by Les Hinton
Common sense said they both deserved instant dismissal for gross misconduct and — legal technicalities aside — that we were entitled to kick out the pair of them. But I agreed we should avoid the risk of defeat and the probability of painful, if unfounded, public allegations, and we settled both cases.
By the end of 2007, I wasn’t thinking about phone-hacking at all. It had been a difficult interlude for everyone involved, but I had put it out of my mind. I was in New York buried in the complicated makeover of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. My memory wouldn’t be jolted until the morning of 9 July 2009.
Kath and I had planned it as a happy day. We had married quietly two months before, but this was the day of our wedding party. We had hired Hertford House, a grand building five minutes from our London flat that had become a gallery, the Wallace Collection. We loved wandering its rooms. It was left to the nation by the family of Sir Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of the fourth Marquess of Hertford, and contains a beautifully eclectic collection of Old Masters, antiques, furniture, and porcelain.
We invited 100 family and friends. Kath’s mother Angela and a merry troop of her Liverpool relatives were there. All five of my grown children came from New York, with spouses and partners, and my two grandchildren, Samantha and Dylan. Dylan, aged three, looked uncomfortably splendid in a blue suit and bright yellow tie.
But that morning’s edition of The Guardian had taken the shine off things. ‘Revealed: Murdoch’s £1m Bill For Hiding Dirty Tricks’ said its front, across two page-wide decks. The lead paragraph was chilling: ‘Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1m to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in criminal methods to get stories.’
The biggest payout, it said, had been a settlement in 2008 of £700,000 to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who had received the money after signing a ‘gagging’ clause preventing him from talking about the case.
A photograph of Rupert, Rebekah Brooks, Andy Coulson, and myself dominated two pages of further coverage inside. We were sitting solemnly in the pews for a memorial service at St Bride’s, Fleet Street’s parish church. I would grow sick of that image; it became the default photo used to illustrate scores of stories.
The Guardian quoted an unnamed police source saying that officers had found evidence that reporters hacked into thousands of mobile phones, including those of cabinet ministers, MPs, celebrities, and sports stars. It ran photos of the actor Gwyneth Paltrow, the cabinet minister Tessa Jowell, the TV chef Nigella Lawson, the mayor of London Boris Johnson, and the comedian Lenny Henry.
The first person to greet Kath and me at the Wallace Collection was not an invited guest. Jon Craig of Sky News was there with a camera crew, looking for an interview. Craig was the first of many, and the media cluster that grew through the evening discouraged some guests from attending. Andy Coulson sent his regrets by text, and Tessa Jowell phoned Kath with her apologies.
Our guests included politicians and party operatives from Labour and the Conservatives, and friends from most Fleet Street newspapers. They were enjoying themselves — politicians and journalists take delight in a crisis when they are merely witnesses. Senior politicians in particular live in a minefield of catastrophes waiting to happen; their glee at the troubles of others must be a relief reflex that comes with surviving another explosion.
It was a worrying article, but The Guardian had stalked News Corp for years and had overplayed other stories against the company. This latest was a dramatic read, but looked thin and depended heavily on unnamed sources. I was also sure that someone would have told me about such a massive payoff. Rebekah Brooks, there that evening, agreed. No one had told her, she said, and she doubted it was true.
But Kath was not so ready to dismiss it. ‘Even if The Guardian has jazzed it up, they can’t have invented the whole story. They would have to be sure about the details of a payment as huge as that,’ she said.
As I prepared to make my speech, she took my arm, kissed my cheek, and whispered: ‘No jokes about this — it isn’t funny.’
The Guardian story ran for three days and the hacking saga came back to life in the news. Parliamentary hearings were convened, and politicians and critics accused News International of a cover-up. But Scotland Yard decided not to reopen its investigation. The assistant commissioner John Yates said: ‘This case has been the subject of the most careful investigation by experienced detectives … No additional evidence has come to light. I therefore consider no further investigation is required.’ The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Keir Starmer QC — later a Labour MP — agreed with Yates.
Andy Hayman, who was assistant commissioner in charge of counterterrorism when the palace made its complaint, wrote in The Times about the original 2006 investigation: ‘This was not the time for a half-hearted investigation — we put our best detectives on the case and left no stone unturned as officials breathed down our neck.’
It seemed conclusive. But there was something I didn’t know, and that Yates and Hayman did not at that time reveal. When the police had searched Mulcaire’s home, they had taken away and stored 11,000 pages of notebooks and papers in bin bags. They had never properly examined them. This turned out to be a big mistake. It might have been incompetent, but I don’t believe it was sinister. The anti-terrorist police assigned to the job believed they had more important things to do, and it’s likely they made a time-and-cost decision based on the logic that the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire would have brought phone-hacking to a dead halt; the job of police forces is to prevent crime and that doesn’t necessarily mean catching every criminal. However, in 2012 when events required them to take another look, Mulcaire’s papers provided abundant evidence of hacking, and led to dozens of civil cases and several criminal prosecutions.
