Hack

by Graham Johnson

  Dan Collins, the Deputy Features Editor, stood over me and picked up a handful of my cuttings. I didn’t let his cherubic Harry Potter-face deceive me. His bookish, straightforward manner masked a paper-cut wit and an unnerving eye for detail. He looked more like a Cityboy than a junior news exec – double-cuffed, stripy shirt, dark suit, textured leather shoes. Murdoch paid his officer class well.

  ‘Why haven’t you got the originals?’ he fired at me, referring to the copies I’d shadily made from the office cuts’ book the day before. Dan was probing to see if I was blagging it. To suss out if I’d ripped off someone else’s exclusives to pass them off as my own.

  ‘No time,’ I said. The sub-text of the answer was this – I spend every waking hour booting in doors and chasing stories – no time to make a fucking scrapbook of them. Not Blue Peter, mate.

  Dan parried: ‘How come you haven’t got any bylines on these stories then?’

  He was just trying to rattle me – he knew very well that lowly-paid agency reporters rarely got credited for their hard graft.

  Dan scanned a bondage story I’d done for the Sunday Mirror about a sado-masochist party at a club owned by former Tory Defence Minister Tom King. King hadn’t known about the sex party but the fact that it had been held at one of his business addresses made it worthy of a spread. To get the story, I’d had to go under cover as a rubber fetishist, disguised in skin-tight plastic trousers and a homoerotic black string vest. I looked like the secret fourth member of Right Said Fred gone wrong. Very embarrassing, especially on my pale, battle-fatigued frame. Ray looked half-interested because of the Screwsy sex angle.

  I told them how I had done some sneaky stills on a Canon Sure Shot of a semi-naked girl hung up on a meat hook being whipped – a difficult task in low light whilst being overlooked by pervy bouncers. Even so, Ray’s expression was half ‘I wouldn’t wipe my arse on that story in the executive bogs down the corridor’ and half ‘So fucking what?’ This was a Fleet Street legend who had hidden in a bedroom cupboard to catch another minister – David Mellor – shagging in his Chelsea kit (allegedly). Ray had served his time on the Sunday Sport in its ‘London Bus Found on The Moon’ heyday. Private Eye dubbed him Ray Latrine.

  ‘Yes, nice one,’ he said diplomatically. ‘But how come you gave this to the Sunday Mirror? Why didn’t you offer this to us first?’

  ‘We did – we offered it to you first. Well, News anyway,’ I explained naively. ‘Words and pics – but they knocked it back. So we moved it on, to the Mirror.’

  ‘Cunts,’ he spat.

  ‘Who? The Sunday Mirror?

  ‘No! Fucking News.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said.

  ‘We’re not fucking News. We’re Features. Putting it up to them is hardly giving it to us, is it?’

  I’d just walked into a political minefield. One wrong move and I’d be confined to a journalistic wheelchair for the rest of my life. I should have realised. But how was I to know? I didn’t know anything about office politics anywhere, never mind at the vipers’ nest that was the organ read by a quarter of all the British population. No one in my family, nor anyone I had ever known, had ever worked in an office – except a betting office. So it wasn’t something that came naturally.

  Later I found out that the two main editorial departments at the NoW – News and Features – were fierce competitors that would have gladly sent each other to the gas chambers. They sabotaged each other’s stories. They doubled-up on jobs, each assigning reporters without the other knowing. They bid against each other on buy-ups. They tried to fuck each other at every turn. They robbed each other’s stories. They would have robbed each other’s women, if they could.

  What’s more, I was astonished to find out, the cut-throat rivalry was a deliberate management tool, based on the arrogance of being a market leader. The News of the World was so powerful that they didn’t even consider rival papers like the Sunday Mirror and the People competitors. Ray wouldn’t wipe his arse on them in the executive bogs down the corridor. Even though he’d earned his spurs on the People under Phil Hall. Phil Hall later moved to the News of the World, bringing Ray across with him, before becoming Editor. Rival papers’ names were never mentioned. The management’s ethos was: ‘Well, if there’s no one to compete against, we’ll just have to compete against ourselves.’ That’s what Ray later told me, anyway.

