Hack Attack (39 page)

I discovered that one of those who had been warned by the police in 2006 was the left-wing MP George Galloway. I hooked him up with Mark Lewis. Separately, Lewis was ratcheting up the pressure on Lady Buscombe, chair of the PCC, formally issuing a writ for libel for the speech she had made implying that he had misled Parliament.

Having had her case for Max Clifford diverted at the courtroom door, Charlotte Harris was now working with Sky Andrew, the football agent who was one of the eight victims named in court at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire – again, no doubt that police had evidence he was a victim. News International clearly didn’t want that to go anywhere. Andrew had had several discreet phone calls from lawyers attached to the
News of the World
, urging him to drop the idea. One of them had gone so far as to offer him a retainer of £25,000 a year for up to five years if he would withdraw – strange behaviour from an organisation which claimed to have nothing to hide. Andrew declined. Harris started pushing his case towards court.

I passed her the list of Steve Whittamore’s victims which I had scribbled down from the computer of Alec Owen as he scrolled through his records from the ICO. These were people whose confidential information had been blagged by Whittamore’s network. Harris started to approach some of the politicians on the list, guessing that if they had been blagged, they might also have been the victims of hacking. Soon, she was charming her way through the Palace of Westminster, forming an alliance with Tom Watson and, through him, with Gordon Brown, who became a client; writing to Scotland Yard on behalf of a dozen MPs who thought their details might show up in Mulcaire’s paperwork; and acting for the former Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, whose sex life had been brutally exposed by the
News of the World
and who strongly suspected that his voicemail had been hacked in the process.

I had endless calls with Lewis and Harris, swapping gossip and trying to piece together the truth. Charlotte Harris on the phone is like a tornado in your ear. She talks very fast and creates a seamless confusion between her conversation on the phone and whatever conversation she is also holding in the background at her end, dropping instructions to taxi drivers or provocations to Mark Lewis into the middle of talking about News International. There was one Saturday when she seemed to be with her two young daughters in a supermarket: ‘We’re in court next week yesmummywillgetyouabiscuit but I don’t know what time.’ On that particular conversation, she was suddenly cut off in mid-storm. I kept trying to call back. I got more and more worried that she and her girls must have been hit by a car as they left the supermarket. Twenty-four hours later, I finally got through to her and discovered they were all fine. They hadn’t been in a supermarket at all. She had been doling out biscuits in her kitchen and had then taken her youngest girl to the bathroom to change her nappy, with her phone jammed between her shoulder and her ear, until the phone had leaped sideways and dived into the toilet.

Like some kind of marriage fixer, I also introduced Lewis and Harris to Mark Thomson, who was still pressuring the police on behalf of his dozen clients, so that they could exchange information and plot tactics together. Thomson was driving me mad. He kept hinting that he had uncovered something special.

‘I’ve got a dynamite case. Dynamite!’

‘Who? What’s it about?’

Then he’d grimace and shake his head apologetically: ‘I can’t comment.’

Thomson and I met often and, on the advice of a security expert, got into the habit – now evidently adopted by all well-informed gangsters – of removing the batteries from our mobile phones so that there was no power for ‘roving bug’ spyware, which could otherwise relay our conversation through the microphone on a handset. We worked out that, although the phone companies kept call data for only twelve months, their security departments might still have the data they had collected for Scotland Yard in 2006 as well as any history of blagging attempts which they had spotted. He applied for their records. I pointed out that, in the transcript of the original trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, the prosecutors said Mulcaire always wrote ‘Clive’ in the top left-hand corner of any work he was doing for him. Logically, he would have done the same for other journalists who commissioned him. Thomson, as he later put it, ‘nearly puked with excitement’ at the prospect of forcing the police to disclose these notes.

A couple of times he asked me if I thought that the
News of the World
were still hacking, and I told him about the private investigator who had claimed that one of the paper’s feature writers, Dan Evans, was in fact a specialist hacker. He asked if I could get the investigator to make a statement, but that was impossible. Thomson didn’t suggest that Dan Evans’s name meant anything to him. Not just then.

I also knew that the police finally had admitted that at least two of Thomson’s clients showed up in Mulcaire’s notes. I established that one of them was Jade Goody, the former occupant of the Big Brother house whose wild ways had become a running story for the tabloids and who had died of cancer in March 2009, aged only twenty-seven. But the trustees of her estate were not interested in pursuing a case. Thomson was clearly following the second case. I guessed he must be going to court to force Scotland Yard to hand over evidence. I kept answering his questions and supplying him with information, hoping this would somehow yield a court hearing where some truth would emerge.

Tamsin Allen from the law firm Bindmans was putting together her case for a judicial review of the original police inquiry on behalf of Brian Paddick and Chris Bryant. The simple fact of a former officer as senior as Paddick taking Scotland Yard to court was stunning in itself. If he needed encouragement, it came in the form of the Yard’s replies to Allen’s letters asking if either Paddick’s or Bryant’s name showed up in Mulcaire’s notes. The Yard’s lawyers claimed there was no mention of Paddick there at all and no evidence that Bryant had been hacked. They didn’t believe it, and nor did I – particularly when Chris Bryant’s phone company revealed that their records showed three attempts to blag information about him from their staff in December 2003 when the
News of the World
and other papers had been busy exposing his sex life.

I hooked up Tamsin Allen with Brendan Montague, a freelance journalist who had contacted me because he suspected the
News of the World
had hacked his phone to steal a story. I also passed her a good-looking rumour that the former Home Secretary David Blunkett had been hacked when the
News of the World
were chasing his sex life. Since she was well connected in the Labour Party, she was able to approach him, but – like his colleagues Tessa Jowell and Charles Clarke – he showed no interest in taking on a fight. Perhaps it made a difference that News International had hired him as a well-paid columnist for the
Sun
.

