by Nick Davies
16. Final reckoning
Friday 4 July 2014. Court 12 at the Old Bailey. At one end of the room, on a raised podium, the judge sits in his red robe and horsehair wig. In front of him, the well of the court is crammed with barristers and journalists. And opposite him, standing in the glass-fronted dock, neatly lined up almost like pets on display in a shop window, tamed and passive, there are five men. All guilty.
Andy Coulson has been convicted of conspiring to intercept communications. Now, he must be sentenced. The judge confronts him with ‘the very great deal of phone-hacking’ which he allowed and which he used to boost his reputation and his career. He talks about ‘the intensely personal messages’ which were intercepted from the famous and also from the ordinary people who happened to stray into the path of Coulson’s journalists; and about Milly Dowler. He tells the court it was ‘unforgivable’ that Coulson not only ordered the eavesdropping on her phone but decided not to tell the police that he and his colleagues thought they had found evidence that the missing girl was still alive. ‘Their true motivation was not to act in the best interests of the child, but to get credit for finding her and thereby sell the maximum number of newspapers.’
Coulson stands quietly while the last fragments of his reputation are swept away by the judge. For a moment, I feel sorry for him, for the sheer depth of his fall. This is the man who, according to one of his former colleagues in Downing Street, enjoyed the small but special privilege of being allowed to walk into the prime minister’s office without knocking. Ruined. But then I remember the day during the trial when the jury was played a tape-recording which David Blunkett made one day in August 2004, when Coulson came to tell the Home Secretary he was going to expose his relationship with Kimberly Quinn. I remember Blunkett’s voice, full of panic and fear as he pleaded for his privacy; and the sheer mechanical coldness of Coulson as he insisted on his right to convert this man into a headline. And I remember all the others who suffered the same fate, left behind like roadkill as Coulson roared off into his gilded future.
The judge tells him the maximum sentence he can give is two years, but he will reduce it, in part because of the delay since the offences were committed. Coulson is jailed for eighteen months.
Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup stand beside Coulson in the dock, the willing lieutenants who ran the news desk for years. Before the trial began, the three of them took one long look at the mountain of evidence which Operation Weeting had gathered against them and pleaded guilty to conspiring to intercept communications. Now, the lawyers for Thurlbeck and Weatherup have pleaded to the judge that they were only obeying orders. Thurlbeck’s barrister says the hacking was ‘known and approved by more senior figures’ at the paper, naming Stuart Kuttner as one of those who was responsible. Weatherup’s says it was ‘endemic’, adding that ‘the suggestion that phone-hacking was the work of a small clique is wrong and misleading’.
The judge notes that none of them had the courage to step forward and give evidence at the trial and is unimpressed by their professions of apology: ‘I am afraid that that has the appearance of regret for the consequences of getting caught rather than true remorse.’ Miskiw and Thurlbeck are jailed for six months, the sentence again reduced because of the delay since the offences. Weatherup, a lesser player, is given four months, suspended for a year.
Finally, it is the turn of Glenn Mulcaire, who also pleaded guilty before the trial began, not only to conspiracy to intercept communications but specifically to hacking Milly Dowler. His lawyer has claimed that Mulcaire thought he was targeting the missing girl to help the police. The judge swipes aside the claim. ‘It is incapable of belief,’ he says. But he tells the man who committed crime for a living: ‘You are the lucky one.’ Since he has already been sent to prison, in 2007, albeit for only a fraction of his offences, Mulcaire will not have to go back to jail. ‘The sentence will be six months’ imprisonment, suspended for twelve months.’
Somewhere offstage there is a sixth guilty man, Dan Evans, the features writer who became the News of the World’s second specialist phone-hacker. He not only pleaded guilty before the trial began but also agreed to help the police, stepping into the witness box to tell the jury that Coulson hired him specifically because of his skill at intercepting voicemail. He will be sentenced separately.
There are three important people who will not be sentenced. Rebekah Brooks and Stuart Kuttner have been acquitted on all charges by the jury. And Ian Edmondson, who started the trial alongside his former colleagues, has been sent for a separate hearing after becoming too ill to continue.
* * *
It is three years to the day since we published the Milly Dowler story; nearly eight months since this trial began. Court 12 has been like a laboratory for the study of excess, examining in microscopic detail the crime that was committed in Rupert Murdoch’s newsroom and studying, too, the sordid inner world of tabloid journalism. It has also been a minor exhibition of passive power.
By the time the jury returned their verdicts, the version of events which had been promoted for so long by News International and Scotland Yard had been smashed into tiny shameful fragments. Not just one rogue reporter, but also a rogue editor, three rogue news editors and two specialist hackers. Not just eight victims, but 5,500 for Glenn Mulcaire and an estimated 1,600 for Dan Evans. As the prosecuting counsel Andrew Edis QC put it, the News of the World had been ‘at the highest level, a criminal enterprise’.
