by Nick Davies
A couple of times he asked me if I thought that the News of the World were still hacking, and I told him about the private investigator who had claimed that one of the paper’s feature writers, Dan Evans, was in fact a specialist hacker. He asked if I could get the investigator to make a statement, but that was impossible. Thomson didn’t suggest that Dan Evans’s name meant anything to him. Not just then.
I also knew that the police finally had admitted that at least two of Thomson’s clients showed up in Mulcaire’s notes. I established that one of them was Jade Goody, the former occupant of the Big Brother house whose wild ways had become a running story for the tabloids and who had died of cancer in March 2009, aged only twenty-seven. But the trustees of her estate were not interested in pursuing a case. Thomson was clearly following the second case. I guessed he must be going to court to force Scotland Yard to hand over evidence. I kept answering his questions and supplying him with information, hoping this would somehow yield a court hearing where some truth would emerge.
Tamsin Allen from the law firm Bindmans was putting together her case for a judicial review of the original police inquiry on behalf of Brian Paddick and Chris Bryant. The simple fact of a former officer as senior as Paddick taking Scotland Yard to court was stunning in itself. If he needed encouragement, it came in the form of the Yard’s replies to Allen’s letters asking if either Paddick’s or Bryant’s name showed up in Mulcaire’s notes. The Yard’s lawyers claimed there was no mention of Paddick there at all and no evidence that Bryant had been hacked. They didn’t believe it, and nor did I – particularly when Chris Bryant’s phone company revealed that their records showed three attempts to blag information about him from their staff in December 2003 when the News of the World and other papers had been busy exposing his sex life.
I hooked up Tamsin Allen with Brendan Montague, a freelance journalist who had contacted me because he suspected the News of the World had hacked his phone to steal a story. I also passed her a good-looking rumour that the former Home Secretary David Blunkett had been hacked when the News of the World were chasing his sex life. Since she was well connected in the Labour Party, she was able to approach him, but – like his colleagues Tessa Jowell and Charles Clarke – he showed no interest in taking on a fight. Perhaps it made a difference that News International had hired him as a well-paid columnist for the Sun.
That was our artillery, rolling slowly towards its target: Steve Coogan and Andy Gray with John Kelly at Schillings; Nicola Phillips and George Galloway with Mark Lewis; Sky Andrew and maybe some MPs with Charlotte Harris; some anonymous client and maybe some dynamite with Mark Thomson; Brian Paddick, Chris Bryant and Brendan Montague with Tamsin Allen. At that point, it didn’t look like much.
* * *
By the beginning of April 2010 – with every political pundit predicting that Gordon Brown would lose the general election in May – Andy Coulson was poised to enter Downing Street at David Cameron’s side, to become one of the most powerful people in Britain.
On 4 April, Peter Oborne published the column which he had discussed with me. It was noticeable that it was not in the Daily Mail, for whom Oborne normally wrote. The Mail evidently had taken fright at the idea of running anything critical of the Conservative leadership when there was an election in sight. Instead, it was published in the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, the Observer. Oborne was forthright in his view.
He suggested that Coulson was the latest example of a ‘behind-the-scenes fixer and thug’ attached to a leading politician; noted that Fleet Street had ignored the hacking scandal ‘under a system of omertà so strict that it would secure a nod of approbation from the heads of the New York crime families’; summarised the disclosures made by the Guardian and concluded: ‘As deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World, [Coulson] was presiding over what can only be described as a flourishing criminal concern.’ Oborne said it would be ‘extremely worrying’ if Cameron were to allow Coulson anywhere near Downing Street.
It was a brave piece and one which must have worried the Conservative leadership since it came from a conservative columnist, yet the column was greeted by silence. It was not just Fleet Street who were playing the omertà game. No leading politician would speak out against Coulson. No political party put the hacking scandal anywhere on their agenda.
I knew from the Emissary that there were senior figures in the Labour Party who were riveted by the affair. He said the Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, would call the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and demand to know the truth; the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, would check official files; the prime minister, Gordon Brown, was so worried that he himself might have been hacked that his wife, Sarah, had contacted Scotland Yard to find out. She had been told there was no evidence that she or Brown had been targeted by Mulcaire, the Emissary said, and I told him not to trust too much of what Scotland Yard told anybody about the hacking. He said the prime minister planned to go on television and make a big splash about the whole story. That didn’t happen. No senior politician was going to pick a fight with the man who spoke to nearly 40% of Britain’s newspaper readers, not in the run-up to an election.
The new editor of the Independent, Simon Kelner, got a taste of the danger when he promoted his paper with an advertisement declaring that ‘Rupert Murdoch won’t decide this election. You will.’ James Murdoch reacted by storming into Kelner’s office, with Rebekah Brooks at his side, to inform him loudly that he was a ‘fucking fuckwit’, threatening that the Murdoch papers would investigate Evgeny Lebedev, the son of the Independent’s owner. ‘We thought you were our friend,’ Brooks told the bewildered editor as they left.
