Hack Attack (55 page)

An hour later, with nowhere to go but backwards, the prime minister himself spoke out against the bid: ‘If I was running that company right now, with all the problems and the difficulties and the mess frankly that there is, I think they should be focused on clearing those up rather than on the next corporate move.’

That Monday morning, Murdoch found his London colony in disarray, with a new back-stabbing leak as an outward sign of their internal friction. Robert Peston of the BBC had been given details about the Harbottle & Lewis emails, revealing that they appeared to show that the
News of the World
had agreed to pay a royal protection officer £1,000 to get phone contact details for the royal family. The leak was no help at all to James’s efforts to push through the BSkyB deal, but it potentially took some pressure off Rebekah Brooks by adding the misleading spin that ‘as soon as the newer management of the
News of the World
became aware of what was in the emails, they were told them [
sic
] that they had to give them immediately to the police’.

The move backfired within hours, first by provoking Sue Akers into going public with her anger, condemning the leak as ‘part of a deliberate campaign to undermine the investigation’, and second by causing yet more irritation on the tenth floor of the Murdoch building in east London.

James’s team was feeling the pressure. One of his closest advisers, Alice Macandrew, had resigned. James wanted to plough on with the BSkyB bid and was frantically looking to Rebekah Brooks to quell the hacking storm. She emailed him to say she had just spent an hour on the phone with Tony Blair, who was suggesting that they set up an inquiry similar to the one which he had established under Lord Hutton to investigate his decision to invade Iraq in 2003. This would ‘clear you’, she told James, ‘and accept shortcomings and new solutions’. She added that Blair was offering to give them more advice but – evidently recognising that this might not please his own party who were confronting News Corp in Parliament – he had suggested that this ‘needs to be between us’. Most of James’s advisers were struggling to rein him in, to persuade him to abandon the bid and take refuge in New York; but James would not hear of it, and the confusion generated an inadequate compromise. On Monday afternoon, James wrote to Jeremy Hunt to say that News Corp were withdrawing their Newco plan. That meant that Hunt would have to refer the bid to the Competition Commission, precisely the move which News Corp had once so feared. Now, with public opinion fervently against them, they told themselves that a six-month delay would help them and that they were better off dealing privately with a regulator than publicly with a politician. But the tide was too strong.

Monday evening added insult to ignominy. Murdoch’s own Sky TV broadcast an episode of
The Simpsons
in which Lisa published a newspaper describing the miserly millionaire Monty Burns as ‘a hateful man nobody likes’ and Burns reacted by buying every news outlet in Springfield to silence all his critics. When the people of the town rebelled against him by producing their own news, Burns concluded: ‘It’s impossible to control all the media – well, unless you’re Rupert Murdoch.’

Tuesday saw Gordon Brown – in an interview with me and Glenn Campbell from the BBC – condemning News International’s ‘most disgusting’ tactics; the former deputy assistant commissioner Peter Clarke, who had commanded the original hacking inquiry, telling the home affairs select committee that the company had lied to police and damning them as ‘a major global organisation deliberately trying to thwart a police investigation’; Sue Akers telling the same committee that Weeting were trying to contact as many as 4,000 potential hacking victims and that they were also looking at ‘the criminal liability of directors’ of the company; and, most alarming of all, David Cameron telling his MPs to back Ed Miliband’s motion in the Commons debate the next day. That was very bad news for the Murdochs.

On Wednesday morning, Chase Carey flew in to London for an urgent meeting with James and Rupert. The two older men agreed they must make the ultimate sacrifice – they had to kill the BSkyB bid. James objected but lost the argument. Carey put out a statement: ‘It has become clear that it is too difficult to progress in this climate.’

In two short weeks, imminent victory had turned to total defeat. That afternoon, the House of Commons passed by acclamation the motion from Miliband which condemned the Murdochs. It was backed by all six parties in the House. Miliband made a rousing speech: ‘This is a victory for people – the good, decent people of Britain, outraged by the betrayal of trust by parts of our newspaper industry … The will of Parliament was clear, the will of the public was clear, and now Britain’s most powerful media owner has had to bend to that will … The painful truth is that all of us, for far too long, have been in thrall to some sections of the media, including News International. For far too long, when these things happened, we just shrugged our shoulders and said “That’s the way it is” – but no longer. The events of the past seven days have opened all our eyes and given us the chance to say “It doesn’t have to be like this.”’