But in July 2009, in the face of an emphatic police response, and without solid evidence against others at the newspaper, the story receded. But the number of civil court actions mounted, with more and more people suspecting their phones might have been hacked.
The Guardian, meanwhile, had stalled in its effort to find a smoking gun inside News International. With no new leads, editor Alan Rusbridger phoned Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, hoping to excite his interest.
Rusbridger’s call was well timed. The long-running war between News Corp and The New York Times was at its hottest. Days before, we had announced that The Wall Street Journal would go into direct competition with The New York Times by launching a daily section called ‘Greater New York’.
Rupert enjoyed battling The New York Times and having fun at the expense of its chairman, Arthur Sulzberger. His admired father and predecessor had been nicknamed ‘Punch’ by his staff; Arthur was known as ‘Pinch’.
Psychological warfare between News Corp and The New York Times had gone on for decades. The New York Post took constant personal shots at ‘Pinch’. Even The Wall Street Journal joined in by illustrating, with part of Sulzberger’s face, a story about ‘men with feminine features’.
The new ‘Greater New York’ section in The Wall Street Journal was a direct assault on The New York Times when it was at its weakest. The 2008 recession had cost the newspaper millions in advertising.
Keller seized the opportunity that Rusbridger’s call gave him. Within three days, three staffers from The New York Times arrived at The Guardian’s London office. The New York Times was cutting costs elsewhere, but these reporters were given all the time they needed to get their story. It was almost six months before it appeared. It wasn’t in the main paper, but in its Sunday magazine — giving it more room for detail and speculation. The cover, dated 1 September 2010, was presented in tabloid style with a vivid red slash of a headline across a photograph of Princes William and Harry: ‘Tabloid Hack Attack!’
The paper had spoken to a do
zen News of the World reporters who claimed that the hacking of mobile phones was pervasive — and that Coulson knew about it. It also named three journalists, giving the report greater strength than the nameless quotes that had appeared in The Guardian. The hacking story had legs again — and this time it was running on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Metropolitan police held their ground, despite calls from politicians for a judicial inquiry into the mishandling of the investigation. ‘We remain of the view that no new evidence has emerged to justify re-opening this inquiry,’ a police statement said. ‘Independently, the Crown Prosecution Service, leading counsel, and the director of public prosecutions reached the same conclusion.’
But this time the inaction did not last long. By the end of 2010, as News International found itself fighting further civil actions, the company began its own internal inquiries. This was when William Lewis, News International’s managing director, found the ‘toxic emails’ that had been lost at Harbottle & Lewis.
Lewis’ discovery flipped a switch within the company. Some at News International appear to have jumped too eagerly to the conclusion that these emails had been covered up in 2007 by the then-management. I realised later that the emails must be the ‘internal report’ someone from News International had inventively told The Guardian I had seen. I was baffled that no one among News International’s team of diligent investigators appears to have questioned Harbottle & Lewis about them. No one asked me if I were aware of them; I would have said flatly that I was not. Without discussing them with me, News International’s investigators handed these explosive emails to the police. The Met, meanwhile, had remembered the bin sacks of papers it had removed from Mulcaire’s home, and reopened its inquiry in the face of ‘significant new evidence’. In the following months, Ian Edmondson, the News of the World head of news, was suspended; Andy Coulson quit his job in David Cameron’s office; and three News of the World journalists were arrested on suspicion of hacking.
By now, the crimes of phone-hackers — and the misery of their victims — were becoming lost in a drama that encompassed political parties, police, media companies, and a band of baying crusaders demanding new laws to keep the press in check.
But the most ferocious attacks on Rupert and News Corp came not from the victims of hacking, or from the police, but from the Brownite faction of the Labour Party.
CHAPTER 28
Draining the swamp
There was a history of hostility between the Labour Party and Rupert, dating back at least to the Wapping siege and The Sun’s fierce support of Margaret Thatcher and its equally fierce opposition to socialism. But that was before the party’s conversion to ‘New Labour’ under the moderate leadership of Tony Blair. During the Blair years, the relationship was mostly cordial; two later events were central to understanding Labour’s new animosity.
Within four months of resigning as editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson accepted the job of director of communications for the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron. The News of the World, along with The Sun, had supported Labour for ten years and now an influential former editor, who was still close to the company, had switched sides. Coulson’s hiring came in the final days of Blair’s reign, four weeks before he resigned, and his appointment disturbed Labour’s new leadership.
Then, in September 2009, when Labour was still in government but struggling under the unsteady leadership of Gordon Brown, The Sun finally abandoned the party, and switched its support to the Conservatives.
Brown was furious at the manner in which The Sun turned against him. Warming up his party for a general election, he had made a powerful and well-received address to the Labour Party conference in Brighton. ‘We are the Labour Party and our abiding duty is to stand. And fight. And win. And serve,’ he thundered.
It was stirring stuff, and Brown was pleased with his performance. But his post-speech heart rate had scarcely returned to normal when he received news of the front-page headline in the following day’s The Sun. It said, simply: ‘Labour’s Lost It’. A supporting subhead went on: ‘After 12 Long Years In Power, This Government Has Lost Its Way. Now It’s Lost The Sun’s Support Too.’