This political inertia was unfortunate, because I was making a little progress. I had been working my way down several grapevines, one of which led me to a genuinely high-minded person who held a senior position in the criminal justice system. She had to work off the record so, in search of a memorable alias, I’ll call her Lola. She agreed to meet me in her office, where we talked for a while and, once she had established that she was safe, she made a dream move. She produced a file, left it open on her desk, said she was going to be busy elsewhere for a while and left me alone with it. Her last words as she left the office were a polite apology that she was afraid there was probably not very much in there. She was wrong about that.
The file contained reports written by Scotland Yard during the original 2006 inquiry. One, dated 30 May 2006, contained a line which leaped off the page: ‘A vast number of unique voicemail numbers belonging to high-profile individuals (politicians, celebrities) have been identified as being accessed without authority. These may be the subject of wider investigation in due course.’ A vast number! Not a bloody handful, as the police had been claiming.
Some of these victims were even named in the paperwork – Max Clifford was there, and the former England football manager, Steve McClaren. And look at the timing. The police had written this memo in May 2006 – at least ten weeks before they arrested Goodman and Mulcaire, so this evidence of a vast number of victims was nothing to do with the material which they had seized during the arrests on 8 August. The police must already have had some big cache of evidence. Maybe they had collected data from the phone companies. Maybe they had been tapping Mulcaire’s phone before he was arrested. Whatever, the fact was that clearly they had gathered a lot more evidence than I had suspected – and kept very quiet about all of it.
The scale of the hacking uncovered by police in 2006 was referred to again in a memo dated 8 August, the day of the arrests, when a senior prosecutor wrote: ‘It was recognised early in this case that the investigation was likely to reveal a vast array of offending behaviour.’ They might have recognised it, but they made very sure that they didn’t mention it to the public in whose name they were supposed to be operating. The prosecutor then added something which began to explain the silence: ‘However, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police concluded that aspects of the investigation could be focused
on a discrete area of offending relating to JLP and HA and the suspects Goodman and Mulcaire.’
The initials clearly referred to Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton and Helen Asprey, two of the three Buckingham Palace employees who were named in court as Palace victims. What was important was that this paperwork showed that police and prosecutors had made a conscious decision to limit the inquiry. More than that, Lola’s file revealed that they had made a second conscious decision ‘to ring-fence the case to minimise the risk of extraneous matters being included’. The papers made it clear that that was a subtle bureaucrat’s way of saying that they had decided not to have any public mention of particularly ‘sensitive’ victims such as members of the royal family. Evidently, it had been the police who had suggested this, doffing their helmets in the direction of Buckingham Palace; and the prosecutors had been only too happy to curtsy nicely before the throne and to agree – as one note put it – that the case should be ‘deliberately limited’ to ‘less sensitive’ witnesses. And they had never mentioned that either.
I thanked Lola profusely.
As I sat down to write this into a story, something else came through. After four months of obstruction, delays and several clear breaches of the Freedom of Information Act, Scotland Yard finally answered my remaining questions about the contents of the material which they had seized from Glenn Mulcaire. Apart from the ninety-one PIN codes and one document with transcribed emails which they had already admitted, they now disclosed that this material also contained 4,332 names or partial names of targets; 2,978 mobile phone numbers; and thirty cassette tapes containing voicemail. Yet more evidence that the scale of Mulcaire’s crime – and of Scotland Yard’s failure – was way beyond the official version of events.
In the vague hope that the police had decided to obey the law, I put in another Freedom of Information request, asking for the number of hacking victims they had warned in 2006 and in 2009. Their response – again – was to breach their legal duty to reply within twenty days and then to start making excuses for not providing the information.
On 5 April, the day after Peter Oborne’s column had appeared in the Observer, I ran a story disclosing the contents of Lola’s file and also revealing these numbers. The following day, as Gordon Brown formally confirmed that there would be an election on 6 May, I wrote again, summarising all that we now knew about the police behaviour: ‘Something very worrying has been going on at Scotland Yard. We now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the News of the World, they cut short their original inquiry; suppressed evidence; misled the public and the press; concealed information and broke the law. Why?’
The Yard immediately demanded space to reply, and the Guardian published an article, under John Yates’s byline, denying that police had been concealing evidence. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ he wrote. The Yard’s handling of the affair, he said, ‘should be recognised for what it is – a success’. It irritated me that the Guardian had let Yates do this. Good newspapers believe in giving a balanced view of the world. Fine. Some people then exploit that belief and use it to balance truth with falsehood.
Lola’s file had revealed one more secret. It disclosed that the original inquiry had been deemed so sensitive that a series of Scotland Yard reports were sent to the then Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who reviewed them in his capacity as the government’s legal adviser. Surely those reports would still be sitting in a file in the Attorney General’s office. If we could get hold of them, they would tell us still more about what the police had known in 2006, and maybe I could stop Scotland Yard scattering falsehood around the place. It might also tell us more about Andy Coulson.
Like scrambling up a muddy hill, always slipping down.
