by Nick Davies
By 6 June, Michel was reporting that, in talking to Hunt’s office, he had ‘floated the threat that, if this were to go on for weeks, we could decide at any moment to withdraw’ – an echo of James Murdoch’s threat, in his speech in Barcelona seven months earlier, to pull BSkyB out of the UK altogether. It didn’t work.
By this time, Scotland Yard were scoping Operation Tuleta, to investigate Jonathan Rees’s involvement with the News of the World, and News International were running out of excuses for failing to give police the Harbottle & Lewis emails. During May, Brooks had agreed that a small sample of them should be shown to the former DPP, Lord Macdonald, who reported to the News Corp board, as he later recalled, that it was ‘blindingly obvious’ that they contained evidence of crime. Yet still Brooks had delayed.
There was more talk within the company of making the drastic tactical move of simply closing the News of the World. On 9 June, Simon Greenberg emailed Brooks: ‘If we are the subject of further enquiries into computer hacking and possibly payments, this is why we should consider the shutdown option. Is the brand too toxic for itself and the company? I believe it is. Unparalleled moments need unparalleled action. Showing we get it is important for us and for Rubicon. You could be person to save the Rubicon deal.’
Weeting detectives had met her on 13 June to show her evidence of the scale on which her own phone had been hacked but she had said nothing about the emails. Finally, on 20 June, nearly three months after receiving them from Harbottle & Lewis, she agreed that Lord Macdonald should pass them to police together with the surviving records of Clive Goodman’s allegations of crime, thus finally provoking the Operation Elveden inquiry into the bribing of police and other public officials.
However, Brooks was still fighting back. As the New York Times later reported, she was trying to create a diversion by asking former News of the World journalists to dig up evidence of hacking by other Fleet Street newspapers. On this account, Rupert Murdoch personally warned the editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, that ‘we are not going to be the only bad dog on the street’. Dacre is said to have told senior managers at the Mail that he had heard several reports that Will Lewis and Simon Greenberg had encouraged business leaders, footballers and PR agencies to see whether they had been hacked by the Mail. Rebekah’s efforts earned her nothing but friction, first from Dacre, who is said to have confronted her at breakfast in Brown’s hotel with the complaint that ‘you are trying to tear down the entire industry’, and then from Lady Rothermere, wife of the Mail’s owner, who told her that the Mail had not broken the law, to which Brooks is said to have responded by asking her who she thought she was, ‘Mother Teresa?’
On 22 June, Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading finally agreed terms with News Corp. An adapted version of Newco would spin off Sky News. The bid could go ahead. On Thursday 30 June, Jeremy Hunt went to Parliament to announce the news, adding that the phone-hacking allegations were ‘not material to my consideration’. He added just one final step – a brief final public consultation, with a deadline of noon on Friday 8 July. Victory was in sight.
On Sunday afternoon, 3 July, while Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch partied with senior politicians in Elisabeth Murdoch’s Oxfordshire garden, Fred Michel was at home, watching Rafael Nadal take on Novak Djokovic in the Wimbledon tennis final. He spotted Jeremy Hunt in the crowd and texted him: ‘Come on Nadal!’
Nadal lost.
On the afternoon of Monday 4 July, the Guardian website posted a detailed story about the News of the World’s involvement in hacking the voicemail of Milly Dowler.
Part Three
Truth
If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way.
Emile Zola in Dreyfus: His Life and Letters
No tyrant need fear till men begin to feel confident in each other.
Aristotle
14. 28 June 2011 to 19 July 2011
I spent six days following up the tip about Milly Dowler. The thirteen-year-old schoolgirl had become a household name when she disappeared while walking home from school in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on 21 March 2002. Six months later, her body was found in woodland twenty-five miles away.
At first, the source was so nervous that he insisted I must make no inquiries for fear of exposing him. As a safe routine move, I checked into the Guardian’s database of Fleet Street output to find some background. Suddenly, I realised I was reading a most revealing story, which had been published by the News of the World on 14 April 2002. It was not a big story – only 300 words long and buried away on page 30. It claimed that a mentally ill woman had tricked one of Milly’s friends into giving her the missing girl’s mobile number and had contacted an employment agency, pretending to be Milly looking for work. And then this: ‘The agency used the number to contact Milly when a job vacancy arose and left a message on her voicemail … It was on 27 March, six days after Milly went missing, that the employment agency appears to have phoned her mobile.’
Two thoughts collided. First, that the News of the World had been either crazy or completely complacent to publish that without even attempting to pretend they had a lawful source for the information. Second, that this gave me a way forward. I contacted the nervous source and suggested that I could start asking questions without exposing him if I told people I was following up on the News of the World’s old story. He agreed.
I called Glenn Campbell from the BBC, who had worked on Milly’s disappearance in 2002. He offered to try to track down sources in Surrey police who had been involved in the original inquiry. I went off in search of other leads. Rapidly, I found a big one in my own office. Steve Whittamore’s records of his work for the News of the World clearly showed that the paper had commissioned him to blag British Telecom records for the home addresses and ex-directory phone numbers of three Surrey families called Dowler, including Milly’s parents, Bob and Sally. That was illegal.
