The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  In September 2016, Parliament finally conceded it had made a mistake. In a long analysis of the allegations against me, it acknowledged the Culture committee had been wrong and that the evidence did not support the finding that I had lied.

  My former colleagues at The Wall Street Journal, in a prominent and satisfying editorial headlined ‘Les Hinton’s Vindication’ wrote:

  Les Hinton must be wondering to which office he should go to get his reputation back. The question was first asked by former Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan after he was acquitted of trumped-up fraud charges … [Hinton’s] parliamentary vindication is, as he says, ‘too little and too late,’ but it should be a warning of the damage that political frenzies can do to the lives and careers of honorable men.

  It had been a long wait, but the door had finally closed for me on the most difficult period of my working life.

  By then, for me at least, the worst was over. The US Justice Department, whose lawyers interrogated me in Manhattan, decided against prosecuting the company. The Crown Prosecution Service reached the same conclusion; three years after my police interview, Detective Sergeant May Robinson of the Metropolitan Police sent me a letter: ‘I am now in a position to inform you that the Crown Prosecution Service has decided to take no further action in relation to the Company, and by extension yourself.’ She thanked me for my cooperation.

  There were no more arrests. More than 100 journalists had been questioned under caution, arrested, or sent to trial. Overwhelmingly, these journalists were from the News of the World and The Sun. Five Mirror journalists were arrested, and 15 interviewed under caution. During one civil action, the barrister David Sherborne said hacking at Mirror Group titles made the News of the World’s exploits look like a ‘small cottage industry’. But even as the courts continued to make large cash awards to Mirror Group victims, the Crown Prosecution Service announced there would be no Mirror prosecutions. There was, apparently, ‘insufficient evidence’.

  The Mirror allegations caused no hysteria; the Labour Party had no interest in destroying the Mirror newspapers, or their owners. The Mirror Group was the only newspaper group that always supported Labour. Despite proof of phone-hacking, John Prescott, once deputy prime minister and a ferocious critic of misconduct at the News of the World, continued writing a weekly column for the Sunday Mirror.

  Of the 21 The Sun journalists caught in the investigation into police payments, all who went to court were acquitted at trial, or on appeal. Of the 29 News of the World journalists arrested for hacking, eight pleaded guilty and one, Andy Coulson, was found guilty at trial.

  News Corp went a long way to make good on Rupert’s promise to The Sun journalists. Several returned to The Sun, others chose to negotiate settlements. The brilliant award-winning John Kay was shattered by the experience, and the company’s decision to reveal his sources, and never returned to journalism. Fergus Shanahan, one of The Sun’s most talented, was left in a state of exhausted despair. After his three-and-a-half-year ordeal with the police and courts, he decided he needed a rest from Fleet Street, bought a dog, and set off with his wife to renovate a house in France. ‘I’m going to read newspapers for a while instead of sweating for them,’ he said.

  Public officials paid by journalists were not so lucky. Thirty police officers, prison officers, and government officials were convicted or pleaded guilty, and many went to prison. This was the other pain for the journalists — seeing sources that had trusted them fall. Bettina Jordan-Barber, a 42-year-old civil servant at the Ministry of Defence, was sentenced to 12 months. Over eight years, The Sun paid her £100,000 for dozens of stories she provided to John Kay. Jordan-Barber may have violated the terms of her employment, but the stories were undeniably in the public interest: a shortage of flak jackets and combat helicopters, military suicides, Army bullying, an inquiry into attempted murder at Sandhurst. In the frenzy, others were convicted on thin evidence. April Casburn, a 53-year-old detective chief inspector in the Met’s anti-terrorist unit, was sentenced to 15 months in prison after calling the News of the World to protest that detectives were being transferred to the hacking investigation and away from terrorist and murder inquiries. The principal evidence against Casburn was that the journalist she spoke to made a note that she wanted to sell her story, which Casburn denied. No money changed hands and no story ever appeared.

