Hack Attack

by Nick Davies

  After the Sun publicly switched their support to the Conservatives on 29 September, the assault became ferocious. The Ministry of Defence cut back on training for the Territorial Army. The Sun complained. Gordon Brown reversed the decision. The Sun complained – ‘a humiliating U-turn’. On Armistice Day, 9 November 2009, Brown went to the Cenotaph, suited and sombre, to lay a wreath in memory of British soldiers killed in action, as prime ministers have done for years. The Sun complained that he failed to bow his head properly.

  That same day, they discovered that in writing to the mother of a soldier who had been killed in Afghanistan the previous month, he had misspelled her name. The dead soldier was Jamie Janes. Brown had addressed the mother as ‘Mrs James’. That one misplaced letter meant that his apparently kind act of writing to commiserate in his own hand became, in the words of the Sun, ‘a disgraceful, hastily scrawled insult’. Coupling this with his supposed failure to bow deeply enough at the Cenotaph, the Sun’s news story reported: ‘His gaffes come despite the Sun’s campaign to remind him there is a bloody war on.’ When Brown tried to make peace with Mrs Janes by telephoning her personally to apologise, the Sun heard of his plan, advised her to tape the call and then turned that against him by quoting it in detail, shifting the stress away from Brown’s apology and towards Mrs Janes’s claim that her son had died because he lacked the right equipment.

  An official who was close to Brown at this time says that the prime minister was deeply upset and contacted Rupert Murdoch to warn him that this kind of behaviour by the Sun could end their relationship. Murdoch suggested that he speak to Rebekah Brooks. The official says Brown did so, telling her: ‘I want to express my disappointment over this. You are attacking me personally. It’s totally outrageous … You are undermining the war effort.’ Brooks defended the Sun’s coverage, according to this official, adding: ‘We reserve the right to disagree with you. It isn’t personal.’ Brown insisted that it was personal. Brooks attempted to mollify him, ending the conversation by expressing the hope that they would talk again, to which the prime minister replied ‘I don’t think so,’ and cut the call.

  With the Sun’s attacks continuing unabated, Brown took a controversial step, arranging for Rupert Murdoch and Brooks to be given an off-the-record briefing by the then head of MI6, Sir John Scarlett. One of Brown’s close advisers says that Sir John warned them that the Taliban were using Sun stories as propaganda and that they were damaging British military morale. Rebekah Brooks started to argue with Sir John, according to this adviser, and the conversation became tense, finally reaching a point where Murdoch cut across Brooks and told Sir John that he could expect to see a calmer tone in the Sun’s reporting. It didn’t happen.

  His back to the wall, the prime minister talked to advisers about hitting back. When the hacking story first broke in the Guardian in July 2009, he had treated it as a mess to be avoided for fear of irritating Murdoch. According to one of his advisers, he asked Cabinet ministers who might have been victims to stay silent. By the time an election was in sight and News International had dumped him, he considered getting involved.

  In March 2010, he asked the Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, if he could call for a public inquiry into the hacking and was frustrated when O’Donnell replied that the available evidence would not justify it in law. Brown then asked his advisers to draft a speech in which he attacked the Murdochs full on, criticised James Murdoch for his MacTaggart lecture, defended the BBC licence fee and called for a new approach to regulation of the media. He never used it. The tiger was too dangerous.

  While Brown was being attacked by the Sun, David Cameron was moving closer. Whereas Brown had seen his keynote speech to his party conference overshadowed and then misreported by the Sun, Cameron had made his the following month with the blessing of a text from Rebekah Brooks: ‘I am so rooting for you, not just as a personal friend but because professionally we are in this together. Speech of your life? Yes he Cam!’ The day after the speech, she texted him again: ‘Brilliant speech. I cried twice. Will love “working together”’, and the Sun reported that Cameron had ‘the strength to get battered Britain back on its feet’ and that he had made ‘a power-packed speech’. It was hard to read that without regarding it as propaganda posing as journalism.

