Hack Attack (61 page)

Scotland Yard hit back by arresting a serving detective from Operation Weeting on suspicion that he had been helping Amelia Hill and me to write stories about the hacking. They then attempted to use the Official Secrets Act to force the
Guardian
to disclose internal records of our work on a selection of stories, including the hacking of Milly Dowler. This provoked a wave of angry protest, and the Yard backed down. The Crown Prosecution Service then ruled that the arrested detective should not be prosecuted, and he retired from the force.

However, the Yard followed up with a far more effective – albeit hypocritical – move. Ignoring the fact that the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police had spent years obscuring the truth about the hacking while whistle-blowers in their lower ranks helped us to expose it, they now lobbied successfully for a crackdown on whistle-blowing, insisting that in future all officers must record all contacts with all journalists – even though that was highly likely to silence any officer who wanted to defend the public interest by speaking out against wrongdoing or abuse of power. Other police forces around the country followed the same authoritarian line.

In the same way, using the unacceptable behaviour of the
News of the World
as a springboard, senior police exploited the scandal to lobby the Home Office to make it easier for them to seize all journalists’ notebooks and computer records, and to make it more difficult for all journalists to conceal the identity of confidential sources.

But it was Lord Justice Leveson’s report which finally confirmed that the rules of the power game had not changed. In the weeks before he published, right-wing newspapers came out to fight, vicious as ever. When forty-two Conservative politicians wrote to the
Guardian
arguing that there should be ‘sensible changes in the law’ to create genuinely independent press regulation, the
Daily Telegraph
dragged out past occasions when fourteen of them had been criticised by the press and suggested they were hypocrites who were ‘tainted by scandal’.

The
Mail
published an extraordinary twelve-page attack on one of the six assessors who had been advising Leveson, Sir David Bell, a former chairman of the
Financial Times
. Headlined on the front page ‘Leveson: Disturbing Questions About A Key Adviser’, the
Mail
used the fact that he had formerly been the chairman of the trustees of Common Purpose, which runs leadership courses for senior managers, to suggest that he was involved in ‘a quasi-masonic nexus’ which was devoted to secretly injecting liberal ideas into ‘every cranny of the inner sanctums of Westminster, Whitehall and academia’. The
Sun
recycled the story with the headline ‘The leftie plotters with a common purpose’ and told its readers: ‘The shadowy enemies of a free press are circling newspapers like the
Sun
. They want the Leveson Inquiry into press standards to result in state regulation. The
Sun
would only be allowed to print what officials permitted you to know.’

A group of newspaper publishers and editors then formed ‘the Free Speech Network’ and paid for a series of advertisements which pictured notoriously undemocratic leaders from Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Iran, Syria and Zimbabwe over the advice to ‘Say NO to state regulation of the press’.

In the event, when he finally published his report in November 2012, Leveson proposed neither statutory regulation nor state regulation. Instead, he invited news organisations to set up their own regulator which would have to function without interference from them or from government. It would handle complaints, investigate persistent offending and run a new arbitration system to deal with libel and breach of privacy with the power to impose fines. As an incentive, those who joined would be exempt from the worst of the costs and damages if anybody still chose to sue them in court. To ensure that it really was independent of press and politicians, the new regulator would be inspected periodically by a ‘recognition body’. All this would be underpinned by a law which would require government to uphold and protect the freedom of the press; require the courts to protect member organisations from some costs and damages; and give the recognition body authority to do its work.

In advance of the report, David Cameron had said that he would implement it in full unless it was ‘bonkers’. And yet within hours of its publication, in a painful echo of the bad old days of government fear of Fleet Street, the prime minister kicked away its cornerstone, rejecting the underpinning law which was essential to Leveson’s plan. There were some who genuinely feared that any kind of legislation was a threat to press freedom, if not immediately then potentially in the hands of some oppressive future government. There was also more of the same naked aggression and distortion.