An email from a junior editor, which was disclosed during the trial, caught the reality of what had been happening behind the closed doors of Murdoch’s paper: ‘Sometimes I think we’re just dazzled by traces and checks and shady stuff and don’t try obvious journalistic techniques.’
The shady stuff turned out to include not only the casual commission of crime but also the tabloid assumption that normal human boundaries existed only to be breached: one of Jude Law’s own family being paid to sell the actor’s private life behind his back; a model who acted as a honeytrap for celebrity sex stories and ending up selling the paper a picture of her own foetus; the truth about Sally Anderson, who had been one of Mulcaire’s victims but who had also invented and sold a completely false story that David Blunkett had made her pregnant; plus a routine campaign of industrial espionage which had seen the News of the World using Mulcaire’s hacking to steal stories from rival papers. I had known that they had hacked the Mail on Sunday’s then investigations editor, Dennis Rice, but Weeting found that they had also hacked the paper’s news editor, deputy news editor and chief feature writer, as well as journalists on the Sunday Mirror and the Sunday People.
Inevitably, the court’s microscope returned often to the Murdoch papers’ endless hunger for the sex lives of public figures, and then revealed a startling hypocrisy: that between 1998 and 2006, while they were busily humiliating other people by exposing their affairs, Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson were themselves secretly doing exactly the same thing in spite of their marriages. Weeting detectives had discovered this when they seized a laptop computer on which Brooks had written to Coulson in 2004, urging him not to end their relationship. She had written this while she was editing the Sun, in which, for example, she had lambasted the leader of the firemen’s union during a strike: ‘It’s bad enough that Andy Gilchrist is a Marxist rabble-rouser. But now we expose him as a lying, cheating, low-life fornicator. In a strike that puts lives at risk, we need men we can trust. Not a hypocrite who lies about his family so he can drop his trousers.’ So it goes.
In the same vein, during the trial, the man who had sold Fleet Street so many of those sex stories – Max Clifford – was himself prosecuted and convicted for a series of indecent assaults on girls and young women. He was jailed for eight years. The newspapers who had been happy to feed off him had then monstered him as though they bore no responsibility for giving him the power and the wealth and the prestige that he had used to intimidate his victims.
The News of the World’s own arroga
nce and aggression were themselves the source of some of the most damning evidence against them. They were faced with the surviving copies of the Harbottle & Lewis emails with their brazen references to the apparent payment of bribes, but the police had found out about them only because News International had tried to fool the media select committee by quoting the law firm’s dubious judgement on them as evidence of their innocence. Coulson was faced with the collection of compromising emails which Clive Goodman had downloaded as an insurance policy after he was arrested in 2006: the prosecution had them only because Coulson had bullied and betrayed his royal editor to the point where he not only handed over the emails but acted as a hostile witness, telling the jury that Coulson personally had authorised his hacking of the royal household.
But the trial was never a foregone conclusion. The threads of evidence which linked that bundle of crime to the defendants in the dock were sometimes thin. It was at this point that the passive power played its part. Rupert Murdoch had no need to do anything to intervene in the trial, but his money gave the defence the kind of muscle which is rarely seen in a courtroom, delivering squads of senior solicitors, junior solicitors and paralegals who sifted every fragment of evidence, testing and probing, wrong-footing witnesses with a misremembered date, a forgotten detail; providing the jurors with neatly organised bundles of laminated paperwork, all backed up by daily transcripts of the evidence and by IT support which would make Google jealous.
By comparison, the Crown Prosecution Service struggled – as any section of the underfunded state now struggles – desperately short of muscle to deal with the weight of evidence which fell on the court from more than three years of endeavour by Operation Weeting. They could afford just one full-time solicitor and one admin assistant to deal with it. The prosecution worked tirelessly but delivered witnesses whose testimony sometimes collapsed under scrutiny, simply because nobody had checked it. They gave the jurors bundles of paper, some of which proved to be misleading or incomplete. Towards the end of the trial, Andrew Edis decided that the jury must have a computer with an electronic index to help them find their way through the mass of paperwork in front of them. He had to offer to pay for it out of his own pocket. He was earning less than a tenth of the fees of the lead barristers for the defence. When it came to calling character witnesses, the defendants picked from the power elite: Stuart Kuttner was able to produce the former Archbishop of Canterbury to vouch for his honesty.
But even a well-funded prosecution would have struggled with a more fundamental problem. There was a shortage of important evidence. It was more than a decade since Rebekah Brooks had left the News of the World and so naturally paperwork had been lost, memories had faded, people had died (Sean Hoare, for example). Weeting never did recover the editorial computers that had been thrown away when the News of the World moved office, nor 210 million of the 300 million emails which had been deleted from the company’s servers over the years, nor the hard drive from Brooks’s computer. There was no way of knowing which way that missing material might have tilted the trial. Fear, too, played its part: Weeting interviewed dozens of journalists who declined to come forward as witnesses and scores of hacking victims who wanted no part in the trial. And often, over the years, the News of the World had been devious in covering its tracks. Dan Evans told the court how he had taped one particularly important voicemail, which had then been put into a Jiffy bag and delivered to the office so that it appeared to have been hacked and delivered to them by some unknown outsider.
