The meeting started badly. ‘I saw that new film you’ve done, Brokeback Mountain. Are you expecting great things from it?’ I asked Murdoch (I was referring to his company 20th Century Fox, not realising that the film was actually made by someone else). He looked at me, slightly bemused, and snapped back, ‘That movie about two cowboys mooning at each other up a mountain? It won’t play outside San Francisco.’
The next time we met, alone, for breakfast, I changed tack. ‘Look, I’m just going to say what I think. I’m everything you don’t like – upper-middle-class, a member of the establishment, a slightly left-leaning Conservative …’ ‘Well, you are,’ he replied. With the problem defined, conversation flowed slightly more easily, but we never reached the point where he was enthusiastic about me.
The arm’s-length approach to the press was fine in theory, but failed in practice. By 2007, as I’ve described, the Conservatives were losing momentum. The party was becoming restless. The grammar schools row had damaged us. Frankly, we were in trouble and drifting towards a fourth successive electoral defeat. George convinced me that we would struggle to win unless we galvanised all the elements of what he called ‘the Conservative family’ – and that included the Conservative-inclined print media.
He was right. But there was a problem. The Tory-leaning papers did not particularly lean towards modernisation – or towards me, for that matter. The Mail was unenthusiastic (its editor Paul Dacre was good friends with Gordon Brown). The Telegraph was also lukewarm (‘Why is the Telegraph giving Mr Brown so much comfort?’ the ConservativeHome website asked). The Sun was still supporting Labour, after switching allegiance to Blair in 1997. The Times had also supported Labour in the 2005 election, as had the FT.
Not only were they unsupportive; when you are the leader of a main political party at the centre of a crisis, you experience the media in full flow.
It was hard not to see the funny side. The Friday-night phone calls from my press team about some forthcoming revelation would lead to a conference call, often interrupted by gales of laughter. I remember having to deal with the allegations of Lord Laidlaw’s bondage parties, and was soon joking in a speech to the parliamentary press gallery that while I had removed the whip from the peer, I should also have confiscated the handcuffs, fishnets and blindfold.
But the press was a force to be reckoned with, and I needed someone to grip it, a heavyweight media operator who knew how tabloids worked. George Eustice was very gracious, but said he couldn’t do the job properly on his own, not least because when it came to dealing with some journalists, ‘I just hate them too much.’
There were various other contenders from the broadcast world, some of whom I met but didn’t click with. And there was a candidate from the tabloid press: Andy Coulson, an Essex-boy-done-good who shot to the top at the News of the World at a young age. It was he who coined the ‘hug a hoodie’ tag that stuck to me like glue. More recently he had dramatically resigned from the paper after its royal editor, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, had been convicted of hacking the voicemail messages of royal aides, including Princes William and Harry’s private secretary. Andy always maintained that he knew nothing of this hacking, but he conceded that as editor the buck stopped with him, and he left.
His assurances had been enough for the existing press self-regulator, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) and the police. They had investigated the allegations and concluded that they had found the criminals. The inquiries appeared to be over.
Andy reiterated his assurances during his interview with Ed Llewellyn and the then party chairman, Francis Maude, for the job of Conservative Party director of communications and planning. And he repeated them again to me during the course of our interviews in my House of Commons office.
I was satisfied with his replies, and believed that the authorities who had gone into the matter in some depth seemed to be satisfied too; Andy had done the decent thing and resigned for what had happened. I decided to give him a second chance.
His arrival helped put the wind back in our sails. He was hugely popular, and despite his frequent flare-ups with Steve Hilton, he injected camaraderie, energy and purpose into the operation.
Out went the green and blue tree on our logo, and in came a Union Flag-draped tree – an Andy innovation that remains to this day. In came more hard-hitting interventions from me on issues like schools, crime and jobs. And when Britain hit recession in 2009, Andy was superb at helping to deliver the message that we needed to live within our means.
Far from there ever being any hint of impropriety in his behaviour, he seemed to me someone of integrity: moral, upstanding, proper. There was a moment during the Caroline Spelman affair (the then party chairman had paid taxpayers’ money to her children’s nanny) when I said we must make sure the nanny knew what to say when the press got to her.Andy went ballistic. That was preparing a witness, he said. We would be breaking the law.
He also rebuilt my relationship with the press. People assume he was brought in to win the support of the Murdoch empire. But we worked just as hard establishing a relationship with the other main newspapers. I had previously met the Daily Mail owner, Lord Rothermere, as well as the editor, Paul Dacre. I had also met the various editors of the Telegraph and its secretive owners, the Barclay brothers, including flying with George and Ed to the Channel Island – their island – Brecqhou in September 2006. But with Andy in place, we stepped up our efforts.
Separately, I became good friends with Rebekah Wade. She started going out with my neighbour and old friend Charlie Brooks, who I would often play tennis and go riding with. Eventually she moved in to Charlie’s house down the road from me, and they married in 2009.
