by Nick Davies
Rebekah Brooks intervened, taking Goodman out for lunch at the RAC Club on 12 April. The official policy of News International was that any journalist who broke the law would be instantly dismissed. She had just repeated the point in a letter to the Press Complaints Commission, who were conducting their ‘investigation’ into the hacking at the News of the World. However, at lunch with Goodman, she offered the convicted journalist a job at the Sun. Goodman declined.
It was at this point that, with Les Hinton’s backing, Cloke and Myler decided to collect emails which Goodman had exchanged with Glenn Mulcaire and the five executives who, he claimed, were co-conspirators – Coulson, Wallis, Kuttner, Edmondson and the features editor, Jules Stenson – and to hand them to the upmarket law firm Harbottle & Lewis. This was later found to be riddled with controversy of two different kinds.
First, the evidence strongly suggests that the law firm were not shown all of the emails. They were collected into seven files, but only five of them were shown to Harbottle & Lewis; and among the messages they did see, several were missing key passages. It may be significant that, according to one source, when Andy Coulson was asked if he would consent to having his emails searched, he said he was not sure and would have to check with his lawyers.
Second, the emails contained evidence which appeared to suggest that Goodman was right, at least in some respects. When the former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald, later read a sample of them, he suggested it was ‘blindingly obvious’ that they included ‘evidence of serious criminal offences’. The messages included strong hints that Coulson and others were aware of Goodman’s hacking, both while he was working with Mulcaire and later when he had been arrested and was awaiting trial; and apparently overt references to payments to royal police officers, complete with several warnings from Goodman that these had to be handled carefully because they amounted to criminal offences – for example, in an email to Coulson: ‘These people will not be paid in anything other than cash because if they’re discovered selling stuff to us, they end up on criminal charges, as could we.’ They also reflected some of the contacts between Coulson and Tom Crone as they tried to limit the damage from Goodman’s arrest.
But News International’s brief for the law firm was very narrow – not to look generally for evidence of wrongdoing but simply to check for evidence to support Goodman’s specific claims. On 9 May 2007, Harbottle & Lewis were given remote access to the emails on News International’s system. Without waiting for a reply, News International went ahead with a second hearing with Goodman on 10 May, at an even more discreet location, the Antoinette hotel, ten miles from central London, in Kingston upon Thames. There, Cloke and Myler argued that Goodman’s allegations were irrelevant to his claim for wrongful dismissal, and that all they should consider was whether Goodman’s sacking had been reasonable and conducted by a proper process. They refused to give him copies of the Harbottle & Lewis emails. A furious Goodman told them that their minute of their earlier hearing was inaccurate, repeated his allegations and added that, in spite of Andy Coulson’s involvement in the hacking, Coulson had been rewarded with a pay-off of £400,000, a car and a nod that he would be allowed to return to News International in the future.
A fortnight later, on 24 May, a senior partner from Harbottle & Lewis, Lawrence Abramson, spoke by phone with News International’s legal director, Jon Chapman. According to evidence which Abramson later gave to the Leveson Inquiry, he drew some of the emails to Chapman’s attention because they ‘contained potentially confidential or sensitive matters that News International may not want to give disclosure of’. But none of this apparent wrongdoing was covered by the brief which News International had given to Harbottle & Lewis: Abramson said that he was told that these were not matters on which he was required to comment. After a brief negotiation with Chapman about precise wording, Abramson formally wrote the letter which News International were to disclose to the media select committee two years later as evidence of their innocence of crime, confirming that ‘we did not find anything in those emails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman’s illegal actions were known about and supported by’ those whom Goodman had named. Abramson later told Leveson that some of the emails which News International claimed to have sent him ‘must have escaped my attention’.
