by Nick Davies
Yates faced a new difficulty when he and Phil Williams were called to give evidence to the media select committee three months later, in September 2009. Preparing for this, Williams wrote a draft statement, which included the following very revealing passage: ‘The size of the potential pool of people that Mulcaire had an interest in could be in the region of 600 individuals … Out of this pool of 600-plus persons of interest, there were in the region of seventy to eighty who the phone companies could indicate may have had their voicemails called … At the time, the strategy recognised that there was still extensive research to be done with the phone companies to identify what the full extent of victims might be … This could be a vastly bigger group of people, and in reality we would probably never know the true scale.’
That clashed directly with several of Yates’s public comments. That whole passage was cut from the final version of the statement given to the committee. Yates sat in front of them and told them baldly: ‘There was nothing to take us any further forward from an investigation point of view.’
Four months later, Yates was confronted with another problem, the Freedom of Information application from the Guardian to which Scotland Yard had responded with many weeks of stalling in breach of their legal duty before finally conceding that they would have to disclose that Mulcaire’s records included ninety-one PIN codes. In January 2010, on the eve of that disclosure, Phil Williams wrote another internal memo, headed ‘Options for dealing with the potential victims issue’. Williams noted that at the end of his press statement about the Gordon Taylor story, Yates had said he would ensure that potential victims would now be warned if ‘there is any suspicion that they might have been’ hacked. The Freedom of Information request, Williams observed, was ‘a good question’, and he saw the immediate problem: ‘The key part of that statement is for us to decide what constitutes “any suspicion that they might have been”. From the moment the reply to the Nick Davies letter is sent out, with the answer ninety-one, we need to be ready to stand by our interpretation.’
Ignoring the obvious inference that if a professional phone-hacker had obtained somebody’s PIN code, that in itself raised the suspicion that they might have been hacked, Williams suggested they narrow the definition to include only those of the ninety-one where the available evidence showed that Mulcaire had also dialled into their voicemail and stayed on the line long enough to listen to a message. The difficulty, he explained, was that thirteen of the ninety-one who met even that restrictive definition, still had not been warned.
He suggested they might immediately warn those thirteen before sending the information to the Guardian. Or they could get the phone companies to do so, which would have the advantage of spreading responsibility to them but the disadvantage that ‘this would take an unknown time, and it is important to send out the Nick Davies FoIA this week’. Both options would have had the effect of concealing the police failure to fulfil Yates’s undertaking. In the event, they said nothing about the unwarned thirteen, nothing about the failure to warn others among the ninety-one and, when the Guardian ran a story about the significance of the ninety-one PIN codes, they complained, and Yates and Dick Fedorcio visited Rusbridger. Quietly, they also warned seventeen more victims.
In the background, Scotland Yard wrote a memo for government ministers which included the claim that ‘Where there was evidence or mere suspicion that an individual had been subject to unlawful interception by use of a PIN, all reasonable steps were taken to ensure that individuals were informed.’
Even when, a year later, in January 2011, he finally agreed that the DPP should review all the evidence in the case, Yates tried to take the credit. It emerged at the Leveson Inquiry that, following the Sienna Miller revelations, Keir Starmer had told Scotland Yard that this was his plan. Yates had come to his office. Starmer recalled: ‘By then, I had reached the stage where I really was not in a mood for being dissuaded.’ But in agreeing to the review, Yates urged that he should be allowed to pretend that the review was his own idea. With the DPP’s consent, he then wrote Starmer a fundamentally misleading letter in which he said: ‘I consider it would be wise to invite you to further re-examine all the material collected in this matter.’
We discovered only later that during the months following the Guardian’s first story, senior Yard personnel – including Sir Paul Stephenson, Dick Fedorcio and John Yates – continued to meet, drink or, more often, dine with senior figures from the News of the World on a total of at least ten occasions. In November 2009 – while his decision to refuse to reopen the inquiry was being challenged by the Guardian and MPs – Yates was happy to dine at the Ivy with the paper’s editor, Colin Myler, and its crime editor, Lucy Panton. He continued to meet socially with Neil Wallis. The then deputy commissioner, Tim Godwin, warned Yates about these meetings at the time, but Yates ignored his request to cut back on his contact with journalists.
It was in this context that Yates and Dick Fedorcio gave their blessing to Wallis becoming a media consultant for the Yard and that Yates helped Wallis’s daughter to find a temporary job. The Independent Police Complaints Commission found that, while these events involved ‘blurred boundaries, imprudent decisions and poor judgement’, neither Yates nor Fedorcio had been guilty of corruption. (Fedorcio faced disciplinary charges for gross misconduct but quit before they could take place.) The IPCC found that Sir Paul was guilty of no misconduct over his free stay at Wallis’s other PR client, Champneys. The real question is whether or how this social contact influenced police thinking. Yates and his colleagues continued to insist that it had made no difference. There is no objective way of finding an answer.
