by Nick Davies
That wasn’t going to be enough. Humble was one thing. But were they also guilty?
Led by Tom Watson, the MPs confronted them with the history of clear and public evidence of crime in their newsroom. How could they not have noticed: the Guardian in September 2002 running 3,000 words on the News of the World’s involvement in Jonathan Rees’s network of corruption; or Rebekah Brooks in March 2003 telling a select committee that her paper had paid police in the past; or the ICO in December 2006 reporting that twenty-three of the paper’s reporters had taken part in Steve Whittamore’s ‘illegal trade’; or the claims at Glenn Mulcaire’s sentencing in January 2007 that he had been working not just for Clive Goodman but for others at the paper?
The Murdochs soon turned to the second part of their strategy. From their lofty position in the crow’s nest at the top of the company, they drew a line under themselves and said simply and repeatedly that they had failed to notice a thing that was going on beneath them. At this moment, their refusal to run an effective internal inquiry became their best line of defence, like a reverse version of the Nazi defence at the Nuremberg war trials: ‘We didn’t know they weren’t obeying orders.’
Rupert Murdoch had an extra layer of help with this: his age. He frowned, shook his head in confusion and disappeared into unnaturally long pauses, tapping his fingers on the desk in front of him. One of his closest advisers claims he always does this when he is asked to say something important, that he is so worried about saying the wrong thing that he gets lost in a mental spin. Whether it was natural character or furtive design, it worked. Confronted repeatedly by awkward questions, he vanished into vagueness.
What had he talked to Tony Blair about, for example? A blank look and a shrug: ‘We argued about the euro, I think.’ What instructions had he given to the editor of the News of the World? ‘I’m not really in touch. I have to tell you that.’ Had he not wondered why News International had paid such large amounts of money to Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford? ‘I never heard of them,’ he said.
James was in more difficulty. His crow’s nest had been in London, with direct responsibility for News International. He had agreed to settle with Gordon Taylor, because that was the advice from senior counsel, but that was all he had known. Which seemed a surprising way for a chief executive to spend £1 million. And Clifford? ‘I was not involved in that piece.’ Really?
A third strategy came into view. The Murdochs explained that they had ‘rested’ on the investigations of others: on Scotland Yard, even though its most senior officers were now accusing News International of lying to them; on the Press Complaints Commission, although its chair, Lady Buscombe, was now pleading that the News of the World had lied to them; and on Harbottle & Lewis, whose narrow remit to review a collection of emails was now presented as a full-scale investigation with the aim, as Rupert put it, ‘to find out what the hell was going on’.
I didn’t believe a word of it, but, in spite of all the efforts of the MPs, the Murdochs held their ground. Then they were presented with a surprising gift. From my right, a young man rose from his seat, walked in front of me and, instead of heading for the door, he turned to approach Rupert Murdoch. I thought he was going to hit him and – in spite of all my battles with the mogul – I tried to shout a warning. Too late. The man produced a paper plate full of whipped cream and shoved it into Murdoch’s face. It was a deeply stupid thing to do. The MPs lost their line of questioning, all the press and public were excluded from the room, and an eighty-year-old man who had been attacked without warning found sympathy tilting towards him. Until that moment, neither side was winning. Now the Murdochs were ahead. When the hearing stuttered to its end soon afterwards, both of them were wounded, but neither had fallen.
Still, they were not in the clear. Scotland Yard were running three investigations into their journalists; Strathclyde police another; Ofcom were officially investigating whether they were fit and proper to hold a broadcasting licence in the UK. In the US, the FBI had started an inquiry into whether News Corp had broken the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by allowing UK officials to be bribed. The Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, had ordered a review of media laws, and News Corp’s subsidiary there was checking for evidence of crime in their newsrooms. Biggest of all, the prime minister had announced that within months Lord Justice Leveson would chair a public inquiry, with powers to compel witnesses and order disclosure of records, to look at News International, the press, the police and government. The hearing was finished, but the show was not over.
15. Exposed!
It was like watching a headmaster addressing the morning assembly. He sat up on the stage at one end of the room, in his charcoal grey suit and his serious spectacles, and, speaking slowly and gravely, more in sorrow than in anger, he told the hundreds of silent faces lined up in neat rows before him of the bad behaviour and indiscipline which had come to his attention. Lord Justice Leveson was delivering his report.
It was the morning of Thursday 29 November 2012. Leveson spoke in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, a few minutes’ walk from Parliament. Around the corner, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson stood in the dock at Westminster Magistrates’ Court for a preliminary hearing on charges that they had conspired to pay public officials for information. Seventeen months had passed since the Guardian published the Milly Dowler story.
The Leveson Inquiry, sitting in public, had taken evidence from 337 people. Some were ordinary members of the public, who had found their lives suddenly ransacked by the press. Others were from the peaks of power: the prime minister, three former prime ministers, numerous Cabinet ministers, government officials, chief constables, detectives, film stars, newspaper editors and a cohort of reporters. All of them were cross-examined. Some were compelled to disclose emails, text traffic, paperwork. More than 300 others submitted written statements. It was an unmatched exercise in exposing the concealed world of governance.