  2

  Street of Shame

  The interview was dragging on in newspaper terms, almost 20 minutes gone. Dan was still holding the S&M story. ‘So was there any shagging at this party then?’ he asked, throwing me a line, and a hand grenade at the same time. Our eyes met for a second, and then I looked away. The moment of truth. Or rather, the concealment of it that always happens when a tabloid reporter is quizzed about an undercover sex story by his peers. When quizzing another myself, I always looked for the clues that were a window onto a man’s soul. The bad breath. The horrid smile. The lead forehead. Subliminal signals, put there by Mother Nature, to get the moral measure of a man. Indicators as to what had really happened in the masseur’s cubicle when the tape recorder had been deliberately turned off. I wondered whether I was emanating signals of my own.

  ‘No, just kinky stuff,’ I replied, trying to brush it off. ‘It’s weird. That crew aren’t really into sex’, glancing back up at both Ray and Dan. ‘It’s all about power and domination.’ Today, I was the gimp. I could see Ray’s leathers hanging-up in the corner. He liked to ride high-powered motorbikes with sexy pictures of flowing-haired women sprayed on to the tank. The portrait was reportedly based on a voluptuous Features reporter who used to like being shagged in the executive bogs down the corridor after the paper had been put to bed. My no-sex reply was the answer Dan had wanted to hear. But not the one that answered the real question. I knew exactly what Dan had really been asking – Dan’s coded question had been: ‘Were you involved in any shagging at the sex party? Did you get carried away and fuck one the guests at the sex club?’ This was crucial in a job interview. A News of the World reporter was supposed to make his excuses and leave at all times – a key trait and a test of your moral fortitude. If you got caught with your pants down on a brothel job, it would be very embarrassing for the company.

  If Dan was expecting me to squirm and show my shame, then it wasn’t going to happen. Like him, I was a supercool blagger. The truth was, I hadn’t made my excuses and left. I’d copped off with a busty nurse who’d been dragged along to the party by a freaky couple she knew. She wasn’t exactly a Miss Whiplash-type, but in a dark, damp corner of a gothic dungeon, after a few bottles of Grolsch bought with the Sunday Mirror’s flash money, one thing had led to another. Pressed against the crumbling brickwork, the sordid action (all straight-up – no kinky stuff) had not even stopped when she had unzipped my shiny shrunken-bin-bag-style kecks and found a tape recorder stuffed down my boxies. I never wrote about that part of the story in the super-soaraway Sunday Mirror. How could I, when I was sermonising against these sicko creeps for staging the sex parties in the first place? And I wasn’t about to mention it now either, and fuck up my shot at the title. We moved on.

  ‘Have you got good contacts?’ Ray asked. Contacts are people that tip you off about stories in return for money.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a good royal contact who gives me good stuff about Camilla Parker Bowles.’ At that time, Camilla was having a secret affair with Prince Charles. My tipster was an eccentric antiques dealer who lived in a posh village near Camilla’s family home in Melksham, Wiltshire. She’d often tip me off when Charles was making a secret visit to Camilla’s house for a midnight tryst. Me and the snappers, from the agency I worked for, spent hours in the bushes outside waiting for Charles to come out. Then as his official car roared off down the muddy track, we sprung a flashgun ambush. Freezing the countryside in a silver wash of brilliant light. For a moment, it looked like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind had come to a dark field in the middle of the English countryside.r />
  ‘I’ve also got a few hookers on the firm,’ I boasted. My main vice contact was an alcoholic, drug-user called Gina, known in the trade as a ‘tart with a heart’. She worked the dismal massage parlours of market towns in Avon, Somerset and Wiltshire. Getting hoofed day-in, day-out by stinking EU-subsidised farmers and the toothless peasant underclass – the depressing reality behind the countryside’s chocolate box image in which I loved to poke around. Gina hadn’t exactly given me any big stories yet, but she was always hinting that she was going to blow the lid on her big fish clients – coppers, judges, celebs, the town mayor etc. I couldn’t see it myself – her face was pock-marked from years of boozing, skin flaking beneath her make-up. Her body had been battered all round the Gulf States during her glory years as a high-class call girl at the time of the oil crisis – most hookers claim to know Saudi princes personally. In these leaner times, she kept the fat tyres around her waist in with a bulging Lycra vest, reeking of talc and stained with baby oil. Her appearance was a human storyboard detailing years of abuse at the hands of men, including a disfigured jaw – courtesy of a pimp – that she hid by constantly brushing her hair on to her face. I always made my excuses after a debriefing from her. However, her promise of vice exclusives was enough for me to tolerate her rambling late-night phone calls. She knew how to work a reporter and during my time I would go through many Gina-style informants.

