Hack Attack (56 page)

By Sunday morning, as Rebekah Brooks’s convoy was heading for London, the row about Neil Wallis had escalated. The
Sunday Times
reported that earlier in the year, Sir Paul and his wife had accepted twenty nights’ free accommodation, worth £12,000, at a Champneys health farm – whose media consultant was Mr Neil Wallis. And one more twist: the farm had a ‘kriotherapy’ unit to treat ailments in sub-zero temperatures – which was run by Charlie Brooks. And Sir Paul had used it during his stay.

At 7.30 that Sunday evening, Sir Paul Stephenson resigned as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

Monday morning saw a new allegation, that John Yates had helped Neil Wallis’s daughter, Amy, to get a job at Scotland Yard. It was by no means the worst complaint about Yates, but it was yet another boot mark. The Professional Standards committee of the Metropolitan Police Authority announced that they were meeting that morning to consider the conduct of Yates, Sir Paul, Peter Clarke and Andy Hayman.

At 2.00 that Monday afternoon, John Yates resigned as assistant commissioner.

*   *   *

It was the biggest show in town. At 2.00 on the afternoon of Tuesday 19 July, Rupert Murdoch and his son, James, would appear before the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee to answer for their failings. The queue outside Parliament had been building since early morning. I joined it.

Sitting on the pavement, watching the TV crews and the demonstrators in the street, I remembered the day just over two years earlier when Alan Rusbridger and I had been called to give evidence to the same committee, with the clear warning that we were to be barbecued for our supposed errors. The email for Neville Thurlbeck had saved us. The question now, not only for me but for multiple millions who would watch live on television, was whether the Murdochs could save themselves.

They had done their best to avoid the occasion. When the committee chairman, John Whittingdale, first invited them, Rupert Murdoch had refused to attend, and his son had replied that 19 July was inconvenient but he would be willing to see them in August. Whittingdale, who had been a friend of Les Hinton and a vocal supporter of BSkyB, threatened to place empty chairs in front of the committee for the world to see and to report their absence as a contempt of Parliament, with the theoretical possibility that the serjeant-at-arms could invoke his ancient power to arrest them. In the event, a formal summons delivered to them by the serjeant’s deputy brought them to heel.

There was a mood of rebellion in the air. Vince Cable, on radio, had put it well: ‘It’s a little bit like the end of a dictatorship, when everybody suddenly discovers they were against the dictator.’ There was also some real sadness. The previous day, Sean Hoare had been found dead at his home in Watford. I had really liked Sean. He had done so much to expose the rotten core of his old paper, and he was good company while he did it, funny and warm with an endless supply of tales. The conspiracy theorists had all started tweeting that he must have been murdered. It wasn’t true. His job, as he used to say, had been ‘to take drugs with rock stars’. That was what killed him, aged only forty-seven.

After four hours on the pavement, we finally made it into the committee room. I sat with my back to the wall, looking down a row of seats where the Murdochs’ supporters would gather: Rupert’s wife, Wendi; Joel Klein; assorted lawyers and PR merchants. In front of them, a little to my left, were the two chairs waiting for Rupert and James. Further to the left was the committee, arranged around their horseshoe-shaped desk, with the familiar faces of Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson nodding a greeting from the far side. We were all very quiet, more nervous than excited, simply because this was such a reversal of power, as if schoolkids were about to discipline the head teacher and his deputy. How could this room possibly dominate the dominators? Yet when Rupert and James finally came in, they were just two men in dark suits, Rupert much smaller than I had expected, a corporate giant but still merely a man.

Within minutes, the first part of the Murdoch strategy became clear. They played the humility card. James Murdoch took the first question and interrupted his own answer to say how sorry he was, and then Rupert interrupted him: ‘This is the most humble day of my life.’ That was a good line, which sounded as if it owed something to Edelman, the world’s largest PR firm, which had been hired by the Murdochs the previous week and had already encouraged Rupert to meet Bob and Sally Dowler to say he was sorry, and to place advertisements in every national newspaper on Saturday, headed in very large print: ‘We are sorry.’ James went on to say that the company was now trying to behave in a humble way, and Rupert repeated that it was the most humble day of his career. Twice.

