said he didn’t know about Steve Whittamore. He had never even heard his name. He said he didn’t know about Glenn Mulcaire. He had never even heard his name. He didn’t know about anybody paying money to police officers. He didn’t know anything that the world did not already know. ‘I am absolutely sure that Clive’s case was a very unfortunate rogue case,’ he told the committee.

The three other witnesses also said they knew nothing about anything illegal. The committee asked numerous questions about Glenn Mulcaire.

The new editor of the
News of the World
, Colin Myler, said he could not help. ‘I don’t know the man,’ he said. The long-serving managing editor, Stuart Kuttner, said he knew no more. The long-serving in-house lawyer, Tom Crone, said he knew equally little. He had never even heard his name until he was arrested, he said.

The MPs confronted them with the email for Neville. Here were leads to follow. The witnesses produced more dead ends than a cemetery.

Tom Crone explained that, when the email had been disclosed some twelve months earlier, during Gordon Taylor’s legal action, he had tried to find out more. He had spoken to the reporter who wrote the email, Ross Hindley, but it had turned out that he was very junior at the time, only twenty, and had only just been promoted from being a messenger boy, so he had spent a lot of time typing up stuff, so he just could not remember anything at all about this particular email. And unfortunately, there was no way to ask him any more. He was in Peru.

Crone said he had also spoken to Neville Thurlbeck but unfortunately it turned out that Thurlbeck had never received the email. Thurlbeck thought it was the London news desk who had told him to work on the Gordon Taylor story but unfortunately the relevant person on the news desk said he had never seen the email. Crone had asked the IT department to check whether Ross Hindley might have sent the email to anybody else, but unfortunately the IT department had found nothing.

What about the contract in which Greg Miskiw had offered £7,000 for the Gordon Taylor story to Glenn Mulcaire, using a false name? Kuttner said he knew nothing about it, because the money promised in the contract had never actually been paid. Coulson said he knew nothing about it, because Miskiw had been up in Manchester. And, as it happened, he said, he couldn’t remember anything at all about any Gordon Taylor story.

What about an interesting story which the
News of the World
had published during Coulson’s time as editor, headlined ‘Chelsy tears Harry off a strip’, written by Clive Goodman and Neville Thurlbeck, quoting from a voicemail message left by Prince William on Prince Harry’s mobile phone? Unfortunately, Andy Coulson said he could not remember it. Nor could Tom Crone, apparently.

Still, in their campaign to prove their innocence, they fired off a co-ordinated volley which flew over the
Guardian
’s head and wounded their friends at Scotland Yard. Answering a question which had troubled me, they disclosed that the police had not interviewed a single one of the journalists on the paper – not Ross Hindley and Neville Thurlbeck, who were named in the email for Neville; not Andy Coulson, who was responsible for the journalists; nor Stuart Kuttner, who was responsible for the money they spent; nor Tom Crone, who was responsible for checking the stories they produced. The Yard press office had refused to answer my questions about this. Naively, I had assumed that detectives must have interviewed somebody from the
News of the World
apart from Clive Goodman. And they hadn’t. Nobody else at all. What kind of police inquiry was that?

Coulson offered one other bit of news, which he brought up as the hearing ended, almost as though – as a professional media adviser – he was feeding a sound bite to the press. He disclosed that the day after John Yates had made his statement declaring that there was no need to reopen the inquiry, a detective had called him to tell him that he had been a victim of Mulcaire’s hacking. Coulson underlined his point: ‘I clearly did not know what Glenn Mulcaire was up to.’ The tabloids duly reported this as the main point of the hearing.

A blind man in a dark room could see that these people were lying and, sure enough, very quickly we caught them out on one point. The whole idea of Ross Hindley being a junior reporter, newly promoted from messenger boy, turned out to be high-grade garbage. I passed a tip to the investigative magazine
Private Eye
whose reporter, Tim Minogue, discovered that Hindley had not been twenty at the time, but twenty-eight; had not been newly promoted from being a messenger boy but had been reporting for the
News of the World
for five years; and happened to be the nephew of a former editor of the paper, Phil Hall. News International eventually admitted that Crone’s evidence had been wrong and claimed that Hindley had ‘seemed to be a messenger’ and that Crone had been misled by ‘provocative questioning and interrupting’. Several members of the select committee thought that that reply was genuinely comic.

But for the most part, they got away with their lies. With the police backing them, there was not much to stop them doing so. None of them knew anything about payments that might have been made to Goodman and Mulcaire to keep them quiet when they came out of prison. Nobody offered any convincing explanation as to how they could come to pay more than £1 million to settle the Gordon Taylor case without understanding that this meant they had crime and criminals in their newsroom; nor why they had never mentioned this to press, Parliament or public.

Separately, Les Hinton, the chief executive of News International, came to the same committee to tell a very similar story. ‘There was never any evidence delivered to me that suggested that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.’