  Newspapers boycotted the Leveson watchdog that was ‘underpinned’ by the state, favouring their own self-regulatory body. After the resignation of David Cameron, the new prime minister, Theresa May, said her government would not adopt the proposal that ‘rebel’ publications should face punitive financial penalties. This was a fragile victory; a future Labour government might well use a new outrage against the press to reverse May’s decision

  But the hacking scandal shifted into history. Politicians found other fires to feed, and the police more serious matters to pursue. Rupert’s companies thrived, and his son James returned to his position as chairman of Sky and continued his rise in the United States.

  But below them, in the foothills, were casualties: the victims of phone-hacking, of course, but also the innocent journalists and their wives and husbands and children, and others with shattered lives and lost careers, so many of them the collateral victims of other people’s wars. It’s possible to be angry with the idiotic law-breaking that happened as well as the unscrupulous exploitation of politicians and their careless destruction of reputations, and the strong-arm conduct of a panic-stricken police force, and, for me most painful of all, the carelessness of some at News Corp, and those working on its behalf, with the welfare of employees and their families.

  As a reader, I had my own problems with the News of the World. It had become too often mean-spirited, even pitiless, although these traits did not make it unique in the changing style of Fleet Street popular newspapers. But it didn’t deserve to die. The newspaper and all who worked there were sacrificed, put to the torch in the manner firefighters set strategic blazes to halt the spread of wildfires. But it died in vain; nothing could check the hungry flames and hostile winds. The Sun endured, and, even with its spirit crushed and much of its leadership gone, it began to recover. But the survivors, and those lost in the inferno, will never forget what happened. ‘Draining the swamp’ is a phrase that lives in infamy among them. No one ever confessed to using it.

  Epilogue

  I had been here a thousand times, but everything had changed. I didn’t recognise the chrome furniture or the subtle lighting, or the artistic black-and-white photographs on the walls. The gleaming paintwork and thick carpet were as unfamiliar as the cheerful face of Melissa, sales executive and guardian of what was once the grim, brick-lined office of the editor of The Sunday Times.

  This used to be Fortress Wapping, the ugly and intermittently embattled home of News International. Now, it was a demolition site, and the room I stood in a real estate showroom, filled with plans and models of glories to come.

  I stood at the wide table in the middle of the room, looking down at the glass-encased toy town of tall buildings, landscaped squares, and tree-lined boulevards — an architect’s vision of a new world, with everything that had gone before eliminated by London’s forgetful rush. Outside, I could hear the clatter of machinery and the shouts of workmen.

  In another decade, the former home of the News of the World, The Sun and The Times newspapers — the place I spent the longest period of my working life — would be a panorama of apartment blocks, shops, restaurants, and a ‘magnificent choreographed central water feature’; a dancing fountain to banish the sounds of an impatient city.

  I had said I was interested in buying a flat, although it wasn’t true. The old Wapping plant had been sold to developers in 2012 and I couldn’t resist a visit. Starting price for an apartment was £869,950. If I were considering a penthouse, it would cost me £4 million. In the 1970s, Rupert Murdoch paid £300,000 an acre.

 
When I came clean and introduced myself to Melissa, and told her the dramatic story of Wapping, she looked at me as if I had landed in her glossy office through a wrinkle in time in an old-fashioned police call box.

  Everything was different, but I knew where I was. I could tell by the immutable grey spire of Hawksmoor’s great church, St George-in-the-East, consecrated in 1729. It sat on the other side of the teeming Highway, waiting for the towering shadows of its new neighbours.

  In the distance was the silvery arrow-point of The Shard; the Baby Shard next door was the new home of Rupert Murdoch’s British publishing group, now called News UK; its name was changed to shake off the stigma of News International.

  I’m always revisiting the places where I’ve lived and worked. I stand outside old homes all the time — peering through the hedge at Brentwood Park; down the overgrown driveway in Minchinbury Terrace; beneath palm trees in Singapore. I go to Westchester County, Boston, Santa Monica, Finchley, and to Bootle, even though my old neighbourhood was bulldozed long ago.