  In November 2009, Cameron had announced his support for Rebekah Brooks’s long-running campaign to use prison ships to create extra space for offenders. The Sun reported it. The following month, the Camerons marked New Year’s Eve with Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie, at a party hosted by the TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, also attended by other senior Tories as well as Andy Coulson. In January 2010, Cameron announced his support for prison ships a second time. The Sun reported: ‘The Tories have got the message. Using prison ships could help them sail to victory when the general election comes.’ Jeremy Hunt held two meetings with James Murdoch, which included discussions about the future of Ofcom.

  By the spring of 2010, it was clear that the prime minister would announce a general election for early May. It also finally became publicly clear that News Corp had one more very big iron in the political fire. The Independent disclosed that the Murdochs were planning a bid to take over the 61% of BSkyB which did not already belong to them. That would make them the dominant players not only in British newspapers but also in British television, significantly boosting their power as well as their profit – but only if the government and Ofcom let them do it.

  More than ever, News Corp needed a friend in Downing Street.

  10. March 2010 to 15 December 2010

  Reporting is not a spectator sport (no matter what they teach in college). You can’t sit and wait for the information to present itself like a postman knocking at your door – not if you’re interested in doing something more than recycling press releases for a living; not if you can begin to understand why the best stories are the ones which someone somewhere doesn’t want you to know. You have to get in there and make it happen; use every last devious ounce of imagination to find ways of forcing the miser to let go of the gold.

  In the spring of 2010, Alan Rusbridger came up with a neat manoeuvre. Reversing the normal convention under which editors grab hold of stories and keep them for their own pages, he started contacting other journalists to give them our work to encourage them to take it further. Since Fleet Street was clogged with self-interest, he tried broadcasters, approaching senior executives at the BBC and Channel 4. Both decided to make documentaries, for Panorama and for Dispatches respectively; and I briefed the people involved. He spoke also to Peter Oborne, a conservative columnist on the Daily Mail who had a reputation for plain-speaking and who, Rusbridger calculated, was one of the very few conservative journalists who might be brave enough to take on Coulson. I met him in a wine bar in Victoria and tried to explain the background. He went off to do his own research.

  Most important, Rusbridger spoke to Bill Keller, executive editor of the mighty New York Times. It can’t have been hard to get him interested. It was not just that Rusbridger was offering him a story which involved the royal family, tabloid hacks and private investigators as well as politicians and police officers apparently colluding with power. Better than that, it was all about the man who had taken over the Wall Street Journal and who was attempting to use it as a weapon of mass-media destruction against Keller’s beloved paper. Keller moved fast.

  Three days later, on 15 March, three New York Times reporters arrived in London and came straight to the Guardian office. That evening, Rusbridger and I spent four hours briefing them. I then followed up a day later with another four-hour session in their London office. Rusbridger introduced one of them, Don Van Natta, to our source the Emissary. I introduced Van Natta to the detective Karl (a strange encounter, in the haut bourgeois surroundings of the piano lounge of the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Karl unravelled the grubby world of Jonathan Rees and his circle of bent cops). I kept pumping them with background and contacts. It felt weird to be handing over reams
of hard-won information to other journalists. It also felt dangerous: for all I knew, they would find that we had got the whole story wrong and publish something that would wipe us out; but we were isolated and we needed support. Plus Van Natta agreed that they would repay the favour by giving me their unpublished material once their story was done. Not a bad deal. Not a bad ally.