Lord Justice Leveson concluded that there was no evidence that the social contact had influenced Yates or any other officer and that the real problem was that from the outset Yates had adopted an ‘inappropriately dismissive and close-minded attitude’ which was aggravated by genuine misunderstanding about the meaning of RIPA and some inaccurate briefings. Yates and Phil Williams had been dogmatic and defensive, Leveson said, in part because the allegations were being made by a newspaper and appeared to be attacking the police.
Certainly, there was some hostility to the Guardian. One of the paper’s crime correspondents recalls that at a police social event during the hacking saga, the then commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, a little red in the face and apparently enjoying the refreshments, informed him that the whole story was ‘a load of middle-class wank’.
Having reviewed all of the evidence, Leveson made numerous criticisms of Yates and some of Williams but concluded emphatically that neither man had acted in bad faith at any stage.
One footnote. When Keith Surtees submitted his statement to Leveson, he complained about the minutes of one of the Gold meetings on Friday 10 July, the day after Yates’s controversial statement about the Guardian. Surtees said they were ‘not a wholly complete or accurate reflection of what was discussed’.
Separately, researching this book, I noticed that two of the Gold minutes were obviously inaccurate, including those for one of the meetings on 10 July. In both cases, the header which listed the time, date and those attending was for one meeting, while the text below recorded the proceedings of a different meeting. I asked Scotland Yard to explain. They never did.
On the sidelines, the Press Complaints Commission too was exposed. In amongst hundreds of pages of internal paperwork which they disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry was one particularly revealing memo from Tim Toulmin, who had been the PCC director when they produced their report which not only exonerated the News of the World but also attacked the Guardian. Their report’s most damning line was that we had suggested in our Gordon Taylor story that the hacking had continued after the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire but had been unable to produce any evidence to support this. This happened to be untrue: there was nothing in the Guardian story to suggest that. And the memo revealed that the PCC knew that. Preparing their report, Toulmin had written to the commission: ‘There is no s
uggestion in the latest Guardian allegations that such activities are ongoing at the NoW or anywhere else.’
Toulmin left the PCC before the scandal broke. The chair, Lady Buscombe, resigned in the wake of the Dowler story.
* * *
All of this exposure and the brief humbling of Rupert Murdoch easily seduced us into thinking that we had won a great victory, that truth had caught up with power. Very soon, however, as attention faded and the scandal slipped into the past, the elite simply took back their power, as if we had never challenged it – as if the tide had stayed out just long enough to allow us to build our castles in the sand, and now we watched as waves of irrestistible force returned to wash them all away.
Scotland Yard hit back by arresting a serving detective from Operation Weeting on suspicion that he had been helping Amelia Hill and me to write stories about the hacking. They then attempted to use the Official Secrets Act to force the Guardian to disclose internal records of our work on a selection of stories, including the hacking of Milly Dowler. This provoked a wave of angry protest, and the Yard backed down. The Crown Prosecution Service then ruled that the arrested detective should not be prosecuted, and he retired from the force.
However, the Yard followed up with a far more effective – albeit hypocritical – move. Ignoring the fact that the senior ranks of the Metropolitan Police had spent years obscuring the truth about the hacking while whistle-blowers in their lower ranks helped us to expose it, they now lobbied successfully for a crackdown on whistle-blowing, insisting that in future all officers must record all contacts with all journalists – even though that was highly likely to silence any officer who wanted to defend the public interest by speaking out against wrongdoing or abuse of power. Other police forces around the country followed the same authoritarian line.
In the same way, using the unacceptable behaviour of the News of the World as a springboard, senior police exploited the scandal to lobby the Home Office to make it easier for them to seize all journalists’ notebooks and computer records, and to make it more difficult for all journalists to conceal the identity of confidential sources.
But it was Lord Justice Leveson’s report which finally confirmed that the rules of the power game had not changed. In the weeks before he published, right-wing newspapers came out to fight, vicious as ever. When forty-two Conservative politicians wrote to the Guardian arguing that there should be ‘sensible changes in the law’ to create genuinely independent press regulation, the Daily Telegraph dragged out past occasions when fourteen of them had been criticised by the press and suggested they were hypocrites who were ‘tainted by scandal’.
The Mail published an extraordinary twelve-page attack on one of the six assessors who had been advising Leveson, Sir David Bell, a former chairman of the Financial Times. Headlined on the front page ‘Leveson: Disturbing Questions About A Key Adviser’, the Mail used the fact that he had formerly been the chairman of the trustees of Common Purpose, which runs leadership courses for senior managers, to suggest that he was involved in ‘a quasi-masonic nexus’ which was devoted to secretly injecting liberal ideas into ‘every cranny of the inner sanctums of Westminster, Whitehall and academia’. The Sun recycled the story with the headline ‘The leftie plotters with a common purpose’ and told its readers: ‘The shadowy enemies of a free press are circling newspapers like the Sun. They want the Leveson Inquiry into press standards to result in state regulation. The Sun would only be allowed to print what officials permitted you to know.’