Within hours, Glenn Campbell reported back that his source on the 2002 Surrey police inquiry had told him that there had been ‘a hell of a lot of dirty stuff going on’. The source had given him three precious nuggets. First: ‘We knew they were into Milly’s answerphone, but there was just so much going on that we didn’t, rather couldn’t tackle it.’ Second: ‘The press interest was just so intense that often we’d arrange landline calls between the SIO [Senior Investigating Officer] and the team and chief, as we didn’t trust our mobiles. Paranoid or what, but looking back, it was most probably sensible.’ Third, Operation Weeting were investigating the hacking of Milly’s phone and had been taking statements from officers on the original inquiry.
I spoke to current sources in Surrey police and confirmed all three points. They were particularly worried about emerging evidence that their own officers had had their phones hacked, including one who had been having an affair at the time. Glenn Campbell’s Surrey source then added that they had known about the hacking at the time because the News of the World quite shamelessly had quoted the voicemail to them when the paper was preparing its story. They had also suspected that the voicemail of Milly’s parents might have been targeted. I contacted Scotland Yard, who refused to help: ‘It’s a “not prepared to discuss”, I’m afraid.’
The original source had two other claims: that the News of the World had not only hacked Milly’s messages but had also deleted some of them, apparently because her voicemail box had filled up and they wanted to make room for new messages; and that some of those deletions had given Milly’s parents a false hope that their daughter must be alive and checking her voicemail.
I brought in Amelia Hill, who contacted Jingle and soon reported back that the News of the World had hacked Milly’s phone, and deleted messages because the voicemail box was full. Months later, new evidence surfaced and cast serious doubt on this last point but at the time, it was supported by the evidence which was available. Amelia added that Weeting
had visited the parents a few months ago and were pursuing the case with the Crown Prosecution Service.
That weekend, I drafted a story and sent it to Glenn Campbell and Amelia Hill to check that it was accurate and did not jeopardise their sources. I was worried about Milly’s family being caught unawares by all this, so I sent Surrey police press office a summary of the story and asked them to warn the Dowlers and to try to put us in contact with somebody who could speak for them, possibly their solicitor. On Sunday evening, 3 July, I emailed the final version to Alan Rusbridger. With the mental image of ambitious tabloid reporters eavesdropping on Milly’s distressed family and friends imploring her to get in touch, I added a message: ‘I think this may be the most powerful hacking story so far.’
On the following day, I had a call from Mark Lewis, who had managed somehow to get himself hired as the Dowlers’ solicitor and who agreed to prepare a statement. Rusbridger and his deputy, Ian Katz, went through the story with the Guardian’s in-house lawyer, confirmed with me that there were at least two sources for every key point and then, at 4.30 on Monday afternoon, 4 July, we published it on our website.
There was a white flash and a mighty explosion.
* * *
Newspapers who had spent so long ignoring the scandal finally reacted like newspapers. It helped that, when they contacted Scotland Yard, reporters were told off the record that the Yard ‘would not argue with’ the Guardian’s report. Surrey police came to my house in search of more information about the hacking of their detectives. Mark Lewis denounced the hacking as ‘heinous’ and ‘despicable’ and told me the Dowlers were happy with the story.
Glenn Mulcaire was not so happy. Max Mosley called to tell me that the investigator was anxious and remorseful and ready to talk. On the Tuesday morning, I met Mulcaire at the office near Trafalgar Square where Mosley was employing him. He was indeed miserable and made no attempt to deny anything. I persuaded him to issue a public statement through me, apologising for the hurt he had caused, describing the ‘relentless pressure’ for results at the News of the World and adding that he had not realised that he was breaking the law. ‘I never had any intention of interfering with any police inquiry,’ he said.
I came out of that meeting to find that David Cameron had told reporters that the hacking of Milly’s phone was ‘a dreadful act’; the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had called for a public inquiry into newspaper malpractice; five major companies had suggested they would withdraw several million pounds’ worth of advertising from the News of the World; and some readers were cancelling their subscriptions. Moral outrage was invading the power game.
Rebekah Brooks suddenly found herself up to her neck in news coverage.
She had been editing the News of the World when they had hacked Milly Dowler’s phone, and that morning I had published a summary of our evidence about criminal activity on her watch. She issued a statement that it was ‘inconceivable’ that she had known about the incident. News International were soon briefing reporters that ‘anyone except Rebekah’ could lose their jobs over the hacking scandal.
That evening, Amelia Hill revealed that Operation Weeting were reviewing every high-profile case of the murder or abduction of a child since 2001 to look for evidence of hacking. Cambridgeshire police confirmed that the parents of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, who had been murdered in Soham five months after Milly, had also been warned by Weeting that they had been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire.
The outrage rolled out like storm clouds. That same evening, the first editions of Wednesday’s papers revealed that the Financial Times were calling for Brooks to resign and – to our great surprise – that The Times were joining the criticism. A bold leader comment described the hacking of Milly’s phone as ‘beyond reprehensible’ and added: ‘It ought to go without saying that nothing of this nature can ever happen again. But then it ought to have gone without saying that nothing of this nature could ever have happened in the first place.’