It was a sneak attack and timed to deliver maximum damage. Brown had spent years making a friend of Rupert and there was a genuine fondness between them. Rupert liked Brown; he thought he was cleverer than Blair and admired his unshowy, blunt style. Brown’s father had been a Scottish church minister, as was Rupert’s grandfather. This shared history was important to them both. ‘Gordon has a Calvinistic approach to life, and there is a lot to be said for it,’ Rupert once told The New Yorker.
The timing of The Sun’s declaration seemed more malice than the paper’s typical mischief-making. Both James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks had become close to Conservative leader David Cameron, whose former life as a public relations executive made him more palatable company than the awkward and often spiky Brown.
But soon after that front-page shock, The Sun delivered another: ‘Bloody Shameful’ was the main headline. The supposed ‘shame’ was that Brown had written a letter of sympathy to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan and misspelt the soldier’s name.
The story was deeply unfair. Brown was partly sighted; aides sent emails to him in extra large font, and when he spoke in the House of Commons, the despatch box was stacked with books to bring his notes closer. Every newspaper knew that Brown wrote clumsily with a thick-tipped pen — and that apparent spelling mistakes were often nothing of the sort. It was a low blow and Brown is said to have snapped over the story.
Rupert said later that he received an angry call from Brown in which Brown said: ‘Your company has declared war on my government and we have no alternative but to make war on your company.’ Rupert, observing Brown’s mood during the call, said: ‘I don’t think he was in a very balanced state of mind.’
Brown’s response to this accusation was emphatic: ‘This call did not happen. This threat was not made. I couldn’t be unbalanced on a call I didn’t have.’
What’s fascinating about these two statements is that they were both made under oath in 2012 in front of the so-called Leveson Inquiry, which was ordered by a beleaguered and weakened David Cameron, by then prime minister, into the ‘culture, ethics, and practices’ of the British press.
It’s impossible to be sure whether either committed perjury — or which was simply forgetful — but before they testified I had heard several accounts from company insiders of a conversation in which Brown threatened Rupert.
Whatever he did or didn’t say in a phone call, Brown was intent on serious damage when he rose from the backbenches of the House of Commons during a debate about phone-hacking in the summer of 2011. News Corp, he said, had ‘descended from the gutter to the sewer … The tragedy is that they let the rats out of the sewer … they marched in step, I say, with members of the criminal underworld … this criminal media nexus [was] standing side by side with criminals against our citizens.’
It was shocking stuff, and it surprised me. In many conversations with Brown over a decade — during private dinners, at the theatre, after Goodman and Mulcaire had gone to prison — he never once hinted at any concerns he harboured about the ethics or propriety of News International. If the prime minister thought the company was ‘in the gutter’, he did a fine job of hiding it from me.
Brown’s onslaught was a rare public demonstration of his notorious intemperance. It came in the days following the Milly Dowler disclosures of July 2011. Voters had thrown him and the Labour Party out of office the previous year; both were bitter and blamed, at least in part, Rupert’s newspapers. The new leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband, was happy to follow the lead of his former boss. There were old scores to be settled, and the hacking crisis provided an ideal opportunity for revenge.
Even better, David Cameron had given Labour a perfect gift in the shape of Andy Coulson. He had ins
talled a ‘criminal’ in Number 10 Downing Street.
In its eagerness for revenge, Labour ignored its own hypocrisy. The party attacked Cameron for his friendship with News International and Rebekah Brooks, overlooking its own conduct and constant inveigling. Only weeks before, a troupe of Labour leaders had turned up for Liz Murdoch and Matthew Freud’s epic housewarming. Self-declared arch-enemy, Tom Watson, forgot the many drinks he’d consumed at the expense of News Corp; I remember the sight of him in a jolly mood wearing a bright blue News Corp jacket, extra large, at our party to wave off a company-sponsored yacht on a transatlantic race; he seemed at home among the yachting set. And Brown was in a different frame of mind when his wife Sarah hosted a late 2007 sleepover and pyjama party at Chequers, attended by Rebekah Brooks and Wendi Murdoch. (Kath had declined her invitation. ‘It’s all too cosy for comfort,’ she’d said. ‘And besides, I’d have to buy a pair of pyjamas.’)
Brooks was the most avid networker in Fleet Street and, as editor of the News of the World and then The Sun, the eagerness to be her friend crossed party lines. She could be dazzled by these supposed admirers and made a mistake in not keeping her distance from politicians. Sure enough, these counterfeit friends fled when Brooks became radioactive and dangerous to know.
As the scandal grew, fallout spread across Britain’s press; every popular newspaper was under suspicion of phone-hacking and other illegal activity.
News Corp’s problems increased in the United States after a source-free Daily Mirror report that the voicemails of the families of 9/11 victims had been hacked — nothing ever came of it. The Mirror itself was later drawn into the scandal, but its pain was less pronounced without the manufactured outrage of other media and self-serving Labour politicians.