I contacted the Emissary, who was immediately alert to the political potential of these reports. Normally, he said, he could have tried to arrange for a government minister to retrieve the file, but because Gordon Brown had formally called the election, members of the government were now banned from their own offices. The only alternative was to persuade a civil servant to hand them over. He agreed to try it. For forty-eight hours, I sat with my fingers crossed, hoping that the Emissary would be able to retrieve the police reports. But he couldn’t: the officials in the Attorney General’s office refused to co-operate, so the reports stayed hidden. This was so frustrating – if I had seen Lola’s file just a week earlier, I could probably have found a friendly Labour minister to dig out the treasure. As it was, all I could do was practise my swearing.
Separately, I contacted the Crown Prosecution Service and David Perry QC, who had been the prosecuting counsel at the trial of Goodman and Mulcaire, and tried to get them to admit that they had been wrong to say that it was an offence to hack voicemail under the RIPA law only if the message had not been heard already by the intended recipient. The CPS stood by their story and told me they would not answer any more questions. David Perry never replied.
At the same time, I had been working my way down a very different grapevine, of people who knew Glenn Mulcaire, particularly those who shared his passion for AFC Wimbledon. It felt like a waste of time; but then, in late April, I called a friend of Mulcaire, whose job means he cannot be identified, so I will call him Ovid. I asked him some tired question, just going through the motions, and to my surprise, he replied: ‘You’ve just struck gold.’
He explained that Mulcaire used to run the reserve team at AFC Wimbledon and had had to write notes for the match programme, which he had found difficult, so Ovid had helped him. When Mulcaire came out of prison in May 2007, he had decided to write two books – the boring one which I had already heard about, advising people how to improve their personal security, and a second one about the whole history of his illegal activity at the News of the World. And for this second book, he had asked Ovid to be his ghostwriter. Mulcaire had spent several days pouring out his heart and memories to Ovid, who had written a synopsis for both books. And yes, if I would come to London to meet him, he would be happy to hand over the synopsis for the tell-all book as well as the notebooks in which he had recorded all the detail. I agreed. Quickly.
When I met him the next day outside Holloway Underground station, as arranged, his opening line was worrying. ‘Good news and bad news,’ he said. The good was that he had found the synopsis and he had a copy of it for me. The bad news was that he had a young daughter and she had needed a new bedroom and so a few months ago he had cleared out his study and he had thrown out a lot of old notebooks …
There are times when you just want to chew through your own arteries. The synopsis was interesting, but it had been written as a tease, to provoke a publisher into commissioning the whole book, and deliberately it held back on all the important detail. It said an editorial executive had ordered Mulcaire to hack the royal phones, but it didn’t name the executive. It said somebody had approached Mulcaire before he was put on trial and had persuaded him to ‘change his story’, but it didn’t name the persuader or explain what Mulcaire’s story would have been. It made it very clear that this was no ‘rogue’ operation. Indeed, the synopsis claimed that the News of the World had pressurised Mulcaire against his will to target the royal household: ‘I was told in no uncertain terms – “stop now and you will never work in the media again”. What choice did that give me? My loyalty cost me.’ But who had pressurised him? Coulson? Some other executive? The synopsis did not say, and Ovid could not remember.
Ovid said the notebooks would have answered all these questions and more, that Mulcaire had gone into great detail about what he had done and who he had done it for. He remembered a few of the targets – the TV presenter Chris Tarrant, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and Prince Charles. All very interesting, and certainly, where Tarrant and Abramovich were concerned, I could try to alert them.
Ovid also reckoned that Mulcaire had had seriously good contacts among the police and that he had been tipped off that he was being investigated before he was arrested in August 2006, and
that this tip-off had included a warning that the Security Service, MI5, were looking at him; but Ovid wasn’t sure, and the notebooks were gone – all that lovely detail, all those powerful facts. And, of course, the book had never been written, because Mulcaire had done a deal with the News of the World. They might still be denying it but I had no doubt that they had paid Mulcaire money in exchange for a binding undertaking not to tell what he knew.
I wrote a story based on the synopsis which Ovid had given me and I extracted a quote from one of the most influential members of Gordon Brown’s government, Peter Mandelson, who was more willing than some of his colleagues to fire a shot at Rupert Murdoch: ‘The idea that as editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson was not aware of this activity beggars belief. If the election in less than a week goes the Tories’ way, we would see this man taking on a major role in the British government. People should think long and hard before considering voting Conservative.’
It had no impact at all. People were too busy electing a government to start worrying about stuff like that.
* * *
There was a pause. David Cameron emerged as victor from the election and moved in to Downing Street, with Andy Coulson at his side. A few weeks later, on 15 June, James Murdoch announced that News Corp were bidding to take over BSkyB. I could see as clearly as anyone else that this would make them more powerful than ever but there was not much I could do about it. I had run my best stories before the election and, just as News Corp were announcing their bid, I veered off sideways when I read a story on the foreign pages of the Guardian, about an American soldier called Bradley Manning who had been arrested and accused of giving a massive tranche of secrets to an organisation called WikiLeaks.
I persuaded the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, to release the secrets to an alliance of news organisations led by the Guardian and spent several months working with him until August when I realised I had to return to the hacking: after some five months of research, the New York Times were getting ready to publish.