Hack Attack (41 page)

We reported that after our Gordon Taylor story in July 2009, the Home Office had considered calling in the Inspectorate of Constabulary to investigate Scotland Yard’s failure but had rejected the idea – because they did not want to upset Scotland Yard. We disclosed that the former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, was poised to sue. When Prescott then gave interviews about this, he was answered by the former assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, Andy Hayman, who went on the radio and bluntly declared: ‘We have to get real over this. This is just another episode of Lord Prescott’s rants.’

John Yates was hauled in front of the home affairs select committee where he repeated the RIPA bollocks and explained: ‘There are very few offences that we are able to actually prove that have been hacked – that is, intercepting the voicemail prior to the owner of that voicemail getting it him or herself.’ He then noticeably failed to tell the committee what he had acknowledged to Alan Rusbridger behind closed doors, that regardless of this strange interpretation of the law, there had been ‘a mass attempt at penetrating people’s voicemail systematically’.

Having diminished the scale of the
News of the World
’s hacking, Yates went on to make a very bold claim about Scotland Yard’s efforts to warn the victims. Detectives had acted, he said, ‘out of a spirit of abundance of caution’. He went on to tell the MPs: ‘We have taken what I consider to be all reasonable steps in conjunction with the major service providers – the Oranges, Vodafones – to ensure, where we had even the minutest possibility they may have been the subject of an attempt to hack, we have taken all reasonable steps in my view.’ Asked to define ‘reasonable steps’, Yates said: ‘Speaking to them or ensuring the phone company has spoken to them.’

Really?

We followed up an obscure paragraph at the end of the
New York Times
story which suggested that a
News of the World
reporter had been suspended for a recent attempt to hack into the mobile phone of a TV personality. Neither the reporter nor the alleged victim was named, but I established that this was a reference to the ‘dynamite’ case which Mark Thompson had been nursing since earlier in the year and that the suspect reporter was none other than Dan Evans, the feature writer whose skill as a hacker had been flagged up to me by a private investigator.

I was amazed at Mark Thomson’s self-control: he had said nothing when I dropped Evans’s name on him months earlier even though, I now understood, he had obtained some kind of evidence from his unnamed client’s phone company that her alleged hacker was using a phone which was registered in the name of Dan Evans from the
News of the World
. We ran the story, reporting also that Evans had been suspended since April when Mark Thomson evidently had confronted News International with his evidence.

In response, the Press Complaints Commission went into a spin. Their new chair, Lady Buscombe, had been on the radio in May, declaring that ‘if there was a whiff of any continuing activity in this regard, we would be on it like a ton of bricks’. But now, six months later, it emerged that they had done nothing to investigate the allegations about Dan Evans on the strange grounds that his alleged victim was suing. The
News of the World
put out a statement claiming to have played straight by telling the PCC all about Evans. In reality, we found, they had said nothing at all when they suspended him in April and had finally told the PCC in June – just after the
New York Times
had started asking them questions about it.

We also ran quotes from our own sources among former
News of the World
journalists, including Paul McMullan who, after nine months of doubt, bravely agreed to talk on the record. He said that as deputy features editor under Rebekah Brooks, he had commissioned hundreds of illegal acts from private investigators and that senior editors including Coulson were aware of phone-hacking by reporters. ‘Coulson would certainly be well aware that the practice was pretty widespread. He is conceivably telling the truth when he says he didn’t specifically know every time a reporter would do it. I wouldn’t have told him. It wasn’t of significance for me to say I just rang up David Beckham and listened to his messages. In general terms, he would have known that reporters were doing it.’ Five other former
News of the World
journalists, speaking off the record, agreed with him in the same
Guardian
story.

Later that day, there was a hacking debate in the House of Commons, and Tom Watson made a powerful speech. There was a shame, he said, which all of them shared:

The truth is that, in this House, we are all, in our own way, scared of the Rebekah Brookses of this world. It is almost laughable that we sit here in Parliament, the central institution of our sacred democracy, yet we are scared of the power that Rebekah Brooks wields without a jot of responsibility or accountability.

The barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators. They are untouchable. They laugh at the law. They sneer at Parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do, with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality. Prime ministers quail before them, and that is how they like it. That indeed has become how they insist upon it, and we are powerless in the face of them. We are afraid. That is the tawdry secret that dare not speak its name.

Channel 4 broadcast the
Dispatches
programme, which Rusbridger had suggested they make, rehearsing the familiar story and adding one new anonymous source who said Coulson knew about the hacking. The Channel 4 crew saw signs that their own phones might have been hacked during production, and I put them on to Tamsin Allen. The
Independent
, after fifteen months of hostility to the story, were beginning to change sides. They finally disclosed that Tessa Jowell had been hacked, at least twenty-eight times, provoking a minor backlash from Rebekah Brooks who ran into the
Independent
editor, Simon Kelner, at a party in Oxfordshire and refused to talk to him before loudly telling another guest that ‘the
Independent
is a perfectly ridiculous newspaper’. One of the guests told Kelner to be careful that his phone was not hacked. Kelner said he was sure it wasn’t and, to prove the point, called into his voicemail, entered his PIN – and discovered that it no longer worked. A few weeks later, Brooks gatecrashed a lunch between Jowell and
Sunday Times
journalists and denounced her to her face, accusing her of making comments which had allowed the
Guardian
to stoke up the hacking story.

The
Independent
ran another useful story, revealing that the reporter on the ‘Ryall’ tape had been working on the
Evening Standard
when Mulcaire coached him on how to hack voicemail and was now at
The Times
. A journalist I did not know contacted me to explain that it was not ‘Ryan’ or ‘Ryall’ but ‘Raoul’ – Raoul Simons, who had indeed been a sports writer on the
Evening Standard
. After one of the occasions when the sex life of the England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson was exposed by the
News of the World
, Simons had written a piece about Mulcaire as a specialist who could protect the security of football celebs like Eriksson. This was ironic, to say the least, since it was Mulcaire himself who had hacked Eriksson’s phone. But Mulcaire was pleased with the story and had returned the favour to Simons by giving him a brief tutorial on hacking – a gift that would have been less poisonous if Mulcaire had not recorded it and then allowed the recording to fall into the hands of police.

By the time we finally identified him, Raoul Simons was working for
The Times
. They suspended him, and later I heard that he had slumped into a deep depression. It did seem highly unfair that News International were suspending a reporter who had had a minor involvement on a paper that did not belong to them while they lied and paid out a fortune to protect those from their own stable who were up to their elbows in crime.

In the face of this new storm, the opposition fell back. Senior Tories started muttering to journalists that Coulson might have to go, and one of the
Guardian
’s political correspondents heard that Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks had agreed a new strategy and were urging Coulson to step down in order to kill off the Labour Party’s political interest in the affair. This was bolstered by a leak to the effect that Rupert Murdoch had called the former prime minister Tony Blair and asked him to persuade the Labour MPs to go quiet, and that Blair had called his successor, Gordon Brown, and asked him to pass this on. The Blair camp later denied this.

More important, John Yates agreed to reopen the police investigation. For a brief moment, that looked like another significant breakthrough and then we discovered a little more about it. First, this inquiry was to be run by Yates’s staff officer, Detective Superintendent Dean Haydon, who might be a good and honest man but who was unlikely to be allowed to break out of Yates’s very limited view of the affair. Second, as if to confirm our worst fears, it turned out that the inquiry would look only at ‘new’ evidence, so it would interview Sean Hoare and Paul McMullan and any other new witnesses, but specifically would not go back and look at the mass of evidence which had been sitting in Scotland Yard for four years now. And third, when Haydon’s officers approached Sean Hoare, they told him they would interview him ‘under caution’, i.e. not as a witness who might help them but as a suspect who could be charged with a criminal offence as a result of what he told them. Hoare could see no reason why he should offer himself up as Scotland Yard’s victim and answered ‘No comment’ to all the questions put to him.