News International then struck a peculiarly generous deal with their criminal former employee: in addition to the one year’s salary of £90,000 which Goodman had been offered by Les Hinton in February, he would be paid a further £140,000 plus £13,000 for his legal bill. This payment was on condition that he sign an agreement not to disclose the existence of the agreement or the circumstances surrounding it, and that he must make no public statement which might damage the good name of the News of the World. Separately, they agreed to pay Glenn Mulcaire a total of £80,050 with the same agreement of secrecy. Mulcaire abandoned his plans to produce a book and a TV documentary about the News of the World.
Both men stayed silent. Murdoch’s company – armed now with even more detailed allegations about the crime in one of their newsrooms – chose to say nothing and do nothing.
* * *
While News International were pacifying Goodman and Mulcaire in the spring of 2007, Mark Lewis was moving forward with his plan to sue the company on behalf of Gordon Taylor, opening the fight with a formal ‘letter before action’. Rapidly, Tom Crone took a train to Manchester where, according to public evidence later given by Mark Lewis, an outwardly calm Crone said that he had thought this had all gone away, to which Lewis had replied that Gordon Taylor was entitled to damages of £250,000. Crone later recalled that he thought ‘Wow. That’s a lot of money.’
Legal wheels turn slowly. Lewis submitted a claim. News International resisted stoutly. When Lewis then obtained devastating new evidence, including the email for Neville, the Murdoch company switched track, pointing out with little subtlety that, if Gordon Taylor pursued this case, the false story about his supposed affair would become public. That may have worried Taylor; it also made him angry. Lewis continued. At the beginning of May 2008, News International offered to pay £50,000 in damages – five times the amount which had just been paid in a privacy case brought by the actress Catherine Zeta Jones. Lewis rejected it. At the end of May, News International upped their offer to £150,000. Lewis rejected it.
News International went to a senior specialist in media law, Michael Silverleaf QC, showed him the bundle of evidence and asked him what he thought. In a powerful opinion – later released to a select committee – Silverleaf concluded on 3 June 2008 that ‘there is a powerful case that there is or was a culture of illegal information access used at News Group Newspapers, to produce stories for publication’. Silverleaf suggested that they might have to go as high as £250,000 to settle the case. News International upped their offer to £350,000, and Mark Lewis rejected it.
On Friday 6 June, one of News International’s external solicitors, Julian Pike of Farrer & Co., spoke to Lewis by phone, an uncomfortable conversation during which Lewis evidently told Pike that it was obvious that hacking was ‘rife’ at the News of the World, that either they went to court, which would expose the scandal, or they would have to settle out of court, in which case his client would agree to sign a confidentiality agreement but he would want £1 million in damages: ‘One way or another, this is going to hurt.’
Pike emailed Tom Crone his note of the conversation, repeating Mark Lewis’s claim that hacking was ‘rife’ at the paper and adding that, before submitting a formal defence, he would speak to Glenn Mulcaire ‘to avoid (as much as possible) hostages to fortune’. Crone sent it on to Colin Myler, explaining his thinking and warning that there was ‘a further nightmare scenario’ if Gordon Taylor’s in-house legal adviser, Jo Armstrong, also sued for messages which had been taken from her voicemail and transcribed in the email for Neville Thurlbeck.
Crone and Pike consulted James Murdoch – a move which was later to jeopardise the
young Murdoch’s career – and duly settled the case, agreeing to pay £425,000 plus £210,000 legal costs to Gordon Taylor. The ‘nightmare scenario’ then unfolded as not only Jo Armstrong but also Taylor’s external solicitor, John Hewison, sued. Nevertheless, News International had the answer. It may have cost them £1 million, but they ensured that all three litigants signed confidentiality agreements and that the case papers were sealed for ever by the court.
Some of Murdoch’s UK executives had been pushed to the very edge of the precipice, to the brink of a fall that would destroy their careers and ruin the reputation of News International, but they had stood their ground, obstructing the police, suppressing the voices of Goodman and Mulcaire, paying off the threat from Gordon Taylor and his two fellow claimants. They had survived. They had kept it all hidden. Now, all would be well for them – for as long as they could continue with their secrets and lies.
