Murdoch's World (29 page)

In August 2008 then opposition leader
Cameron flew on the private plane of Elisabeth's husband, Matthew Freud, the London public relations executive, to the Greek isle of Santorini; Cameron met with the media patriarch and much of his inner circle on his yacht. It was just as important to the young Conservative politician's prospects as Tony Blair's jaunt across the globe to Hayman Island off the coast of Australia had been thirteen years earlier.

Charlie Brooks raised horses, and soon Rebekah was on the fields riding too. Their friends joined in on the fun. In one text to Rebekah Brooks, written in 2009, Cameron wrote, “The horse CB [Charlie Brooks] put me on—
fast unpredictable and hard to control—but fun.”

In the wake of a key address by Cameron to the Conservative Party, Brooks cheered him on:
“brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love working together.” Later, Brooks tutored the next prime minister in the protocol of their modern communiqués: “Occasionally, he would sign them off, LOL—‘Lots of love,'” she said, “until I told him it meant ‘laugh out loud.' And then he didn't sign them like that anymore.” Cameron attended her June 2009 wedding. So did then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. A month later, the Murdochs elevated her to become CEO of News International.

In retrospect, the
Guardian
story in 2009 should have blown away all vestiges of that “line in the sand” walling off the rest of
News of the World
from the specific scandal over the princes. Three days after the
Guardian
's scoop appeared,
Colin Myler called in Neville Thurlbeck and promised him a generous severance package if he agreed to resign. The email “for Neville” detailing transcripts of hacked voice mail messages was too hot for the paper, though Thurlbeck denied wrongdoing.

James Murdoch had told his colleagues in New York there was
no cause for concern. Executives at News Corp's headquarters heard
the assistant police commissioner John Yates dismiss the
Guardian
story out of hand. That was good enough for them. The board did not formally take up the issue.

More than a year later, in late 2010, I stood next to Brooks outside the glass-paneled meeting rooms of the
Times of London
as
she watched Cameron on a TV monitor, waiting for the verdict on which country would get to play host to the World Cup games in 2018 and 2022. She cut a striking figure—initially, it must be said, by her appearance, her pale skin offset by a flowing mane of fiery red hair. Then I was struck by the force of her personality. The UK was a finalist, but thought unlikely to prevail. The set was tuned to Sky News as Cameron and Prince William made impassioned last-minute pitches.

“Just imagine how many papers we could sell if London got the Cup,” Brooks said, watching intently. She rolled her eyes as the Swiss president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, finally announced the games would go to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022, a setback for Cameron and his minister of culture and sport, Jeremy Hunt.

Some executives in Manhattan considered the
New York Times
story in September 2010 to be a wake-up call, raising questions about criminal implications and Brooks's behavior, but James Murdoch insisted hacking could be handled locally. It was a relatively trifling issue, he said, and any involvement from headquarters would be wrongly taken by the company's rivals to mean there was substance to larger accusations.

Rupert Murdoch had one overriding concern: protect Brooks above all. The company's general counsel, Lawrence Jacobs, insisted that the board needed to take charge and to set up an internal investigation. The corporation had to act to satisfy both US and UK authorities that it was rooting out any practices of corruption in its British properties. This could no longer be handled by London. Brooks could not be the focus of defense efforts. Corporate officials in New York had been deceived in 2009 by relying on the assurances of police officials
in London who had been compromised by close ties to News Corp's British executives and newsrooms.

But James held New York at bay. His hopes for succession at long last were starting to materialize. He had carried
a quiet anger that he had not been designated the future CEO—or even simply promoted to the job—several years earlier. In March 2011, he had been elevated to deputy chief operating officer and chief executive of News Corp's international holdings. The new position formalized his status as the heir apparent. He would move to New York and run the non-American elements of the conglomerate.

And Rupert Murdoch turned elsewhere for legal help. When the
New York Post
had to acknowledge its lead gossip columnist had taken payments from sources and another gossip writer had attempted extortion,
the
Post
did not engage in the self-reflection and self-flagellation exhibited by the
New York Times
after the Jayson Blair fabrication and plagiarism scandal. Nor would News Corp do so here.

At his
multimillion-pound townhouse on the periphery of Green Park, near Buckingham Palace, in May 2011, a group of senior News Corp officials and lawyers dined at a long table in a session convened by Brooks, then still CEO of News International. Among the guests were Jacobs, Klein, and Brendan Sullivan, a Washington defense attorney who had famously represented Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings and who had been a law partner of Klein's wife.