Some came in grandeur. Before Rupert Murdoch spent two days in the witness box, his staff visited the drab waiting room next to Leveson’s court and distributed cushions and flowers and laid a white tablecloth and silver cutlery on the battered old table for the mogul’s lobster lunch. Others took a simpler approach. Ed Miliband prepared his evidence in the same room without luxury additions, asking at the end for a few minutes on his own, during which the sound of Journey playing ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ could be heard through the door, fortifying the Labour leader’s morale.
Some witnesses rebelled against the very idea that they could be called to account at all. During preliminary seminars in October 2011, the former editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, stood in front of Leveson and referred to ‘this ludicrous inquiry … this bloody inquiry’. The editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, declared he could detect ‘the rank smell of hypocrisy and revenge in the political class’s current moral indignation’ at his profession. Without waiting for a word of formal evidence, the Sun’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh, told Leveson that his inquiry was ‘a cloud over freedom of speech’.
Once the inquiry started, in November 2011, some newspapers continued to behave as though Leveson were not watching them. When Hugh Grant’s girlfriend gave birth to a child that month, tabloid reporters and photographers surrounded her home with such persistence and occasional aggression that Grant eventually went to court and got an injunction to stop them. When an eleven-year-old British boy, Sebastian Bowles, died with twenty-seven others in a coach crash in a Swiss tunnel in March 2012, while Leveson was still sitting, British newspapers ignored requests to respect the family’s privacy. They published a picture of his grieving nine-year-old sister on private property preparing to carry flowers to the scene of the accident as well as photographs which had been taken from Sebastian’s Facebook page in apparent breach of privacy settings. His family had to close down the dead boy’s blog after quotes and a photograph from it were published without their consent, and they found so many reporters outside their home that they wer
e forced to live behind shuttered windows for more than a week.
Some newspapers attacked Leveson directly. When the Education Secretary Michael Gove told the Commons press gallery that the inquiry was having a ‘chilling effect’ on press freedom, Leveson called Downing Street to find out if the government no longer supported its work. He was reassured by the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood. In the hands of the Mail on Sunday, this became a front-page story, headlined ‘Leveson’s “threat to quit” over meddling minister’ with a claim that the judge had made an angry call to the Cabinet Secretary and ‘demanded that the Education Secretary be gagged’.
Some papers adopted a threatening tone not only to the inquiry but to some of those who dared to step forward to speak to it. A former Daily Star reporter, Rich Peppiat, told Leveson in detail how he had been encouraged to fabricate stories. He was then confronted and denounced by one of his former bosses in the conference centre’s canteen. The Daily Mail attacked some of Hugh Grant’s evidence as ‘mendacious smears’. The Mail also went to court to try to stop Leveson taking evidence from anonymous sources. They failed, but at least three former Mail reporters then backed out of helping the inquiry for fear of losing their careers if their assistance became known.
Nevertheless, by the time Leveson summarised his report to that assembly of journalists in November 2012, he had exposed Fleet Street to some of the humblest days of its life. Above all, he provided a platform for dozens of media victims who variously told him of the blackmail, bullying, malice, invasion of privacy and toxic falsehood which they had suffered. Some were celebrities whose phones had been hacked and who had been pursued by reporters and photographers to the point where their lives were no longer free. The most impressive were ordinary people.
Kate and Gerry McCann recalled the aftermath of the abduction of their three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, during a family holiday in Portugal in May 2007 – how newspapers recycled unchecked and baseless allegations from the Portuguese press which poured acid on their grief, and falsely accused them of selling or murdering their own child. In his report, Leveson concluded: ‘They had become a news item, a commodity, almost a piece of public property where the public’s right to know possessed few, if any, boundaries.’
Leveson went on to investigate what happened when the News of the World obtained a copy of Kate McCann’s diary, in which she had recorded her agony, a document which was so private that she had not shown it even to her husband. Portuguese police had seized it, translated it and then allowed a copy to reach a local journalist. The News of the World had bought it for ‘a substantial sum’, translated it back into English and then confronted the significant legal problem that they had no right to publish it. The editor, Colin Myler, told Leveson that his news editor, Ian Edmondson, had spoken to the McCanns’ representative, who had consented to publication. Edmondson, however, told a different tale, explaining that, in reality, Myler had told him to contact the McCanns’ spokesman and to ‘make it very woolly’, specifically not to tell him that the paper had the complete diary for fear that the McCanns would take legal action to prevent publication. Leveson said this was ‘devastating evidence’. Gerry McCann said his wife had felt ‘distraught and morally raped’.
Margaret Watson, whose sixteen-year-old daughter had been stabbed to death by another schoolgirl, described how her girl was then portrayed by the Glasgow Herald as a snob and bully. Mrs Watson recalled the pain which this had caused not only herself and her husband but also their only surviving child: ‘It was all too much to bear for our dear son, Alan, and he took his own life. He was found holding copies of the articles.’