Part Two
The Power Game
There is only one thing in this world, and this is to keep acquiring money and more money, power and more power. All the rest is meaningless.
Napoleon Bonaparte
I work for a man who wants it all and doesn’t understand anybody telling him he can’t have it all.
Paul Carlucci, senior executive in News Corp
7. A wedding in the country
Based on interviews with wedding guests and with journalists and others who have worked with News Corp; biographies of Rupert Murdoch and of UK prime ministers; and evidence disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry.
On a bright shining Saturday afternoon in the middle of June 2009, in the rolling green downland of west Oxfordshire, there is a wedding party. Several hundred men and women are gathered by the side of a great lake, 350 metres long, crowned at the far end with an eighteenth-century boathouse disguised as a Doric temple. The sun pours down. The guests sparkle like the champagne in their gleaming flute glasses. The bride arrives to the sound of Handel’s ‘Rejoice!’, written for the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Amongst the onlookers, two men lean their heads towards each other.
‘So what do you make of all this?’ one asks quietly.
‘It is a statement,’ says the other, in an equally discreet whisper, ‘of power.’
At first sight, the power appears to rest with the guests. The man who wants to know what he should make of all this is a senior member of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, one of a small group of ministers who are scattered through the gathering. Alongside them is a group of other senior politicians from the Conservative opposition, including its leader, David Cameron. The other man in the whispered conversation is a famously aggressive national newspaper editor, a creator of storms, a destroyer of reputations – and just one of a substantial collection of editors, former editors, political editors, political consultants, newspaper executives, TV presenters, political lobbyists, political PR specialists, political correspondents, all now pressed together by the lakeside. This is a gathering of the country’s power elite, and yet the power which is being stated here is not that of the guests.
As the Christian wedding blessing begins, there is an extraordinary interruption. A large car with dark windows arrives at the top of the slope which leads down through the trees to the lake and, instead of halting there with all of the Bentleys and Mercedes (and the chauffeurs slowly baking in the sun), it ploughs on down the hill, its engine horribly loud, its presence horribly wrong, and when several hundred heads turn to understand the commotion, they see the doors of the intruding vehicle open to reveal the familiar form of the prime minister, Gordon Brown, arriving late.
Brown starts to move among the guests, but his body language screams his discomfort. He shakes hands, offers a rictus smile and moves on, obviously ill at ease and out of place. Other guests watch and conclude that he simply does not want to be here. He has just attended the Trooping of the Colour ceremony. He is due back in London to meet President Bush. But the fact is that he had to be here, to show respect.
An alien intruder would assume naturally that this respect is being shown to the bride and groom. The groom is Charlie Brooks – easy-going, clubbable, a trainer of racehorses and a liver of the good life, a man who only a few weeks earlier had explained to the posh socialites’ magazine, Tatler, that he liked nothing better than to wake up in the morning in his two-bedroomed, taupe-painted converted barn, with his bride-to-be by his side, and for the two of them to fly off to Venice, for lunch at Harry’s Bar, followed by some sightseeing and shopping by the canals, and then to fly back to London, for dinner in the famously elegant surroundings of Wilton’s oyster bar in Jermyn Street. A perfect day. Charlie is from old English money – nothing flash, nothing vulgar, just solid, comfortable, horse-loving, Home Counties country folk.
But, for the most part, it is not the amiable Charlie who catches the eye in this gathering. His bride captures far more attention. Rebekah is beautiful, with her red hair falling in crazy corkscrews around her elfin face. She is also charming – really quite famous (among this power elite) for her ability to make anybody feel that she is their special friend, that she is part of their team, always ready with a favour, always willing to confide. She is particularly good with men, her fingers resting gently on their forearm and her gaze resting direct on their eyes. Not quite sexual, not quite romantic but so intimate that a well-married, conservative kind of man, several decades older than her, reflects that sometimes he finds himself sighing and wondering whether ‘maybe, if things had been a little different, maybe we would have been together’.