That wasn’t going to be enough. Humble was one thing. But were they also guilty?

Led by Tom Watson, the MPs confronted them with the history of clear and public evidence of crime in their newsroom. How could they not have noticed: the
Guardian
in September 2002 running 3,000 words on the
News of the World
’s involvement in Jonathan Rees’s network of corruption; or Rebekah Brooks in March 2003 telling a select committee that her paper had paid police in the past; or the ICO in December 2006 reporting that twenty-three of the paper’s reporters had taken part in Steve Whittamore’s ‘illegal trade’; or the claims at Glenn Mulcaire’s sentencing in January 2007 that he had been working not just for Clive Goodman but for others at the paper?

The Murdochs soon turned to the second part of their strategy. From their lofty position in the crow’s nest at the top of the company, they drew a line under themselves and said simply and repeatedly that they had failed to notice a thing that was going on beneath them. At this moment, their refusal to run an effective internal inquiry became their best line of defence, like a reverse version of the Nazi defence at the Nuremberg war trials: ‘We didn’t know they weren’t obeying orders.’

Rupert Murdoch had an extra layer of help with this: his age. He frowned, shook his head in confusion and disappeared into unnaturally long pauses, tapping his fingers on the desk in front of him. One of his closest advisers claims he always does this when he is asked to say something important, that he is so worried about saying the wrong thing that he gets lost in a mental spin. Whether it was natural character or furtive design, it worked. Confronted repeatedly by awkward questions, he vanished into vagueness.

What had he talked to Tony Blair about, for example? A blank look and a shrug: ‘We argued about the euro, I think.’ What instructions had he given to the editor of the
News of the World
? ‘I’m not really in touch. I have to tell you that.’ Had he not wondered why News International had paid such large amounts of money to Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford? ‘I never heard of them,’ he said.

James was in more difficulty. His crow’s nest had been in London, with direct responsibility for News International. He had agreed to settle with Gordon Taylor, because that was the advice from senior counsel, but that was all he had known. Which seemed a surprising way for a chief executive to spend £1 million. And Clifford? ‘I was not involved in that piece.’ Really?

A third strategy came into view. The Murdochs explained that they had ‘rested’ on the investigations of others: on Scotland Yard, even though its most senior officers were now accusing News International of lying to them; on the Press Complaints Commission, although its chair, Lady Buscombe, was now pleading that the
News of the World
had lied to them; and on Harbottle & Lewis, whose narrow remit to review a collection of emails was now presented as a full-scale investigation with the aim, as Rupert put it, ‘to find out what the hell was going on’.

I didn’t believe a word of it, but, in spite of all the efforts of the MPs, the Murdochs held their ground. Then they were presented with a surprising gift. From my right, a young man rose from his seat, walked in front of me and, instead of heading for the door, he turned to approach Rupert Murdoch. I thought he was going to hit him and – in spite of all my battles with the mogul – I tried to shout a warning. Too late. The man produced a paper plate full of whipped cream and shoved it into Murdoch’s face. It was a deeply stupid thing to do. The MPs lost their line of questioning, all the press and public were excluded from the room, and an eighty-year-old man who had been attacked without warning found sympathy tilting towards him. Until that moment, neither side was winning. Now the Murdochs were ahead. When the hearing stuttered to its end soon afterwards, both of them were wounded, but neither had fallen.

Still, they were not in the clear. Scotland Yard were running three investigations into their journalists; Strathclyde police another; Ofcom were officially investigating whether they were fit and proper to hold a broadcasting licence in the UK. In the US, the FBI had started an inquiry into whether News Corp had broken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by allowing UK officials to be bribed. The Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, had ordered a review of media laws, and News Corp’s subsidiary there was checking for evidence of crime in their newsrooms. Biggest of all, the prime minister had announced that within months Lord Justice Leveson would chair a public inquiry, with powers to compel witnesses and order disclosure of records, to look at News International, the press, the police and government. The hearing was finished, but the show was not over.