Christopher Jefferies told Leveson how he had suddenly become a tabloid victim because he was the landlord of a young woman, Joanna Yeates, who was found murdered on Christmas Day 2010. He was arrested as a suspect but released without charge. The real killer was caught three weeks later. In the meantime, some newspapers had published what Jefferies described as ‘a mixture of smear, innuendo and complete fiction’ about him, effectively naming him as the killer. These stories were not only libellous – Jefferies sued eight newspapers over a total of forty of them – but also risked serious prejudice to any trial which he might have faced, and the Sun and the Daily Mirror were later fined for contempt of court with the judge describing Jefferies as ‘the latest victim of the regular witch-hunts and character assassination conducted by the worst elements of the British tabloid media’.
It was the stories of these victims which built the platform on which Leveson constructed his report. Addressing his silent audience that day, he said that the object of his inquiry had been not simply to make recommendations, but also ‘to expose precisely what has been happening’. He was not alone in attempting to do that. With Scotland Yard, two select committees and court actions still dragging detail out into the open, the power elite found its secret world uniquely threatened with exposure.
* * *
The threat to James Murdoch began with a discreet text message at 4.37 in the afternoon of 19 July 2011, as he and his father were navigating their way through the choppy waters of their appearance before the media select committee with MPs alleging that the pair had known about crime at the News of the World and engineered a cover-up.
Watching from the side of the room, I could see the MPs repeatedly rocking the Murdochs’ boat but never quite upsetting them. Several had got close by challenging James Murdoch over his decision to pay huge damages to Gordon Taylor in 2008. Surely he must have known that Taylor’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, had found evidence of illegality. But James was well prepared and claimed he had agreed to settle simply because that was the advice of counsel and without exploring the reasons. I could see that the MPs needed to push him further into the detail. I remembered sitting in front of this same committee two years earlier and distributing the document which saved my skin.
Quietly, I slipped my phone out of my pocket, found Tom Watson’s number and sent him a message across the room: ‘Did James know about email for Neville? If not, why settle Taylor case? If so, why not tell police?’
I caught Watson’s eye and held an imaginary phone to my ear. He nodded. I waited. The idiot with the whipped cream broke up the hearing, but when the MPs resumed, Watson intervened to put one more question to James Murdoch: ‘When you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see, or were you made aware of, the “for Neville email”, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?’
James snapped back his answer: ‘No, I was not aware of that at the time,’ he said.
Now he had committed himself. Now he was vulnerable.
The next day, my colleague David Leigh called Tom Crone, who had handled the detail of the Taylor settlement, and urged him to say what he knew. Crone had no reason to like us and said only that he would think about it. The following evening, he and Colin Myler issued a joint statement: ‘Just by way of clarification to Tuesday’s select committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch’s recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken. In fact, we did inform him of the “for Neville” email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers.’
With that, James Murdoch was tipped out of his boat. If Crone and Myler were right, James had concealed his knowledge of crime for more than two years. As he struggled to keep his head above water, the media select committee over the following months extracted a sequence of disclosures, each of which threatened to push him under.
These revealed that in May 2008, Myler had met James to discuss Gordon Taylor’s lawsuit, armed with Crone’s written opinion that the email for Neville was ‘fatal to our case’; and that, the following month Myler and Crone together had seen him a second time. According to Crone: ‘Since the “for Neville” document was the sole reason for settling and, therefore, for the meeting, I have no doubt that I informed Mr Murdoch of its existence, of what it was and where it came from.’ James had stalled, they said, wanting to se
e the legal opinion from Michael Silverleaf QC, who duly reported that the email for Neville ‘has disclosed that at least three journalists appear to have been intimately involved in Mr Mulcaire’s illegal researching into Mr Taylor’s affairs’ and that the News of the World had harboured ‘a culture of illegal information access’.
Was James Murdoch really going to maintain that he settled the case with Gordon Taylor without knowing any of this evidence? Faced with the new disclosures, he changed his story. He was summoned back to the committee to give evidence for a second time, on 10 November 2011. The chairman, John Whittingdale, confronted him: ‘Even if it was not described as the “for Neville email”, were you made aware of the existence of an email that contained the transcripts of voice intercepts which, in Tom Crone’s words, was “fatal” to your case?’
To which he answered: ‘Yes.’
This directly contradicted the answer which he had given four months earlier to Tom Watson, who had asked him if he had known about ‘the “for Neville email”, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages’. To which he had answered: ‘No.’
He went on to agree that he understood that this email was very damaging to the company’s defence that nobody other than Clive Goodman had been involved. To any reasonable onlooker, that was enough: as far back as June 2008, the executive chairman of News International had known that the ‘rogue reporter’ line was untrue, but he had not told anybody – not Parliament, which had been misled; not the police, who had clearly not captured anybody other than Goodman; and not his shareholders, in spite of his duty of candour to them.
James Murdoch wriggled with great energy. He had known about ‘a transcript of voicemail interceptions that were made on behalf of the News of the World’, he now agreed, but he had not known that this had been produced ‘for Neville’ and so had not been aware that it implicated anybody else or required further investigation. It was very hard to understand how Mulcaire could have been producing illegally obtained voicemail for the newspaper without some human being who worked there necessarily being involved.