This is Rebekah who was so close to Tony Blair when he was prime minister that Downing Street aides recall Blair’s wife, Cherie, finding her in their flat and hissing privately ‘Is she still here? When is she going?’; Rebekah who then effortlessly transferred her affection to the next prime minister, Blair’s great political rival Gordon Brown, who showed his own affection for her by allowing his official country residence, Chequers, to be used one night last summer for an all-girls pyjama party and sleepover to mark her fortieth birthday; Rebekah who now spends her weekends swapping canapés and gossip with Brown’s newest political rival, David Cameron, who could possibly be prime minister within a year and who is said to sign off his notes to her with the words ‘Love, Dave’. Everybody (who is anybody) is Rebekah’s friend.
There are those who say that this is not entirely natural, that they have seen her, for example, on the eve of an important dinner, studying the table plan like a schoolgirl actress with her script, spending several hours revising until she knows all the names and the partners’ names and the children’s names and the personal interests and the important topics; and then she goes out and performs. And everybody feels so special. Some say that, in truth, Rebekah has no friends at all, only contacts; that all these charming conversations she holds with all these guests are really nothing more than transactions; that all of her relationships are simply a means calculated to attain an end for ‘the World’s Number One Networker’. Her obvious and immediate end would be journalistic. She is the editor of the Sun, the biggest-selling daily newspaper in the country, and, of course, she wants contacts, to give her the stories which she needs to succeed. So, in these transactions which pass as conversations, clearly she has more than her charm to offer. She also has power – the power to make and break a reputation; quite an incentive for those who are offered her friendship.
And she will break as well as make: she is famous not only for her charm but also for her temper like a tornado. Some at the Sun remember the morning when she woke up to discover the rival Daily Mirror had beaten them to a particular story and how she expressed her feelings by walking into the office and targeting the news desk with a well-aimed missile, hastily identified as a heavy glass ashtray. One of the guests at this wedding, who has been close to her for years, says that here in Oxfordshire, Rebekah is a country wife, riding horses and organising shooting parties, but that, in London, where the real transactions take place, she is ‘the beating
heart of the Devil’.
The word that follows Rebekah around is ‘ambitious’. Most of the journalists who have worked for her love her. In the language of Fleet Street, she has earned the highest accolade – she is ‘an operator’. When she wants a story, nothing will stand in her way. Years ago at the News of the World, she once dressed up as a cleaning lady to infiltrate the office of the Sunday Times and steal their story. But some of those who know her say that it is not really journalism that moves her – that she knows exactly how it works and exactly how to pull in a story and turn out a headline, but that she has no real love of it, no pulse of excitement at the very idea of it. They say that, for Rebekah, journalism is simply a ladder reaching from her not-particularly-well-off middle-class origins in a village in Cheshire, up through her first humble jobs in various newsrooms, then rapidly over the next few rungs to the editor’s office at the News of the World, and then to the editor’s office at the Sun – and then higher and higher, as far as the eye of her ambition can see. This summer day in 2009, she is still only forty-one, still climbing. For her, they say, the power of an editor is simply a mechanism for acquiring still more power. ‘Where there is power,’ says one of those who acts as her friend, ‘there is Rebekah.’
Yet, any intruder who imagines that it is the power of Rebekah Brooks which is being stated here today has entirely missed the point. She is merely an avatar. It may not be immediately obvious but the man with the real power is the elderly gentleman, aged seventy-eight, with the avuncular smile and the clumsily dyed orange hair, chatting quietly in the crowd. He is entirely undistinguished in this gathering, but it is he who has raised Rebekah up the ladder of her ambition, and it is his presence which makes the simple, central statement to the members of this power elite: ‘You need to be here.’ He is one of the small global group who have reached that special position where they are commonly identified simply by a first name. It may be Rebekah’s wedding, but this is Rupert’s day.