15. Exposed!

It was like watching a headmaster addressing the morning assembly. He sat up on the stage at one end of the room, in his charcoal grey suit and his serious spectacles, and, speaking slowly and gravely, more in sorrow than in anger, he told the hundreds of silent faces lined up in neat rows before him of the bad behaviour and indiscipline which had come to his attention. Lord Justice Leveson was delivering his report.

It was the morning of Thursday 29 November 2012. Leveson spoke in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, a few minutes’ walk from Parliament. Around the corner, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson stood in the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for a preliminary hearing on charges that they had conspired to pay public officials for information. Seventeen months had passed since the
Guardian
published the Milly Dowler story.

The Leveson Inquiry, sitting in public, had taken evidence from 337 people. Some were ordinary members of the public, who had found their lives suddenly ransacked by the press. Others were from the peaks of power: the prime minister, three former prime ministers, numerous Cabinet ministers, government officials, chief constables, detectives, film stars, newspaper editors and a cohort of reporters. All of them were cross-examined. Some were compelled to disclose emails, text traffic, paperwork. More than 300 others submitted written statements. It was an unmatched exercise in exposing the concealed world of governance.

Some came in grandeur. Before Rupert Murdoch spent two days in the witness box, his staff visited the drab waiting room next to Leveson’s court and distributed cushions and flowers and laid a white tablecloth and silver cutlery on the battered old table for the mogul’s lobster lunch. Others took a simpler approach. Ed Miliband prepared his evidence in the same room without luxury additions, asking at the end for a few minutes on his own, during which the sound of Journey playing ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ could be heard through the door, fortifying the Labour leader’s morale.

Some witnesses rebelled against the very idea that they could be called to account at all. During preliminary seminars in October 2011, the former editor of the
Sun
, Kelvin MacKenzie, stood in front of Leveson and referred to ‘this ludicrous inquiry … this bloody inquiry’. The editor of the
Daily Mail
, Paul Dacre, declared he could detect ‘the rank smell of hypocrisy and revenge in the political class’s current moral indignation’ at his profession. Without waiting for a word of formal evidence, the
Sun
’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh, told Leveson that his inquiry was ‘a cloud over freedom of speech’.

Once the inquiry started, in November 2011, some newspapers continued to behave as though Leveson were not watching them. When Hugh Grant’s girlfriend gave birth to a child that month, tabloid reporters and photographers surrounded her home with such persistence and occasional aggression that Grant eventually went to court and got an injunction to stop them. When an eleven-year-old British boy, Sebastian Bowles, died with twenty-seven others in a coach crash in a Swiss tunnel in March 2012, while Leveson was still sitting, British newspapers ignored requests to respect the family’s privacy. They published a picture of his grieving nine-year-old sister on private property preparing to carry flowers to the scene of the accident as well as photographs which had been taken from Sebastian’s Facebook page in apparent breach of privacy settings. His family had to close down the dead boy’s blog after quotes and a photograph from it were published without their consent, and they found so many reporters outside their home that they were forced to live behind shuttered windows for more than a week.

Some newspapers attacked Leveson directly. When the Education Secretary Michael Gove told the Commons press gallery that the inquiry was having a ‘chilling effect’ on press freedom, Leveson called Downing Street to find out if the government no longer supported its work. He was reassured by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. In the hands of the
Mail on Sunday
, this became a front-page story, headlined ‘Leveson’s “threat to quit” over meddling minister’ with a claim that the judge had made an angry call to the Cabinet Secretary and ‘demanded that the Education Secretary be gagged’.

Some papers adopted a threatening tone not only to the inquiry but to some of those who dared to step forward to speak to it. A former
Daily Star
reporter, Rich Peppiat, told Leveson in detail how he had been encouraged to fabricate stories. He was then confronted and denounced by one of his former bosses in the conference centre’s canteen. The
Daily Mail
attacked some of Hugh Grant’s evidence as ‘mendacious smears’. The
Mail
also went to court to try to stop Leveson taking evidence from anonymous sources. They failed, but at least three former
Mail
reporters then backed out of helping the inquiry for fear of losing their careers if their assistance became known.