That was our artillery, rolling slowly towards its target: Steve Coogan and Andy Gray with John Kelly at Schillings; Nicola Phillips and George Galloway with Mark Lewis; Sky Andrew and maybe some MPs with Charlotte Harris; some anonymous client and maybe some dynamite with Mark Thomson; Brian Paddick, Chris Bryant and Brendan Montague with Tamsin Allen. At that point, it didn’t look like much.

*   *   *

By the beginning of April 2010 – with every political pundit predicting that Gordon Brown would lose the general election in May – Andy Coulson was poised to enter Downing Street at David Cameron’s side, to become one of the most powerful people in Britain.

On 4 April, Peter Oborne published the column which he had discussed with me. It was noticeable that it was not in the
Daily Mail
, for whom Oborne normally wrote. The
Mail
evidently had taken fright at the idea of running anything critical of the Conservative leadership when there was an election in sight. Instead, it was published in the
Guardian
’s Sunday sister paper, the
Observer
. Oborne was forthright in his view.

He suggested that Coulson was the latest example of a ‘behind-the-scenes fixer and thug’ attached to a leading politician; noted that Fleet Street had ignored the hacking scandal ‘under a system of
omertà
so strict that it would secure a nod of approbation from the heads of the New York crime families’; summarised the disclosures made by the
Guardian
and concluded: ‘As deputy editor and then editor of the
News of the World
, [Coulson] was presiding over what can only be described as a flourishing criminal concern.’ Oborne said it would be ‘extremely worrying’ if Cameron were to allow Coulson anywhere near Downing Street.

It was a brave piece and one which must have worried the Conservative leadership since it came from a conservative columnist, yet the column was greeted by silence. It was not just Fleet Street who were playing the
omertà
game. No leading politician would speak out against Coulson. No political party put the hacking scandal anywhere on their agenda.

I knew from the Emissary that there were senior figures in the Labour Party who were riveted by the affair. He said the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, would call the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and demand to know the truth; the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, would check official files; the prime minister, Gordon Brown, was so worried that he himself might have been hacked that his wife, Sarah, had contacted Scotland Yard to find out. She had been told there was no evidence that she or Brown had been targeted by Mulcaire, the Emissary said, and I told him not to trust too much of what Scotland Yard told anybody about the hacking. He said the prime minister planned to go on television and make a big splash about the whole story. That didn’t happen. No senior politician was going to pick a fight with the man who spoke to nearly 40% of Britain’s newspaper readers, not in the run-up to an election.

The new editor of the
Independent
, Simon Kelner, got a taste of the danger when he promoted his paper with an advertisement declaring that ‘Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election. You will.’ James Murdoch reacted by storming into Kelner’s office, with Rebekah Brooks at his side, to inform him loudly that he was a ‘fucking fuckwit’, threatening that the Murdoch papers would investigate Evgeny Lebedev, the son of the
Independent
’s owner. ‘We thought you were our friend,’ Brooks told the bewildered editor as they left.

This political inertia was unfortunate, because I was making a little progress. I had been working my way down several grapevines, one of which led me to a genuinely high-minded person who held a senior position in the criminal justice system. She had to work off the record so, in search of a memorable alias, I’ll call her Lola. She agreed to meet me in her office, where we talked for a while and, once she had established that she was safe, she made a dream move. She produced a file, left it open on her desk, said she was going to be busy elsewhere for a while and left me alone with it. Her last words as she left the office were a polite apology that she was afraid there was probably not very much in there. She was wrong about that.

The file contained reports written by Scotland Yard during the original 2006 inquiry. One, dated 30 May 2006, contained a line which leaped off the page: ‘A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. These may be the subject of wider investigation in due course.’ A vast number! Not a bloody handful, as the police had been claiming.

Some of these victims were even named in the paperwork – Max Clifford was there, and the former England football manager, Steve McClaren. And look at the timing. The police had written this memo in May 2006 – at least ten weeks before they arrested Goodman and Mulcaire, so this evidence of a vast number of victims was nothing to do with the material which they had seized during the arrests on 8 August. The police must already have had some big cache of evidence. Maybe they had collected data from the phone companies. Maybe they had been tapping Mulcaire’s phone before he was arrested. Whatever, the fact was that clearly they had gathered a lot more evidence than I had suspected – and kept very quiet about all of it.

The scale of the hacking uncovered by police in 2006 was referred to again in a memo dated 8 August, the day of the arrests, when a senior prosecutor wrote: ‘It was recognised early in this case that the investigation was likely to reveal a vast array of offending behaviour.’ They might have recognised it, but they made very sure that they didn’t mention it to the public in whose name they were supposed to be operating. The prosecutor then added something which began to explain the silence: ‘However, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police concluded that aspects of the investigation could be focused on a discrete area of offending relating to JLP and HA and the suspects Goodman and Mulcaire.’

The initials clearly referred to Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton and Helen Asprey, two of the three Buckingham Palace employees who were named in court as Palace victims. What was important was that this paperwork showed that police and prosecutors had made a conscious decision to limit the inquiry. More than that, Lola’s file revealed that they had made a second conscious decision ‘to ring-fence the case to minimise the risk of extraneous matters being included’. The papers made it clear that that was a subtle bureaucrat’s way of saying that they had decided not to have any public mention of particularly ‘sensitive’ victims such as members of the royal family. Evidently, it had been the police who had suggested this, doffing their helmets in the direction of Buckingham Palace; and the prosecutors had been only too happy to curtsy nicely before the throne and to agree – as one note put it – that the case should be ‘deliberately limited’ to ‘less sensitive’ witnesses. And they had never mentioned that either.

I thanked Lola profusely.