  Meanwhile, attempting to recover from the collapse of Max Clifford’s legal action, I remembered something I had read in Good Times, Bad Times, the memoir of Harry Evans describing his experience as editor of the Sunday Times between 1967 and 1981. He recalled how in March 1974, he had sent reporters to Paris to investigate the mysterious crash of a DC-10 passenger plane, which had killed all 346 of those on board. The initial evidence which they dug out suggested that there was a structural fault in the plane which meant that it was always likely to crash and that the manufacturers, McDonnell Douglas, should have recalled it; but they couldn’t publish such an aggressive story without hard evidence. Evans described in the book how his reporters had intervened in the events they were reporting, acting as middlemen linking the bereaved families with highly effective lawyers in the United States, encouraging them to sue there because the US courts were most likely to order McDonnell Douglas to disclose internal paperwork. That worked. I decided to try to do the same.

  So, instead of passively waiting for potential victims to see their way through the fog around Scotland Yard, I set out to discover who had been targeted by Mulcaire so that I could tip them off; encourage them to sue; hook them up with the right lawyers; ply the lawyers with background information and advice; do whatever it took to help the lawyers get to court so that a judge could drag out the truth for us.

  I was now sure that at least two more Cabinet ministers were among the victims, but I could not persuade them to sue. Months earlier, the former Secretary of State for the media, Tessa Jowell, had confirmed to me that during the original inquiry in 2006, police had told her that her messages had been repeatedly intercepted during the time when she was separating from her husband; but she had urged me not to publish this for fear of reviving press interest in her family, and I agreed. (I think I was wrong to agree this: as Jowell had been the Secretary of State responsible for the media, the fact that the News of the World had dared to hack her messages was probably too important to be withheld for personal reasons.)

  A second Cabinet minister – David Blunkett’s successor as Home Secretary, Charles Clarke – had been followed by Derek Webb. I asked a friend who knew Clarke to tell him that this meant that he had probably also been hacked, but the answer came back that he was not interested in pursuing it. Perhaps he did not want a fight with Murdoch, perhaps he did not want to revive whatever mad gossip had attracted the paper to him in the first place.

  I identified about a dozen law firms who specialised in representing celebrities in their dealings with newspapers and contacted all of them, explaining about the evidence at Scotland Yard and offering to help. Most of these clients didn’t want to know. Some were too busy. Some were worried about reviving an embarrassing story. Some were simply scared of provoking an attack by Murdoch’s papers. But a few agreed to write to the police, following the small group of lawyers who were already preparing to fight.

  Rusbridger had picked up a rumour that at some stage the Australian actress Nicole Kidman had been told by police that she was a victim. I found that Kidman was represented in London by a lawyer called John Kelly, a burly Liverpudlian who worked for the specialist media law firm Schillings (generally hated by journalists for their aggressive action on behalf of celebs). I called Kelly and, although he insisted that Kidman had had no such warning from the police, he was interested in what the police were doing. I went to see him at the Schillings office in Bedford Square, central London, and gave him a one-hour tutorial on how to hack phones and how to extract information from Scotland Yard. He took it all in and acted on it, writing to the Yard on behalf of seven clients to ask if their names showed up in Mulcaire’s notes.

  The police eventually admitted that two of them did. Both of them agreed to go to court to force police to hand over the notes. To begin with, Kelly kept their identities quiet but, as the cases proceeded, it became clear that he was acting for the comedian and actor Steve Coogan, whose relationship with the indie musician Courtney Love had made him a tabloid target, and Andy Gray, former international footballer turned TV commentator, whose relationship with anybody gave the tabloids an unnatural interest in the whereabouts of his trousers.

  By this time, the spring of 2010, Mark Lewis had left his Manchester law firm; bleached his hair in punky spikes; fallen in and out of love with Charlotte Harris several times; fallen in and out of a working partnership with her; opened up a sideline as a stand-up comic; and ended up working on his own at a small law firm called Taylor Hampton with an office up a scruffy flight of stairs opposite the Royal Courts of Justice in central London. He soon picked up an important client.

  In the backwash of Max Clifford’s aborted legal action, it had become apparent that while the News of the World were targeting Clifford in order to try to steal the stories he was selling, they had also hacked the voicemail of his assistant, Nicola Phillips. I tracked her down and – in my new role as the supplier of ammunition for the legal guns – introduced her to Lewis. She was now working for herself as an independent PR and was worried about falling out with the Murdoch papers but, to her credit, she decided to fight.