And then we saw the first edition of the Daily Telegraph with a devastating front-page story: Operation Weeting had found evidence that some of the fifty-two families who had been bereaved by the terrorist bombings in London in July 2005 had had their phones hacked by the News of the World. They quoted Graham Foulkes, whose twenty-two-year-old son, David, had died in the attacks. ‘How low can you get?’ he asked.
The next forty-eight hours saw a stream of new revelations squirting out of the holes in the crumbling walls of News International’s defences: the hacking of families of British military personnel who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan; the targeting by Mulcaire of George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and of Michael Mansfield, the barrister who had challenged the official version of events at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. I ran a detailed account of Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook’s meeting with Rebekah Brooks, when he had warned her that Alex Marunchak had used the News of the World’s resources to spy on him while he was investigating murder allegations against Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery.
In Scotland, Strathclyde police revealed they were investigating allegations of hacking there by the News of the World and of perjury by Andy Coulson at the trial of the Scottish radical, Tommy Sheridan. Stories were running on the front page of Fleet Street papers and all around the world, although Murdoch’s Fox News continued to ignore it. On Wednesday, in an emergency debate in the House of Commons, an increasingly confident Ed Miliband raised the stakes by urging that the BSkyB bid must now be blocked.
In the nine months since he had become Labour leader, Miliband had followed Blair and Brown in attempting to befriend the Murdoch papers. Early on, he had arranged a private meal with Rebekah Brooks, although reports hinted it had not gone well with Miliband inquiring twice about her children even though she had none; and suggesting she should read Sun editorials from the 1930s although the paper had not been launched until the 1960s. But now it was safe to end the pretence of alliance.
News International did their best to fight back, insisting that they would be ‘absolutely appalled and horrified’ if it were confirmed that the News of the World had hacked the phones of dead soldiers’ families. They said that Rebekah Brooks had been on holiday when the paper published the story about Milly Dowler’s voicemail and also when they ran stories about Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. The clear implication was that we should blame her deputy, Andy Coulson.
They also tried some tactical leaking, laced with falsehood and hypocrisy. In the midst of the turmoil, Will Lewis’s old friend, Robert Peston of the BBC, disclosed that News International had ‘uncovered emails that indicate payments were made to the police by the News of the World during the editorship of Andy Coulson’. Peston reported that the company had handed them to Scotland Yard.
News International then followed up by claiming that this demonstrated their ‘full co-operation with the Metropolitan Police’. Not only did they fail to mention that they had sat on this information for four years; that they had retrieved the emails only because the police had told them to do so; and that they had then delayed handing them over for nearly three months: they also failed to mention that they had promised the police that they would say nothing about them, for fear of tipping off suspects who might then destroy evidence. They were rewarded with the private fury of Sue Akers and her officers, and a helpful front-page story in The Times.
By noon on Thursday 7 July, the boycott by advertisers had gathered devastating force, with thirty-three companies withdrawing their business from the paper and a particularly vocal Mitsubishi describing the seventy-two hours of revelation as ‘unbelievable, unspeakable and despicable’. Some newsagents were saying they would refuse to sell the paper on Sunday. Equally bad for News International, old allies were changing sides.
The Press Complaints Commission finally withdrew their 2009 report which had cleared the News of the World and criticised the Guardian’s coverage. The London mayor, Boris Johnson, who had been happy to describe the Guard
ian’s stories as ‘codswallop’ now called for allegations of corruption to be investigated ‘ruthlessly and openly’. David Cameron denounced the News of the World’s behaviour as ‘absolutely disgusting’ and promised a public inquiry, though he refused to join the calls for the resignation of Rebekah Brooks. The Guardian, the Daily Mirror and a swelling group of MPs from all parties were now calling for an end to the BSkyB bid.
And then, that Thursday afternoon, the Murdochs made a move which was stunning in its desperation. They announced the death of the News of the World. Sunday’s edition would be the last. It would carry no advertising, and the income from sales would be given to charities. ‘Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad,’ James Murdoch explained. Rusbridger and I were dumbstruck by the move. Nobody had called for this, nobody had expected it. The ruthlessness was amazing to see – to chuck not just one or two bodies but the entire newspaper over the battlements to save their grab for BSkyB.
But if they thought this would clear the air or even relieve the pressure, the Murdochs were wrong. They had done too little for too long and, in the flood of revelation, this looked less like a commitment to good conduct than a confession of guilt. Within minutes of the news breaking, Twitter was alive with bitter complaints that the Murdochs had sacrificed several hundred jobs to save their own and Rebekah Brooks’s. Thirty journalists from the Sun walked out in protest. A throng of MPs now called loudly for Brooks to resign. Within an hour, Tweeters had discovered that, two days earlier, News International had registered the domain name sunonsunday.co.uk, clearly suggesting that the closure was a PR move and that the News of the World would reopen at some point as the Sun on Sunday. The leak to Robert Peston two days earlier now looked nastier than ever – an attempt to smear their own newspaper before they sentenced it to death.