  I drive past the Fox lot in Los Angeles, through streets where the Boston Herald once stood, and stroll often along Fleet Street. I haven’t been to Tripoli yet; I carved my name deep into a seafront wall when I was nine and imagined it being there forever.

  Kath is indulgent of my constant need to return to places, although I know she thinks it’s weird and obsessive. She’s probably right, but I can’t stop. I’ve travelled so much, it’s somehow reassuring to see the physical evidence of my life, and I enjoy putting together the memories. Perhaps, somewhere deep down, I’m looking for a coherent pattern to my untidy life, but logically I understand that’s a waste of time. With a childhood broken randomly into disconnected pieces, life was so ephemeral that I think permanence came to seem unnatural — dangerous and stagnating.

  Wapping was more than another lost place; it was also a symbol of how Rupert’s company had evolved beyond the print business I joined in 1959. Wapping had been a powerhouse of cash that fuelled the company’s American expansion, but by 2017, with profits depleted, it was struggling to reinvent itself. The magnates of television and newspapers, who once dominated the world of information and communication, were yielding to engineers and computer scientists with empires of a size and reach once unimaginable. Their new world was demolishing many businesses I grew up with, but it was also creating an inestimably better informed planet. As a teenager in Adelaide, there were two daily newspapers, a couple of television stations each providing a total of, maybe, an hour of news, and local radio doing the same. Half a century later, in the same city — any city — technology supplied an amount of information and variety of opinion that was virtually unquantifiable. The business of print might have been in doubt, and the new economics of journalism still to be settled, but it seemed sure to me that good journalism would flourish because there would always be demand. In the decimated print industry, while nothing promised the riches of old, green shoots were peeping through the tundra on the frontier of digital reinvention in places such at The Times in London, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. The Daily Mail had stolen The Sun’s clothing with the introduction of a lurid tabloid website that claimed to have the world’s biggest English-language audience.

  By 2018, the Murdoch empire was changing. First, it had grown two heads, with the giant of profit and promise, 21st Century Fox, divorcing its weakening print partner. Then Rupert made a deal to sell to the Walt Disney Company his 20th Century Fox film and television studio, and other TV assets, including Sky TV. James, at least, seemed about to escape the powerful gravity of his 87-year-old father by joining Disney, or going his own way. Now middle aged, James and Lachlan, the princes who had flourished under their father’s sponsorship, would soon make their own history or become footnotes in their father’s story.

  No one was sure what the next chapter of Rupert’s story might be, but his had been the biggest and best media company ever created — or the heart of darkness, depending on your point of view. On the hard facts, no other old newspaper baron established big newspaper operations in so many places — not Hearst, or Beaverbrook, the Sulzbergers, or Northcliffe and the Rothermeres. More than six decades from the beginning, Rupert’s newspapers still had a powerful presence on three continents. And no other television operation was ahead of his in its global spread — from Australia, to Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Sky TV and Vodafone were arguably the two great new post-war British businesses, introducing new forms of communication and creating thousands of jobs where none existed.

  His success had not met with universal admiration. Rupert could be hell to work for, and 60 years of success and tough tactics yielded for him a bitter harvest of enemies. To the bitterest, he was a scabrous, plundering capitalist debasing cultures across the world. Few books written about him were flattering. The titles said it all: Dial M for Murdoch; Murdoch’s Politics: How one Man’s Thirst for Wealth and Power Shapes our World; Breaking News: Sex, Lies and the Murdoch Succession; Murdoch’s Pirates. Books by wishful thinkers have been a staple: Murdoch: the Decline of an Empire; The Fall of the House of Murdoch; The Rise and Fall of the Murdoch Empire.

  But the Rupert Murdoch they hated was a hallucination, a virtual devil, a crowd-sourced apparition created to be the object of all their rage and grief about big business, great power, global inequity, and everything else they saw wrong with the world.