Rebekah was clever, interesting, gossipy and easy to get to know. We remain friends. Of course it was part of her job to be close to political leaders – and part of mine to build relationships with key media figures. But our relationship felt as much social as political, not least because at the time it began the newspapers she was responsible for were still pretty staunch in their support for Labour.
But then on 30 September 2009, the morning after Gordon Brown’s conference speech, the Sun switched that twelve-year allegiance to the Tories with the splash ‘Labour’s Lost It’. I was pleased with the endorsement, and I didn’t feel it had come as a result of my efforts with the media so much as reflecting the national mood. But I was disappointed that it was framed as the paper having given up on Labour rather than taken up with the Conservatives.
We’d have to wait for the Telegraph to show its hand, which it did just two days before the election – again, more of a Labour and Lib Dem rejection than a Conservative testimonial. The Mail came out on election eve – also supportive, but not full-throated.
In the preceding months Andy had been in two minds about following us from opposition into government, but George and I persuaded him. And he thrived there.
At the same time as all of this, in June 2010, News Corporation, News International’s parent company, launched its bid for the remaining 61 per cent of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB. I saw at once how significant this was, and recused myself from it. I told my office I didn’t want to be involved at all, and didn’t want to know when decisions were being made.
Privately, having been at Carlton and in direct competition with BSkyB when we established the rival pay-TV operator ONdigital, my view was that the media furore was actually overdone. BSkyB was already effectively controlled by News Corporation, and therefore by Rupert Murdoch. Allowing it to buy out the remaining shareholders was a big deal in terms of scale, but not in terms of the impact on the market.
There was a legitimate argument that News Corporation had too dominant a position in the national newspaper market, where it had 36 per cent of circulation. And there was another legitimate argument that ‘cross-media ownership’ rules were needed to prevent companies having too strong a position
in both print and television – although in my view Murdoch was already in that position.
I didn’t buy into either of those arguments. While at Carlton I had made the case against ownership restrictions both within individual markets and between them. My view then and now was that the media were becoming more open and more competitive, with the blurring of distinctions between the different types of media and the entry of new giants, like Google, onto the scene.
Far from being frightened about strong media groups being established, we should recognise that it was bound to happen. Indeed, it would be good to have some British-based giants to compete with US titans like Disney and Time Warner.
The newspaper industry was in long-term decline, so consolidation was inevitable. Added to that, there was no need for concern about combining Sky News with a bunch of newspapers because a) they were already combined, and b) Sky News, while an excellent service, had a tiny audience compared with the news on BBC or ITV.
Politicians who love appearing on news channels tend to make the mistake of believing that everyone else likes watching them. They don’t. I knew from my time in the industry, when I had studied the overnight ratings as soon as I got to my desk every morning, that even the most unpopular edition of the BBC’s 10 o’clock news gets an audience five times the size of the most popular show on Sky News.
But none of this was my call to make. It was down to Vince Cable, who as business secretary had oversight of media deals, and he referred the bid to the media regulator Ofcom for investigation.
On 21 December 2010 the Daily Telegraph released a secret recording of Vince telling two reporters posing as voters at one of his constituency surgeries that he had ‘declared war’ on Rupert Murdoch and was planning to block the bid.
I pondered whether demanding his resignation might be appropriate, but the necessities of coalition and the weight Vince brought to the department prevailed, and he stayed put. The quasi-judicial responsibility for the bid, however, would have to go to another minister.
One allegation is that I chose Jeremy Hunt because he was sympathetic to Murdoch. Again, simply not true. He was not only the most logical person, as the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, but his appointment was made on the advice of the most senior civil servant in the government, cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell, and was confirmed by the most senior solicitor in government, Paul Jenkins.
But it was phone-hacking that was to push media policy to the top of my prime-ministerial agenda.
Though the PCC had reviewed its evidence in 2009 and still found no evidence of wider hacking beyond Goodman and Mulcaire, the Guardian revealed that News International was making payouts – by that time totalling £١ million – to those claiming their voicemails had been hacked.
In February 2010 the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee said that it was ‘inconceivable’ that more people didn’t know about hacking, and continued to probe.
Then there was an essay in the New York Times that September revealing the extent of the practice and how exactly it was done: calling the target’s phone to make it engaged, then simultaneously calling on another line and using the easily guessed manufacturer-set password to access their voicemail messages.
What had been claimed to be a couple of bad apples was now unfolding as an industry with a rotten secret at its core. Crucially, the article claimed that Andy had not just known about hacking, but encouraged it.
The charge against me has frequently been: why didn’t you do something at this point, when the finger was being pointed directly at Andy? I was very much of the view that unless someone produced evidence that he knew about the hacking, then, like anyone, he was innocent until proven guilty. And while the claims about him were becoming more lurid, I still hadn’t seen any evidence to countermand the assurances that he had given me.