  I discovered that one of those who had been warned by the police in 2006 was the left-wing MP George Galloway. I hooked him up with Mark Lewis. Separately, Lewis was ratcheting up the pressure on Lady Buscombe, chair of the PCC, formally issuing a writ for libel for the speech she had made implying that he had misled Parliament.

  Having had her case for Max Clifford diverted at the courtroom door, Charlotte Harris was now working with Sky Andrew, the football agent who was one of the eight victims named in court at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire – again, no doubt that police had evidence he was a victim. News International clearly didn’t want that to go anywhere. Andrew had had several discreet phone calls from lawyers attached to the News of the World, urging him to drop the idea. One of them had gone so far as to offer him a retainer of £25,000 a year for up to five years if he would withdraw – strange behaviour from an organisation which claimed to have nothing to hide. Andrew declined. Harris started pushing his case towards court.

  I passed her the list of Steve Whittamore’s victims which I had scribbled down from the computer of Alec Owen as he scrolled through his records from the ICO. These were people whose confidential information had been blagged by Whittamore’s network. Harris started to approach some of the politicians on the list, guessing that if they had been blagged, they might also have been the victims of hacking. Soon, she was charming her way through the Palace of Westminster, forming an alliance with Tom Watson and, through him, with Gordon Brown, who became a client; writing to Scotland Yard on behalf of a dozen MPs who thought their details might show up in Mulcaire’s paperwork; and acting for the former Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, whose sex life had been brutally exposed by the News of the World and who strongly suspected that his voicemail had been hacked in the process.

  I had endless calls with Lewis and Harris, swapping gossip and trying to piece together the truth. Charlotte Harris on the phone is like a tornado in your ear. She talks very fast and creates a seamless confusion between her conversation on the phone and whatever conversation she is also holding in the background at her end, dropping instructions to taxi drivers or provocations to Mark Lewis into the middle of talking about News International. There was one Saturday when she seemed to be with her two young daughters in a supermarket: ‘We’re in court next week yesmummywillgetyouabiscuit but I don’t know what time.’ On that particular conversation, she was suddenly cut off in mid-storm. I kept trying to call back. I got more and more worried that she and her girls must have been hit by a
car as they left the supermarket. Twenty-four hours later, I finally got through to her and discovered they were all fine. They hadn’t been in a supermarket at all. She had been doling out biscuits in her kitchen and had then taken her youngest girl to the bathroom to change her nappy, with her phone jammed between her shoulder and her ear, until the phone had leaped sideways and dived into the toilet.

  Like some kind of marriage fixer, I also introduced Lewis and Harris to Mark Thomson, who was still pressuring the police on behalf of his dozen clients, so that they could exchange information and plot tactics together. Thomson was driving me mad. He kept hinting that he had uncovered something special.

  ‘I’ve got a dynamite case. Dynamite!’

  ‘Who? What’s it about?’

  Then he’d grimace and shake his head apologetically: ‘I can’t comment.’

  Thomson and I met often and, on the advice of a security expert, got into the habit – now evidently adopted by all well-informed gangsters – of removing the batteries from our mobile phones so that there was no power for ‘roving bug’ spyware, which could otherwise relay our conversation through the microphone on a handset. We worked out that, although the phone companies kept call data for only twelve months, their security departments might still have the data they had collected for Scotland Yard in 2006 as well as any history of blagging attempts which they had spotted. He applied for their records. I pointed out that, in the transcript of the original trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, the prosecutors said Mulcaire always wrote ‘Clive’ in the top left-hand corner of any work he was doing for him. Logically, he would have done the same for other journalists who commissioned him. Thomson, as he later put it, ‘nearly puked with excitement’ at the prospect of forcing the police to disclose these notes.