  No doubt, he’s a driven businessman with heavy boots who bruised a lot of people. At times, he has deserved a kicking. As a boss, he could be hands-off or autocratic, charming or irascible, forgiving or fierce, and sometimes just a comprehensive pain; but he also imbued his companies with a fantastic sense of possibility and got big results. His ambition to grow seemed unending, as if he were working on an unfinishable opus. The ancient Macedonian conqueror, Alexander the Great, wept when he had no more worlds to conquer. Over the years, many were known to search hopefully for that tear in Rupert’s eye. Working for him could be very tough and the attrition was high. At each of our regular management conferences, a booklet listed the attending executives; as the years passed, reading one was like looking at a war memorial. It was said of Lord Beaverbrook — a press lord from a previous generation — that never working for him was like serving in a world war without hearing a shot fired. I understand.

  It took a while to acclimatise to life without the trappings and hectic hours of a Murdoch executive. But my suits don’t wear out so quickly, and I’ve stopped, after 40 years, setting the alarm clock for 5.30am. For a while after leaving, I did nothing except tackle the hacking fallout in London. I didn’t kick the travel bug. We travel so often between New York and London that it’s only now and then we fail to recognise the cabin crews on British Airways. It’s novel going on long trips without the company or the Army making the rules. Kath loved America so much she became a US citizen in 2014, but few moments make her happier than when we arrive back in London.

  Writing your life story is self-indulgent, but it also illuminates the people who have made everything worthwhile: Lilian and Frank, my English parents; Marilyn and Duncan, my Australian siblings; Martin, Thomas, William, James, and Jane, my American children; and their mother, Mary, my first wife, who travelled the world with me and who died of cancer in December 2016. She is buried in a churchyard in Lusk, County Dublin, a walk from the thatched house she cherished and near the meadows of the family farm where she played as a child. And there are Samantha, Dylan, Lily, and Leo, my grandchildren; their mothers, Stephanie, Eliana, and Kel. And my wife Kath, dearest Kath, who has helped me with this book, and in uncountable other ways.

  I can’t explain what has entitled me to my life’s success: the love, the family, or the career. My mother had a fierce determination and Bootle toughness she never seemed sure how to deploy. I think I took her determination and made better use of it, and I know that made her proud. My childhood travel seemed an unstable foo
ting, but built in me a flexibility that prepared me for a successful working life. Arriving so often in so many new places, having to make the right impression with another group of strangers, made me good at slipping into new jobs and getting along with people. And yet, because the mobility came naturally, I imposed it on the family, just as it had been imposed on me, and was too self-absorbed to recognise until later how hard it could be for them.

  My life and career has been wilder, happier, weirder, richer, and sometimes more disconcerting than I could ever have expected. I’m grateful for it all. I was always the new boy at the school gate. The early journeys were a unique education, and, for all the occasional anguish, my travels with Rupert were priceless. When it was tough I got through by staying optimistic; expect the future to be perfect — you can’t be wrong all the time.

  But there really is no place like home for me — none. It’s too late. There is no everlasting destination. No cocoon. No hearth. No dust-shafted aspidistra parlour, or dependable smells, or reassuring staircase creaks. Home travels with me. It is with the pre-dawn blackbirds and the blinking Belisha at the London window; in the breezy sunsets of the Hudson Valley hills; in the sparrows of a Manhattan courtyard; and everywhere in the hot, strange smells of unknown cities. It’s a baby’s breath; the weight of a small child against my chest; the book-buried head of Kath; my own reflection in a grown-up child, older and wearier with the world, with all the same hopes and apprehensions.

  Home is where it needs to be.

  And that’s good enough for me.

  Acknowledgements

  As a reporter, writing was mostly a hasty activity in noisy newsrooms, or on the road scribbling into notebooks, or dictating raw to copy-takers in old-fashioned phone rooms who had heard every story before; there was nothing more cheering — or rare — than a word of appreciation from one of them. Writing a book is different, and lonely. Without the imperative of an immediate deadline, with months to go before delivery, and no fierce editor hovering, an inner discipline is required; it was a struggle to find mine. You also need help to write a book, lots of it, and, without the help given to me, these pages would have been impossible.