Hack Attack (57 page)

Nevertheless, by the time Leveson summarised his report to that assembly of journalists in November 2012, he had exposed Fleet Street to some of the humblest days of its life. Above all, he provided a platform for dozens of media victims who variously told him of the blackmail, bullying, malice, invasion of privacy and toxic falsehood which they had suffered. Some were celebrities whose phones had been hacked and who had been pursued by reporters and photographers to the point where their lives were no longer free. The most impressive were ordinary people.

Kate and Gerry McCann recalled the aftermath of the abduction of their three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, during a family holiday in Portugal in May 2007 – how newspapers recycled unchecked and baseless allegations from the Portuguese press which poured acid on their grief, and falsely accused them of selling or murdering their own child. In his report, Leveson concluded: ‘They had become a news item, a commodity, almost a piece of public property where the public’s right to know possessed few, if any, boundaries.’

Leveson went on to investigate what happened when the
News of the World
obtained a copy of Kate McCann’s diary, in which she had recorded her agony, a document which was so private that she had not shown it even to her husband. Portuguese police had seized it, translated it and then allowed a copy to reach a local journalist. The
News of the World
had bought it for ‘a substantial sum’, translated it back into English and then confronted the significant legal problem that they had no right to publish it. The editor, Colin Myler, told Leveson that his news editor, Ian Edmondson, had spoken to the McCanns’ representative, who had consented to publication. Edmondson, however, told a different tale, explaining that, in reality, Myler had told him to contact the McCanns’ spokesman and to ‘make it very woolly’, specifically not to tell him that the paper had the complete diary for fear that the McCanns would take legal action to prevent publication. Leveson said this was ‘devastating evidence’. Gerry McCann said his wife had felt ‘distraught and morally raped’.

Margaret Watson, whose sixteen-year-old daughter had been stabbed to death by another schoolgirl, described how her girl was then portrayed by the
Glasgow Herald
as a snob and bully. Mrs Watson recalled the pain which this had caused not only herself and her husband but also their only surviving child: ‘It was all too much to bear for our dear son, Alan, and he took his own life. He was found holding copies of the articles.’

Christopher Jefferies told Leveson how he had suddenly become a tabloid victim because he was the landlord of a young woman, Joanna Yeates, who was found murdered on Christmas Day 2010. He was arrested as a suspect but released without charge. The real killer was caught three weeks later. In the meantime, some newspapers had published what Jefferies described as ‘a mixture of smear, innuendo and complete fiction’ about him, effectively naming him as the killer. These stories were not only libellous – Jefferies sued eight newspapers over a total of forty of them – but also risked serious prejudice to any trial which he might have faced, and the
Sun
and the
Daily Mirror
were later fined for contempt of court with the judge describing Jefferies as ‘the latest victim of the regular witch-hunts and character assassination conducted by the worst elements of the British tabloid media’.

It was the stories of these victims which built the platform on which Leveson constructed his report. Addressing his silent audience that day, he said that the object of his inquiry had been not simply to make recommendations, but also ‘to expose precisely what has been happening’. He was not alone in attempting to do that. With Scotland Yard, two select committees and court actions still dragging detail out into the open, the power elite found its secret world uniquely threatened with exposure.

*   *   *

The threat to James Murdoch began with a discreet text message at 4.37 in the afternoon of 19 July 2011, as he and his father were navigating their way through the choppy waters of their appearance before the media select committee with MPs alleging that the pair had known about crime at the
News of the World
and engineered a cover-up.

Watching from the side of the room, I could see the MPs repeatedly rocking the Murdochs’ boat but never quite upsetting them. Several had got close by challenging James Murdoch over his decision to pay huge damages to Gordon Taylor in 2008. Surely he must have known that Taylor’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, had found evidence of illegality. But James was well prepared and claimed he had agreed to settle simply because that was the advice of counsel and without exploring the reasons. I could see that the MPs needed to push him further into the detail. I remembered sitting in front of this same committee two years earlier and distributing the document which saved my skin.

Quietly, I slipped my phone out of my pocket, found Tom Watson’s number and sent him a message across the room: ‘Did James know about email for Neville? If not, why settle Taylor case? If so, why not tell police?’

I caught Watson’s eye and held an imaginary phone to my ear. He nodded. I waited. The idiot with the whipped cream broke up the hearing, but when the MPs resumed, Watson intervened to put one more question to James Murdoch: ‘When you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see, or were you made aware of, the “for Neville email”, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?’

James snapped back his answer: ‘No, I was not aware of that at the time,’ he said.

Now he had committed himself. Now he was vulnerable.

The next day, my colleague David Leigh called Tom Crone, who had handled the detail of the Taylor settlement, and urged him to say what he knew. Crone had no reason to like us and said only that he would think about it. The following evening, he and Colin Myler issued a joint statement: ‘Just by way of clarification to Tuesday’s select committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch’s recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken. In fact, we did inform him of the “for Neville” email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers.’

With that, James Murdoch was tipped out of his boat. If Crone and Myler were right, James had concealed his knowledge of crime for more than two years. As he struggled to keep his head above water, the media select committee over the following months extracted a sequence of disclosures, each of which threatened to push him under.

These revealed that in May 2008, Myler had met James to discuss Gordon Taylor’s lawsuit, armed with Crone’s written opinion that the email for Neville was ‘fatal to our case’; and that, the following month Myler and Crone together had seen him a second time. According to Crone: ‘Since the “for Neville” document was the sole reason for settling and, therefore, for the meeting, I have no doubt that I informed Mr Murdoch of its existence, of what it was and where it came from.’ James had stalled, they said, wanting to see the legal opinion from Michael Silverleaf QC, who duly reported that the email for Neville ‘has disclosed that at least three journalists appear to have been intimately involved in Mr Mulcaire’s illegal researching into Mr Taylor’s affairs’ and that the
News of the World
had harboured ‘a culture of illegal information access’.