Paul McMullan, who was a more confrontational character, publicly refused to have anything to do with being questioned under caution and defied Scotland Yard to come and arrest him. They stayed away. They interviewed Matt Driscoll, who spent three hours with them in a suite of the Hilton hotel near Tower Bridge, telling them everything he knew about illegal information-gathering at the
News of the World
. They also questioned Coulson, who denied everything.

The Murdochs seemed unmoved. As the hacking story bubbled and boiled through that September, Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK – and held a private meeting with James Murdoch, who had donated a reported £100,000 to fund the visit. Somewhere in the corridors of power, their bid for BSkyB was quietly moving forward.

*   *   *

By now, the legal artillery was getting close to the front line. Certainly, News International could see the threat and were trying to stop it in its tracks. They didn’t understand quite what they were dealing with. We had a secret weapon.

Back in May, I had been asked to go to a private meeting to talk about the future of the media. It was in a posh restaurant in South Kensington. There was just a small group of us around a table – some lawyers, a High Court judge, the
Channel 4 News
anchor Jon Snow and the man I was sitting next to, Max Mosley.

Mosley, I knew, had been a victim of the
News of the World
on an eye-watering scale of viciousness. They had, as he put it now, ‘tried to destroy my life’ by posting on their website video extracts of him naked with prostitutes. Talking to him, it was clear that the £60,000 damages he had then won had done little to heal his emotional wound.

Mosley, who was seventy when I met him that evening, has a quiet, deferential manner, but he is obviously also a very determined man. He told me that his family had warned him not to fight the Murdoch organisation because he could never win, but he had made up his mind that he was going to challenge the
News of the World
and the press generally over their invasion of privacy. Indeed, he made it clear that he was willing to spend the rest of his life doing it. He would also spend money, although at first I did not understand quite how much he had in the bank. Very quickly that evening, we agreed to work together.

Already, he had one very interesting plot. He had opened up a line to Glenn Mulcaire through his own private investigator, a former police officer who happened to live near Mulcaire in south London and who had befriended Mulcaire at AFC Wimbledon games. It was clear that Mulcaire was very worried about money, and Mosley was thinking of coaxing him into a direct conversation in which he could offer to hire him as his own security consultant, on the understanding that he would make a clean breast of his role at the
News of the World
. I encouraged him, and we agreed that I might supply questions for these conversations and check the answers to make sure Mulcaire was telling the truth.

Within weeks, however, a second plot emerged. I was talking to Mark Lewis, who was complaining that he might have to drop his libel action against the PCC chairwoman, Lady Buscombe, simply because he could not afford the costs. That case was important. She had implied that he misled Parliament in repeating what a police officer had told him about the number of people whose messages had been intercepted by the
News of the World
. If the case went to court, it might flush out more of the evidence which the police were still busily concealing about the true number of victims. It might also underline the failure of Buscombe and the PCC to play fair with the evidence in the hacking scandal. On 9 June, I emailed Mosley and explained the problem and asked if he might underwrite Lewis’s costs. He agreed.

Within days, Mark Lewis had introduced Mosley to Tamsin Allen, and Mosley soon was also underwriting the costs of the judicial review which she was organising for Brian Paddick and Chris Bryant, which threatened to force Scotland Yard to reveal the history of its decision-making in the 2006 inquiry. With Mosley’s help, our artillery was bigger and faster than ever.

Mosley and I took to meeting in the quiet corners of an upmarket café near his home in Knightsbridge, plotting amongst cream cakes and chocolate croissants. By the time the
New York Times
published in September, Mosley was reporting that Mulcaire had agreed to become his security adviser on a two-year contract on the condition that he told the truth about his work for the
News of the World
. I wrote a seven-page briefing memo for Mosley’s lawyer, identifying key facts and key questions to put to him. By October, Mulcaire had signed his new work contract and was beginning to talk. He was not necessarily telling the truth.