Publishing the report, Leveson had said: ‘This is not and cannot reasonably be characterised as statutory regulation of the press.’ While some commentators honestly debated genuine concerns about his plans, hostile newspapers continued to tell their readers that he had called for regulation by statute and even by the state. In something close to parody, the Press Complaints Commission attempted to lead the debate by appointing a ‘foundation group’ of six experts to oversee the transition to a new regulator – and appointed Trevor Kavanagh as one of its members.

In a lecture in London at the end of January 2013, the respected former editor of
The Times
and
Sunday Times
, Sir Harry Evans, looked back at the past two months and condemned ‘the cynicism and arrogance of much of the reaction to Leveson coming from figures whose inertia assisted the cover-up conducted into oblivion by News International’. The distortion of Leveson’s ideas was, he said, ‘staggering’. To portray his careful construct for statutory underpinning as state control was ‘an amazingly gross distortion’.

When he published, Leveson had also said that the handling of his report should itself be the first test of his advice that contacts between government and the senior ranks of media companies should be transparent. The government nevertheless proceeded to hold a series of meetings with the senior ranks of media companies behind closed doors, refusing to confirm that they had even taken place. While opinion polls showed public support for Leveson running at over 70%, government stalled. By March 2013, the report was mired in confusion and compromise, with its supporters and opponents equally frustrated. The
Daily Mail
then exposed the sex life of a barrister who had subjected its editor to particularly fierce questioning at a Leveson hearing.

And in the wings of this pantomime, News Corp was reviving. In February 2012, they launched the
Sun on Sunday
to replace the
News of the World
. The following September, Ofcom published the results of their inquiry into whether the company was ‘fit and proper’ to hold a broadcasting licence. The regulator laid into James Murdoch, concluding that his handling of the hacking had been ‘both difficult to comprehend and ill-judged … [and] repeatedly fell short of the exercise of responsibility to be expected of him as chief executive and chairman’. Nevertheless, they found that the company was entitled to broadcast in the UK: the Murdochs could keep their 39% stake in BSkyB.

Their annual report in May 2012 showed that the company’s global profit had soared by 47% from $639 million to $937 million, primarily from its film and TV interests. In the twelve months following the Dowler story, News Corp shares rose by 23%, valuing the company at $73 billion and the Murdoch family trust’s stake alone at $9.5 billion. During that year, Rupert Murdoch was paid just over $30 million; and James Murdoch received $16.8 million.

News Corp’s political influence also revived. Rupert Murdoch’s visits to London saw him dining with senior Conservative politicians, while senior Labour figures agreed to write guest columns in the
Sun on Sunday
. Soon, the mogul was throwing his political weight around in the old familiar way, voicing his support for Republican electoral candidates in the US while the
Sun
, still punishing David Cameron, flirted with the right-wing UK Independence Party in the UK.

There were some who did not revive. As with the collapse of any big structure, the masonry fell downwards, inflicting most damage on those below the Murdochs. Having lost his job, Les Hinton was denounced by the media select committee, who accused him of misleading them and of being ‘complicit in the cover-up at News International’. Hinton strongly denied this though the complete absence of the ‘full rigorous internal inquiry’ which he had told them about in 2007 was particularly striking. Tom Crone and Colin Myler also lost their jobs, though Myler was then hired to edit the New York
Daily News
. Both men also were damned for giving misleading evidence to the select committee which found that they ‘deliberately avoided disclosing crucial information and, when asked to do so, answered questions falsely’.

However, the most severe damage was reserved for journalists who had worked for Rupert Murdoch and for some of the public officials with whom they had dealt. As the months unfolded, more and more of them fell victim to Operation Weeting. Their trials were to provide the final chapter of the scandal at the same place where the whole saga had begun seven years earlier with the trial of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire: the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in central London.