Was James Murdoch really going to maintain that he settled the case with Gordon Taylor without knowing any of this evidence? Faced with the new disclosures, he changed his story. He was summoned back to the committee to give evidence for a second time, on 10 November 2011. The chairman, John Whittingdale, confronted him: ‘Even if it was not described as the “for Neville email”, were you made aware of the existence of an email that contained the transcripts of voice intercepts which, in Tom Crone’s words, was “fatal” to your case?’

To which he answered: ‘Yes.’

This directly contradicted the answer which he had given four months earlier to Tom Watson, who had asked him if he had known about ‘the “for Neville email”, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages’. To which he had answered: ‘No.’

He went on to agree that he understood that this email was very damaging to the company’s defence that nobody other than Clive Goodman had been involved. To any reasonable onlooker, that was enough: as far back as June 2008, the executive chairman of News International had known that the ‘rogue reporter’ line was untrue, but he had not told anybody – not Parliament, which had been misled; not the police, who had clearly not captured anybody other than Goodman; and not his shareholders, in spite of his duty of candour to them.

James Murdoch wriggled with great energy. He had known about ‘a transcript of voicemail interceptions that were made on behalf of the
News of the World
’, he now agreed, but he had not known that this had been produced ‘for Neville’ and so had not been aware that it implicated anybody else or required further investigation. It was very hard to understand how Mulcaire could have been producing illegally obtained voicemail for the newspaper without some human being who worked there necessarily being involved.

Undaunted, he wriggled on. He understood that it now appeared that he had discussed the Taylor case with Colin Myler in May 2008, but he did not recall this and, therefore, did not recall Myler passing on any of the ‘fatal’ evidence which Tom Crone had given Myler. And, he agreed, he had decided to wait for Michael Silverleaf’s opinion before deciding how to settle with Taylor, but, he claimed, he had then settled the case without reading the opinion for which he had asked.

Furthermore, he said, it was not just in 2008 that he had remained unaware of the evidence in the Taylor case. When it was splashed across the front page of the
Guardian
in July 2009, he still had not known about it, even when the
Guardian
the following week gave the email for Neville to the select committee. This had all been handled by Rebekah Brooks, he claimed, because she had become chief executive in June 2009. This happened to be provably inaccurate: Brooks’s appointment had been announced in June 2009, but she had not taken over until September.

Beyond that, he claimed that in spite of the public storm which had broken around the Taylor settlement after the
Guardian
story, he had not stopped to ask why his company in February 2010 then agreed to pay £1 million to stop Max Clifford suing them. That, too, had been dealt with by Brooks. ‘It was discussed with me in general terms but not from an authorisation perspective,’ he told the committee.

James was alive but still struggling in the water when that hearing finished. The committee then obtained one final piece of evidence, which appeared to contradict him. News Corp disclosed that in the midst of his meetings with Crone and Myler, James had received an email chain which included Myler telling him that ‘unfortunately, it is as bad as we feared’ and Crone explaining that ‘we knew of and made use of the voicemail information from Glenn Mulcaire’. James had sent a brief reply a few minutes later. Confronted with this, James wrote to the committee to claim that although he had replied, he had not actually read the message which he had received. He suggested that this was because he had received it on a Saturday ‘when I was likely alone with my two children’. In spite of his pressing childcare arrangements, he had then invited Myler to call him at home that weekend.

Mark Lewis, who had been at the centre of the Taylor case, was called back to the committee and put the case against James in its clearest form: ‘I think James Murdoch would like to give you the impression that he was mildly incompetent rather than thoroughly dishonest.’ In their final report, published on 1 May 2012, the committee also used strong language, concluding that it was ‘extraordinary’ that James had authorised such an expensive settlement without knowing the evidence and ‘simply astonishing’ that he had not understood that the ‘rogue reporter’ defence had collapsed.

At the end of all this, James Murdoch could still insist that he had not been proved to be part of a cover-up, but the cumulative damage to his credibility and reputation was serious. In New York, he was marginalised. ‘Because his surname is Murdoch, he can command meetings with people who fly in to report on what’s going on,’ according to a senior News Corp executive, ‘but he’s just treading water and has no function.’ His close ally, Beryl Cook, stepped down as head of human resources. His right-hand man, Matthew Anderson, also resigned. In the run-up to the media select committee publishing its report, James himself resigned his two UK posts, as executive chairman of News International and chairman of BSkyB.

*   *   *

For Rupert Murdoch, the threat of exposure was never so tightly focused.

Like his son, he stumbled into trouble with the media select committee, for example by telling them that News International had hired the law firm Harbottle & Lewis ‘to find out what the hell was going on’. That was emphatically denied by Daniel Cloke and Jon Chapman, the two News International executives who had hired the law firm. It was also denied by Harbottle & Lewis themselves, who told the committee: ‘There was absolutely no question of the firm being asked to provide News International with a clean bill of health which it could deploy years later in wholly different contexts for wholly different purposes.’

He stumbled into more trouble when he was summoned to appear before the Leveson Inquiry, spending two days in the witness box, under attack over his relationships with senior UK politicians and his handling of the hacking scandal. He denied all wrongdoing. He had never asked a politician for a favour, he said. And he had simply not known the facts about the hacking. Indeed, he claimed, it was he who was the original victim of the cover-up at News International. His evidence was greeted with great scepticism. He emerged bruised and diminished. But at the end, his line of defence was not quite broken.

However, he faced a more powerful threat from a much bigger accusation: that he had been running a rogue corporation. The hacking scandal turned out to be one particularly well-defined part of a pervasive pattern.