At the dinner, the chairman revealed his own plans.
This is going to be handled by Joel and Brendan
, Murdoch declared.
I will handle the board. Everyone else stay out of it
. Privately, Murdoch had told Klein and Sullivan that they had one mission: to preserve Rebekah Brooks's standing. Klein told others later that that order would be a tall one. To save the Murdochs and to protect the corporate board, she would probably have to go. But he did not press the chairman. Not yet.

At the dinner, Brendan Sullivan declared his faith in Brooks's innocence; indeed, she would soon be entrusted with running the UK
company's internal investigation. Attention would be kept away from New York, away from James and especially from Rupert. Sullivan's declaration flew in the face of reality. But Murdoch leaned on Klein more than ever. His chief spokeswoman at the city schools system had just been named Murdoch's chief of staff. Sullivan was a senior partner at his wife's firm.

Klein teamed with News International executive Will Lewis to run News Corp's management and standards committee. For the time being, they would please their client, Murdoch. But they knew a reckoning would confront the company down the line.

Jacobs resigned less than a month after witnessing the rejection of his advice.

EVEN AS James Murdoch shut down
News of the World
in July, he sustained his support for Brooks.
“I am satisfied that Rebekah, her leadership of this business and her standard of ethics and her standard of conduct throughout her career are very good,” James said, praising her for working “transparently” with police to get to the heart of the matter.

Then James announced he had chosen Brooks herself to lead the company's internal investigation. By the end of the first week of July 2011, Brooks's standing was in considerable doubt. Brooks met with the shell-shocked staff on July 7 to explain the decision to shut down
News of the World
. If she felt personally chastened, it did not show, citing the
“onslaught of attacks” the paper had faced since 2006. “You have led the news agenda [the headlines] because of past mistakes, but you have also set the agenda. . . . We don't get that message across.”

“This is not exactly the best time in my life, but I'm determined to get vindication for the paper and for people like you,” she told them, promising
to shield their reputations from what she called a “
Guardian
-BBC witch hunt.”

Security guards stood sentinel by the doors; technicians had severed the staff's access to the Internet on their work computers. The newsroom by this point had become a crime scene, lacking only the yellow tape favored by police to declare areas off-bounds.

“By your calling our newspaper toxic, we've all been contaminated by this toxicity,” one reporter responded. “There's an arrogance there that you'd think we'd want to work for you there again.”

Brooks was apologetic and emphasized her own lack of knowledge of any wrongdoing. “One of the problems, now, is how we dealt with it at the time,” Brooks said. In 2006, she said, everyone wrongly defined hacking as an isolated case. The police said so, she noted. News International had believed them. “There's a feeling of a cover-up, our rivals think. Eventually, it will come out why things went wrong and who was responsible. And that will be another very difficult moment in this company's history.”

Perhaps mindful of the police, lawyers, and prosecutors poring over emails, documents, and phone records inside the newspaper and in people's homes, no one at the staff meeting articulated the main source of their resentment: like Goodman earlier in his letter of protest at being dismissed for hacking into the princes' phones, reporters and editors believed that their bosses had tolerated, endorsed, and even effectively required these activities. Brooks undercut Murdoch's virtuous declaration that he would dedicate the advertising revenue to charity by telling her staff that the number of companies willing to take out ads had plummeted.

PRIME MINISTER Cameron began edging away from his patrons at News International. On Friday, July 8, 2011, he announced concurrent
investigations by police and MPs, and a broad-ranging inquiry into the practices and ethics of the press. (It would be led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson.)

Contrition proved the order of the day. “Because party leaders were so keen to win the support of newspapers, we turned a blind eye to the need to sort [out] this issue, get on top of the bad practices, to change the way our newspapers are regulated,” Cameron said. “The people in power knew things weren't right. But they didn't do enough quickly enough—until the full mess of the situation was revealed.” Cameron said had he been in Murdoch's position, he would have accepted Brooks's resignation.

News International press aides denied she had made any such offer. Yet behind the scenes, guided by executives in New York, News International
eased Brooks from the role she had ostensibly been assigned to oversee the internal inquiries. Stories in the
Guardian
and elsewhere brought a fresh rash of concerns: a report that a senior News International executive, as yet unnamed, had intervened twice
to destroy millions of emails dating back to 2005—when the phone hacking of the royals occurred.

Rupert Murdoch flew to London, arriving on the morning of Sunday, July 10. He emerged from a chauffeured sedan carrying the final edition of
News of the World
; “Thank You and Goodbye” read the last headline. It carried the banner: “The World's Greatest Newspaper, 1843–2011.”

Murdoch headed to his house in Mayfair and later emerged with Rebekah Brooks, crossing to a meeting at a luxury hotel across the road. Asked by a reporter amid a throng of photographers and cameramen about his priorities now that he was in town, Murdoch answered,
“This one,” gesturing with his thumb to Brooks, giving public voice to his private instinct.