*   *   *

Early on Sunday morning, 17 July, a chauffeur-driven black Audi set off from the peaceful farmland of west Oxfordshire and rolled down the M40 towards London. In the back, Rebekah Brooks sat alongside her husband, Charlie.

For days, she had known that Operation Weeting wanted to interview her. She had been told to present herself at noon at Lewisham police station in south London. In spite of the efforts of her lawyers, she had been unable to discover whether she was to be interviewed as a witness, or arrested on her arrival and treated as a suspect. Her lawyers feared the worst. And it was with this knowledge that two days earlier, on Friday morning, 15 July, she had finally announced her resignation.

The last move had come from Lewis and Greenberg who had met with the Murdoch family on the Thursday, told them that the police wanted to interview her, that it was crazy to leave her in charge of the MSC inquiry or anywhere near the company. They had no need to push: the Murdochs had agreed rapidly. Lewis and Greenberg had been dispatched to give her the news, to which she replied:‘You people are mad.’ With the police on Friday morning instructing that she be out of the building by lunchtime, at noon she was marched down to the front door with a security guard.

She had released a statement saying that she left with ‘the happiest of memories and an abundance of friends’, describing News Corp as ‘the finest media company in the world’. In reply, she had received sympathetic messages from Tony Blair and indirectly from David Cameron, even though publicly he welcomed her departure. Ever the power broker, she had negotiated a generous deal with Rupert Murdoch: a severance payout which was reported to be worth £10.8 million; an undertaking that News Corp would fund her lawyers for any criminal or civil action arising from her work; and a security team whose brief – rich in irony – included protecting her from news media.

This last task had been given an internal code name, Operation Blackhawk. The man in charge of it was Mark Hanna, News International’s director of security, who hired a group of former soldiers who were experts in surveillance to help him.They wanted £5,500 a day to keep Brooks safe. Murdoch had agreed to pay. Blackhawk did its job – its men texting each other outside her country home over the weekend to report the lurking presence of her former colleagues from Fleet Street, or, as they put it: ‘Lots of rats at the bottom of the road.’ In the wings, this created a small pantomime, which involved bin bags, pizzas and a great deal of confusion.

At noon, Rebekah arrived at Lewisham police station and was immediately arrested and held while her chauffeur waited outside. A quarter of an hour later, Charlie Brooks, who had gone to their luxury flat at Chelsea Harbour, went down to the underground car park, clutching a brown Jiffy bag and an old Sony laptop to his chest, walked round the corner to where there was a row of large green wheelie bins and dumped them. But he wasn’t throwing them away. Two hours later, Mark Hanna drove into the car park, took a brown briefcase out of the car, chatted for a moment with Charlie and went over to the bins to retrieve the Jiffy bag and the laptop. He then left, with Jiffy bag, laptop and briefcase safely in hand. An hour later, at about 3 p.m., a small squad of Weeting officers arrived to search the Brooks flat. Clearly, Mr Brooks had something to hide, but if this was intended to be secret, things were going badly: all of it was caught on the CCTV cameras in the car park.

It took a little time for Fleet Street to hear about Rebekah Brooks’s arrest. They were still chasing the flood of scandal, which was now lapping on the edges of the US. She had not been the only casualty on Friday. In New York, Les Hinton had resigned from his prestigious post as chief executive of Dow Jones and publisher of the
Wall Street Journal
. Hinton had started to attract heat as more questions were asked about his knowledge of crime at the
News of the World
and in particular about his knowledge of the Harbottle & Lewis emails whose content had been leaked so assiduously by some of Brooks’s team. Politicians were asking whether he had deliberately misled the media select committee on the two occasions he had given evidence to them.