16. Final reckoning

Friday 4 July 2014. Court 12 at the Old Bailey. At one end of the room, on a raised podium, the judge sits in his red robe and horsehair wig. In front of him, the well of the court is crammed with barristers and journalists. And opposite him, standing in the glass-fronted dock, neatly lined up almost like pets on display in a shop window, tamed and passive, there are five men. All guilty.

Andy Coulson has been convicted of conspiring to intercept communications. Now, he must be sentenced. The judge confronts him with ‘the very great deal of phone-hacking’ which he allowed and which he used to boost his reputation and his career. He talks about ‘the intensely personal messages’ which were intercepted from the famous and also from the ordinary people who happened to stray into the path of Coulson’s journalists; and about Milly Dowler. He tells the court it was ‘unforgivable’ that Coulson not only ordered the eavesdropping on her phone but decided not to tell the police that he and his colleagues thought they had found evidence that the missing girl was still alive. ‘Their true motivation was not to act in the best interests of the child, but to get credit for finding her and thereby sell the maximum number of newspapers.’

Coulson stands quietly while the last fragments of his reputation are swept away by the judge. For a moment, I feel sorry for him, for the sheer depth of his fall. This is the man who, according to one of his former colleagues in Downing Street, enjoyed the small but special privilege of being allowed to walk into the prime minister’s office without knocking. Ruined. But then I remember the day during the trial when the jury was played a tape-recording which David Blunkett made one day in August 2004, when Coulson came to tell the Home Secretary he was going to expose his relationship with Kimberly Quinn. I remember Blunkett’s voice, full of panic and fear as he pleaded for his privacy; and the sheer mechanical coldness of Coulson as he insisted on his right to convert this man into a headline. And I remember all the others who suffered the same fate, left behind like roadkill as Coulson roared off into his gilded future.

The judge tells him the maximum sentence he can give is two years, but he will reduce it, in part because of the delay since the offences were committed. Coulson is jailed for eighteen months.

Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup stand beside Coulson in the dock, the willing lieutenants who ran the news desk for years. Before the trial began, the three of them took one long look at the mountain of evidence which Operation Weeting had gathered against them and pleaded guilty to conspiring to intercept communications. Now, the lawyers for Thurlbeck and Weatherup have pleaded to the judge that they were only obeying orders. Thurlbeck’s barrister says the hacking was ‘known and approved by more senior figures’ at the paper, naming Stuart Kuttner as one of those who was responsible. Weatherup’s says it was ‘endemic’, adding that ‘the suggestion that phone-hacking was the work of a small clique is wrong and misleading’.

The judge notes that none of them had the courage to step forward and give evidence at the trial and is unimpressed by their professions of apology: ‘I am afraid that that has the appearance of regret for the consequences of getting caught rather than true remorse.’ Miskiw and Thurlbeck are jailed for six months, the sentence again reduced because of the delay since the offences. Weatherup, a lesser player, is given four months, suspended for a year.

Finally, it is the turn of Glenn Mulcaire, who also pleaded guilty before the trial began, not only to conspiracy to intercept communications but specifically to hacking Milly Dowler. His lawyer has claimed that Mulcaire thought he was targeting the missing girl to help the police. The judge swipes aside the claim. ‘It is incapable of belief,’ he says. But he tells the man who committed crime for a living: ‘You are the lucky one.’ Since he has already been sent to prison, in 2007, albeit for only a fraction of his offences, Mulcaire will not have to go back to jail. ‘The sentence will be six months’ imprisonment, suspended for twelve months.’

Somewhere offstage there is a sixth guilty man, Dan Evans, the features writer who became the
News of the World
’s second specialist phone-hacker. He not only pleaded guilty before the trial began but also agreed to help the police, stepping into the witness box to tell the jury that Coulson hired him specifically because of his skill at intercepting voicemail. He will be sentenced separately.

There are three important people who will not be sentenced. Rebekah Brooks and Stuart Kuttner have been acquitted on all charges by the jury. And Ian Edmondson, who started the trial alongside his former colleagues, has been sent for a separate hearing after becoming too ill to continue.