  On a Sunday newspaper you live and die by your contacts. That’s because you can’t rely on news to fill the paper – leave that to the dailies. Sunday reporters work mainly on ‘off-diary’ stories. Some reporters are technically brilliant and can do 100 words-per-minute Teeline shorthand. They give good copy and cover press conferences accurately. For me, that was like watching paint stay wet. I had learned shorthand on my post-grad NCTJ course – but quickly gibbed it. I spent the early part of my career trying to remember what people had said or making it up. The only shorthand I possessed was the contemptuous nicknames I had for the subjects of my stories. Members of the public were known as tools, bell-ends and ball-bags. It was a simple device to dehumanise my prey. I had the perfect tabula rasa short-term memory for crunching up pop culture and spitting it out again – a blank. If a story had male and female subjects – for instance a couple involved in a ‘shagging’ story – I referred to the man as Jimmy Pisspot and the woman as Jenny Pisspot. These were the tools of my trade.

  However, what I did possess was Factor X. A mythical quality possessed by an elite corps of hard news journalists. The ability to sniff out a story within seconds. Lock on to the person in the room who’s got it and tease it out of them with a talk-round. I was a doorstep king. Factor X was the journalistic equivalent of The Force in Star Wars. Mainly it was about getting people to like you and to talk to you. Hard to identify but one journalist who’s got Factor X in bundles is the legendary former Daily Mirror writer John Pilger. His articles, books and docos are dripping in Factor X. The only problem was I later identified the magic ingredient of Factor X – and it turned out to be the truth. The irony was that Factor X got me a job at the News of the World, but it was like a deal with the Devil. To actually succeed in tabloids from then on in, I would have to lie, squandering my Factor X on the way. The law of diminishing returns. Law of the Red-Top jungle – destroying the thing that had created me.

  Like most things in newspapers, the job interview was short and sweet and on-the-seat-of-your-pants. Now and again, Ray jumped up from his spring-loaded seat and shouted out on to the floor. Things like: ‘What the fuck’s this? What’s such-and-such saying about that story?’ directed at a terrified reporter, or ‘For fuck’s sake, what the fuck is going on?’ etc. Basically, Ray didn’t have time for all this job interview bollocks. All that he wanted to know about a prospective reporter was whether he was:

  1. No hassle – low maintenance.

  That I’m not going to bother anyone with daft talk of a chair to sit on on my first day. Or directions to the canteen. Or ask things like: ‘Do I press 9 for an outside line?’

  And for the duration of my employment I’m not going to ask about holidays, contracts, car parking passes or pensions.

  2. The Right Stuff.

  That I’ve got the resourcefulness of an SAS soldier trapped behind enemy lines. Coupled with the prison cunning of a gang member in a Detroit superjail.

  3. Resilience.

  That I’ve got the fortitude of an American fighter pilot shot down over Hanoi who gets his leg broken by a mob of angry rice farmers and is then imprisoned in a semi-submerged rat cage for five years – in solitary. To endure privation without complaint.

  4. On the Ball.

  That when Ray shouts out of his office at random: ‘Get me Madonna’s person on the line,’ I’m not going to say, ‘Have you got a number? Who is that? Do you want her agent or press officer?’ You just do it. Fast.

  5. Right Ideology.

  The fact that I’m sitting in an office at News Int. for a job interview proves that I’ve got the professional qualifications to do the job. But all professionals have to have the right attitude. In this case, it was subordination, deference and complete realignment of my goals in line with those of Rupert Murdoch and his agents. I would never question any viewpoint or show any moral objection to any story whatsoever.