Still, his resignation was a surprise. Hinton had been Murdoch’s friend for fifty-two years, his ‘representative on earth’. But loyalty has its limits.According to one source from the senior ranks of News Corp, his departure was another part of Brooks’s severance deal with Rupert Murdoch: ‘She would not go alone. She said if she was going, Les had to go too.’ By mid afternoon, news of Brooks’s arrest had broken, and Hinton’s problems were swept aside.

Soon the CCTV cameras in the underground car park were busy recording more of the pantomime. First, at about five o’clock, they caught the police search team leaving with armfuls of seized material. Then, at about 9.30 that evening – with Rebekah Brooks still being questioned – they recorded the arrival of one of Mark Hanna’s security men, who drove in to the car park, made a quick phone call and, with a few furtive glances, lifted a well-stuffed black bin bag from his car and took it over to the green wheelie bins, where he hid it. Minutes later, a friend of Charlie Brooks came down to the car park and was rewarded by the security man with two boxes full of pepperoni and barbecued steak pizza (with piri piri stuffed crust).

The security man then texted his Operation Blackhawk controller a line famously used by Richard Burton to his commanding officer in
Where Eagles Dare
: ‘Broadsword to Danny Boy. Pizzas delivered.The chicken is in the pot.’ The controller replied ‘Hah! Fucking amateurs’ and went on to suggest they should have used a dead letter box or ‘a brush contact by the riverside’.

Night fell. Soon after midnight, a small convoy of cars delivered Rebekah Brooks home. Her husband was there. Much later, he explained that by this time he and his friend had consumed not only the pizza but six bottles of wine. Perhaps it was for that reason that he failed to retrieve the bin bag that evidently had been left for him. And by the time he tried to do so, at about one o’clock the following afternoon, it was too late. A conscientous cleaner, Mr Nascimento, had got there first. Worse, Mr Nascimento had opened the bin bag and seen the old Sony computer and a stash of other interesting-looking material and taken it to his manager.

Brooks had gone in search of it, telling the manager: ‘A friend left this bag for me last night, and there’s been a bit of a mix-up.’ The manager said he would look into it and, aware that the morning papers were full of the news of Rebekah Brooks’s arrest, he then called the police, who soon swept onto the scene – or, as one of the Blackhawk security men put it in a text, ‘Filth all over the underground car park ref Pizzagate.’

All this was to have painful ramifications for Charlie Brooks and his wife.

*   *   *

Scotland Yard, however, had problems of their own. John Yates’s reputation was disintegrating rapidly: every step that Weeting took was a boot mark on his face, exposing his own failure to investigate properly. During the previous week, he had appeared before the home affairs select committee to defend himself and been told by the chairman, Keith Vaz, that his evidence was ‘unconvincing’. Andy Hayman had been doing no better. His attempts at the same committee session to justify the weakness of the original hacking inquiry had ended in ridicule, with MPs describing him as ‘a dodgy geezer’ and ‘more Clouseau than Columbo’. Now, it all got worse.

The day before Rebekah Brooks resigned, Operation Weeting had arrested Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the
News of the World
, on suspicion of involvement in the conspiracy to intercept voicemail. That might have passed as a simple news story, if the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, had not then released a very surprising statement – that in October 2009, four months after the
Guardian
published the Gordon Taylor story, as the
Guardian
and the media select committee continued to uncover the hacking scandal, Scotland Yard had hired Neil Wallis as their media consultant. Among other things, Wallis had been giving advice directly to Sir Paul and to John Yates. What kind of influence had Wallis had?

That evening, Alan Rusbridger wrote to Dick Fedorcio, who had personally been responsible for hiring Wallis, reminding him of the two occasions on which he had visited the
Guardian
– first with Sir Paul, then with John Yates – to insist that the
Guardian
’s coverage of the hacking was ‘over-egged and incorrect’. Rusbridger asked him a series of questions: ‘Why did you not think it appropriate to tell me at the time of these meetings that you, Paul and John were being advised by Coulson’s former deputy? What advice did he give you about the coverage of the phone-hacking? Was Wallis consulted in advance of these meetings or subsequently informed of the nature or contents of our discussions?’