A group of newspaper publishers and editors then formed ‘the Free Speech Network’ and paid for a series of advertisements which pictured notoriously undemocratic leaders from Cuba, North Korea, the Soviet Union, Iran, Syria and Zimbabwe over the advice to ‘Say NO to state regulation of the press’.
In the event, when he finally published his report in November 2012, Leveson proposed neither statutory regulation nor state regulation. Instead, he invited news organisations to set up their own regulator which would have to function without interference from them or from government. It would handle complaints, investigate persistent offending and run a new arbitration system to deal with libel and breach of privacy with the power to impose fines. As an incentive, those who joined would be exempt from the worst of the costs and damages if anybody still chose to sue them in court. To ensure that it really was independent of press and politicians, the new regulator would be inspected periodically by a ‘recognition body’. All this would be underpinned by a law which would require government to uphold and protect the freedom of the press; require the courts to protect member organisations from some costs and damages; and give the recognition body authority to do its work.
In advance of the report, David Cameron had said that he would implement it in full unless it was ‘bonkers’. And yet within hours of its publication, in a painful echo of the bad old days of government fear of Fleet Street, the prime minister kicked away its cornerstone, rejecting the underpinning law which was essential to Leveson’s plan. There were some who genuinely feared that any kind of legislation was a threat to press freedom, if not immediately then potentially in the hands of some oppressive future government. There was also more of the same naked aggression and distortion.
Publishing the report, Leveson had said: ‘This is not and cannot reasonably be characterised as statutory regulation of the press.’ While some commentators honestly debated genuine concerns about his plans, hostile newspapers continued to tell their readers that he had called for regulation by statute and even by the state. In something close to parody, the Press Complaints Commission attempted to lead the debate by appointing a ‘foundation group’ of six experts to oversee the transition to a new regulator – and appointed Trevor Kavanagh as one of its members.
In a lecture in London at the end of January 2013, the respected former editor of The Times and Sunday Times, Sir Harry Evans, looked back at the past two months and condemned ‘the cynicism and arrogance of much of the reaction to Leveson coming from figures whose inertia assisted the cover-up conducted into oblivion by News International’. The distortion of Leveson’s ideas was, he said, ‘staggering’. To portray his careful construct for statutory underpinning as state control was ‘an amazingly gross distortion’.
When he published, Leveson had also said that the handling of his report should itself be the first test of his advice that contacts between government and the senior ranks of media companies should be transparent. The government nevertheless proceeded to hold a series of meetings with the senior ranks of media companies behind closed doors, refusing to confirm that they had even taken place. While opinion polls showed public support for Leveson running at over 70%, government stalled. By March 2013, the report was mired in confusion and compromise, with its supporters and opponents equally frustrated. The Daily Mail then exposed the sex life of a barrister who had subjected its editor to particularly fierce questioning at a Leveson hearing.
And in the wings of this pantomime, News Corp was reviving. In February 2012, they launched the Sun on Sunday to replace the News of the World. The following September, Ofcom published the results of their inquiry into whether the company was ‘fit and proper’ to hold a broadcasting licence. The regulator laid into James Murdoch, concluding that his handling of the hacking had been ‘both difficult to comprehend and ill-judged … [and] repeatedly fell short of the exercise of responsibility to be expected of him as chief executive and chairman’. Nevertheless, they found that the company was entitled to broadcast in the UK: the Murdochs could keep their 39% stake in BSkyB.
Their annual report in May 2012 showed that the company’s global profit had soared by 47% from $639 million to $937 million, primarily from its film and TV interests. In the twelve months following the Dowler story, News Corp shares rose by 23%, valuing the company at $73 billion and the Murdoch family trust’s stake alone at $9.5 billion. During that year, Rupert Murdoch was paid just over $30 million; and James Murdoch received $16.8 million.
News Corp’s political influence also revived. Rupert Murdoch’s visits to London saw him dining with senior Conservative politicians, while senior Labour figures agreed to write guest columns in the Sun on Sunday. Soon, the mogul was throwing his political weight around in the old familiar way, voicing his support for Republican electoral candidates in the US while the Sun, still punishing David Cameron, flirted with the right-wing UK Independence Party in the UK.
There were some who did not revive. As with the collapse of any big structure, the masonry fell downwards, inflicting most damage on those below the Murdochs. Having lost his job, Les Hinton was denounced by the media select committee, who accused him of misleading them and of being ‘complicit in the cover-up at News International’. Hinton strongly denied this though the complete absence of the ‘full rigorous internal inquiry’ which he had told them about in 2007 was particularly striking. Tom Crone and Colin Myler also lost their jobs, though Myler was then hired to edit the New York Daily News. Both men also were damned for giving misleading evidence to the select committee which found that they ‘deliberately avoided disclosing crucial information and, when asked to do so, answered questions falsely’.
However, the most severe damage was reserved for journalists who had worked for Rupert Murdoch and for some of the public officials with whom they had dealt. As the months unfolded, more and more of them fell victim to Operation Weeting. Their trials were to provide the final chapter of the scandal at the same place where the whole saga had begun seven years earlier with the trial of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire: the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in central London.