  6. Hunger.

  That I was as desperate to succeed. Ravenous, like a Cuban refugee drug dealer who’d just landed in 1980s Miami. The World Is Yours.

  7. Fear.

  Fear is the fuel that drives the tabloid news industry. In some newsrooms such as the Sunday Mirror’s, it’s an undercurrent, a covert but menacing presence that keeps everyone running around, looking busy. But at the Screws it’s a cardinal passion. Terror is as much a part of the corporate culture as footballer-shagging stories and the Fake Sheik. Fear is glorified. The more fear that managers could conjure up from the alchemy of corporate hierarchy, the better – fear of not getting a story, fear of my boss, fear of my colleagues, fear of a rival department, fear that when I get back from a week’s holiday my swipe card will have been cancelled, fear that I can’t talk too loud, fear that the all-important story confession will not have ‘come out on tape,’ fear that my indiscretions won’t stay a secret, fear that I will be sued.

  The great thing was, I was a friend of fear. I knew fear. Fear blackened the edges of my thoughts like a sheet of paper on fire. I was a child of Thatcher. Brought up in a recession. Steeled in a furnace of decimated lives, mass unemployment and deindustrialisation. My dad had been made redundant from an aluminium factory. My mum worked like a donkey as a part-time settler in a bookie’s. My motivation wasn’t even fear of failure – that was a luxury reserved for podgy grammar school kids. It was fear of not having a job. Full stop. Fear of poverty. As a child the only life lesson that was drilled into me was simple – get a fucking job. That’s all that matters. Work. Work. Work. Any job. It didn’t matter which one. I never wanted to be a journalist – it was just a job.

  8. Story-getting.

  That you can self-generate and deliver world exclusive stories week after week.

  9. Story-getting..

  That you can self-generate and deliver fucking great world exclusive stories week after week

  10. Story-getting..

  That you can self-generate and deliver big fuck-off mind-blowing world exclusive stories week after fucking week. After fucking week. Until you fuck up then it’s down the road, no questions asked.

  3

  Pressure

  Like most first days at work, my induction into life at the paper that sold 3.5 million copies every week was a high-pressure, uncomfortable experience. Traditionally, the working week at a Sunday newspaper begins on a Tuesday morning, at the relatively leisurely hour of 10 am. But at the News of the World, even back then, the atmosphere felt like a trading floor on Black Monday when the Asian markets had just opened up. As soon as I walked in, head well down, I could sense crisis building. Few of the reporters looked up
– they were agitated and tetchy. Fraught with the kind of latent irascibility that I’d only ever come across doing stories about the long-term homeless and the ritually abused. I could tell, within seconds, that I had already become a burden. No breaks for the FNG. I didn’t have a desk or a computer and when I asked a reporter called Helen Carter ‘Where’s good?’ she nodded exasperatedly at the chair opposite. Carter was fiercely competitive and resented giving me the marginal advantage of work space. She ended up working for the Guardian. I remained a refugee for many months long before hot-desking became the feng shui of corporate cost-cutting.

  I soon discovered the reason for the bad vibes when a pretty secretary called Tara suddenly stood up and shouted ‘Conference’. Conference was the name of the weekly meeting between the writers and Features Editor Ray Levine. Each reporter was expected to pitch at least three story ideas ‘for edition’ – i.e. for that Sunday’s paper. So if you’re a celebrity or politician, whose life has been napalmed by the Screws, and have ever wondered where the beginning of the end began – it started here in conference, in a blank room overlooking two high-rise blocks of flats in Tower Hamlets.

  Each story idea broadly had to have the following attributes. Firstly, it had to be totally exclusive. Then it had to be standupable within a week. That meant that all of the journalistic bits could be turned-around relatively quickly, including evidence-gathering, ‘chats’ with the main characters and getting pics. Most importantly, the story also had to clear the News of the World’s extremely high ‘wow-factor’ bar. No mean feat, considering the Screws’ inglorious history of breaking big stories.