But, looking back, of course my stubbornness was misplaced. Andy had been a capable and honest adviser to me, and had become part of my close team. Everything in our relationship to that point made me trust him. It wasn’t only that I believed his assurances, it was that I very much wanted to believe them. And that always affects your judgement.
The Met Police then changed its position from the one I had relied upon initially. Operation Weeting later estimated that there were 829 likely victims of phone-hacking. The concurrent Operation Elveden began investigating payments by the press to the police for information. Accusations of corruption flew around: between politicians and the press, the press and the police, the entire establishment. Pandora’s Box had been flung wide open.
On 21 January 2011 Andy came to me and said that his continued presence in government was too much of a distraction. He admitted that he had been wrong to have come into Downing Street when these claims – untrue as I thought they were – were still being levelled.
And then, that summer, the whole saga took a gut-churning turn when it was revealed that the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler had been hacked in 2002.
I was in Afghanistan, about to hold a press conference with President Karzai, at which I would be asked about the allegations: the Guardian had reported that voicemail messages on Milly’s phone had been deleted by journalists, which caused her parents to believe she was still alive (in fact that allegation was later found to be inaccurate, though the hacking itself had indeed taken place). Overnight, the whole thing had moved from an issue that was unedifying and wrong to something that was despicable and wicked. The victims weren’t just people in the public eye; they were grieving families who had already lived through hell.
Three days later my new director of communications, Craig Oliver, took me to one side to say that the News of the World, which had been on Britain’s news stands for 168 years, was closing. We had an emergency meeting with Ed, Kate, George and others in the flat. I tried to make sense of this sorriest of sagas.
Three things had come to a head that hadn’t been properly dealt with.
First, there were the poor practices by the newspaper industry. Reporters and editors were under such pressure – from twenty-four-hour rolling news, new media and declining sales – that they had chased new angles and exclusives, with some resorting to totally unacceptable practices. From rooting through bins (which the Sunday Mirror did to me) to hacking voicemails, the industry was in denial about its own activities.
Second, there was a chronic and persistent regulatory failure. Former media secretary David Mellor had famously told the press it was ‘drinking in the last-chance saloon’ two decades before, but if anything the situation had got worse. The self-regulatory body, the Press Complaints Commission, had proved itself toothless and ineffective. Its code of conduct was good, but it wasn’t even close to being properly enforced. Nor were the police dealing with the elements that were clearly criminal.
It was difficult for anyone to get redress for falsehoods that had been published about them. And when people did successfully complain, an apology or correction would be printed so far back in the paper, with such little prominence, that it was hardly worth being printed at all.
And third, yes, there was a relationship between the press and politicians that was too close. And close in a particularly troubling way.
This is not a new thing. Unlike the BBC, there is no constitutional obligation for newspapers to keep their distance from politicians. But the desire of politicians to get good coverage, and the way society has changed, produced a relationship in which power was skewed. Because politicians were so reliant upon the press – and saw editors and reporters as colleagues and friends, but also feared them – few of them questioned how well the self-regulatory system was working or delved too deeply into press practices, even when the evidence was growing that the system was failing and poor behaviour was rife. That was the problem with the closeness. No one wanted to cross those on whom they relied, or risk angering those who could bring them down.
I’m sure this is why every time the issue of press intrusion had come up in the past, politicians stuck their heads firmly in the sand. For instance, in 2006 the information commissioner produced a report revealing that private detectives were selling people’s personal data and information to newspapers. What was the political reaction? Did the Labour government condemn this theft of data? Was the opposition up in arms demanding action? Not a bit of it. There was close to total silence. (What had I done about the Sunday Mirror going through my bins? Made a fuss about it for a few days, and then dropped it.)
These issues would have to be dealt with, and dealt with properly. In terms of the most serious allegations – the hacking of phones – there was a strong case for launching a public inquiry. If a select committee couldn’t find out the truth, if the PCC couldn’t find out, if the Metropolitan Police couldn’t find out, then who could? Parliament, the press and the police had failed. An inquiry was right and inevitable.
Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems wanted a fully independent, judge-led public inquiry with a wide remit. So did Ed Miliband and Labour. Doubtless they both believed that the Conservatives and I had the most to lose from broadening the terms to include the relationship between the press and politicians, but the case for doing so was pretty strong. And as there was a majority in Parliament for a comprehensive public inquiry, that was what we would have.
Indeed, on press regulation there was no Conservative–Lib Dem coalition and Labour opposition; there was, effectively, a Labour–Lib Dem coalition and a Conservative opposition. It was dangerous territory to be in. Either have an inquiry on our terms or have one forced on us by them.
The Labour position on the issue had fundamentally changed. The party under Blair and Brown had enjoyed an even closer relationship with newspapers and their proprietors than I ever had. But Miliband decided to go full-throttle on the issue, opposing the BSkyB takeover, criticising press practices, condemning the closeness of the media and politicians, even condemning his own party’s two most recent leaders, and demanding that Murdoch’s UK press empire be dismantled.
For the Record Page 33