While the prosecution urged the jury to stand back and look at the big picture and to accept that the editors must have known about the crime in the ranks below them, the defence urged them to move closer, to look at the detail, to see the gaps, the problems, the doubts. After the five guilty pleas before the trial began, only Brooks, Coulson and Kuttner faced the phone-hacking charge. All three said they had never heard Mulcaire’s name until he was arrested. Brooks said she had not even been aware of his contract; Coulson and Kuttner that they knew of the contract with Mulcaire’s company but had had no idea what he was doing for his money.
The hacking case against Brooks was pure inference – that the sheer volume of interception meant she must have known – and Murdoch’s money allowed her to land a particularly powerful blow. Her lawyers were handed all 11,000 pages of the scribbled and scrawled notes which Caryatid had seized from Glenn Mulcaire. The Caryatid detectives had taken one look at them and decided they didn’t have the resources to check them. Weeting did the job, but it took them the best part of a year. Brooks’s team did it in three months and then had the manpower to deliver a very helpful analysis. Since Brooks had been editor for more than a third of the time that Mulcaire was working on contract for the paper, it was possible that his notes would record well over 1,000 taskings on her watch. However, Brooks’s lawyers set aside all those notes where it was not 100% certain that they had been written during her editorship, and all those where it was not 100% certain that Mulcaire had been tasked to intercept voicemail as opposed to blagging confidential data. Since a considerable mass of his notes were incomplete and/or ambiguous on either date or task, this allowed them to tell the jury that there were only twelve occasions when it was 100% certain that Glenn Mulcaire had hacked a phone while she was editor. In her case, the big picture became much smaller.
Strangely, the most powerful evidence of hacking – what the judge described as ‘the high point of the prosecution case’ – came from the same source as the most powerful emotion, a murdered schoolgirl. It was not just that Weeting had found fourteen pages of Mulcaire’s notes about the hacking of Milly Dowler, with the names of Greg Miskiw and Neville Thurlbeck in the top left-hand corners; but Surrey police had found, in their archive, records of the phone calls and emails with which the News of the World had tried to bully them into confirming the paper’s false story that the girl was alive and applying for work. These included emails from Stuart Kuttner, who told the court that he had known that the newspaper had obtained Milly’s messages but that he could not remember asking where they had come from and certainly had not known they were hacked. Both Brooks and Coulson insisted that they had known nothing of this, Brooks emphasising that she had been on holiday in Dubai at the time.
Coulson alone faced more difficult evidence, including the recording which Blunkett made openly when Coulson visited him to confront him with the story about his affair. Now, the prosecution had the tape, on which the jury could hear Coulson saying: ‘I am certainly very confident of the information … It is based on an extremely reliable source.’ Faced with that, Coulson went into the witness box and admitted that – contrary to years of denial to Parliament and the prime minister – he had known that the story was hacked, that Neville Thurlbeck had even played him the tapes. He claimed he had been shocked and had told Thurlbeck never to do it again. That put him in the position of knowing that one of his staff had broken the law, but not actually of doing so himself. It also put him very close to the edge of conviction. The rest of the evidence pushed him over. Weeting found an email in which he had dealt with the possibility that one of his journalists was leaking stories by ordering in writing: ‘Do his phone.’ Dan Evans and Clive Goodman both told the jury that he had been deeply involved.
Brooks was also charged with conspiring to commit misconduct in public office by authorising payments totalling £38,000 to a civil servant in the Ministry of Defence. The cash had been paid. The civil servant admitted selling information. But the trail of emails which tied Brooks to the payments was ambiguous, well short of proof that she understood that it was a public official on the receiving end. The jury found her not guilty. Coulson faced two similar charges together with Clive Goodman, who could have been forgiven for thinking he had seen the last of the inside of a courtroom back in 2007.
This involved the emails from the Harbottle & Lewis collection in which the two of them apparently discussed paying cash to Palace police officers. Weeting had followed the p
ayments through News International’s accounts and found they were made to false names with false addresses. Coulson said he had never believed that Goodman really was paying police. It was suggested that Goodman might have been pocketing the money himself, though Goodman told the jury that the real recipients were other journalists whom he would not name and that he had pretended they were police officers to encourage his editor to make the payments. The jury could not reach a verdict, and Coulson and Goodman were told they would face a new trial. Separately, Coulson was facing trial for perjury over evidence he had given at the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow in December 2010.
The other charges – of hiding evidence from Weeting – crumbled into a mess of confusion and doubt. Charlie Brooks appeared at first to be in trouble over the CCTV images of him using the bins of the underground car park as a hiding place while police searched their flat. When Weeting retrieved his mysterious bin bag, they assumed that the laptops he had hidden must belong to Rebekah. They were wrong, and the bag proved to contain no evidence of crime, only Charlie’s porn, his unpublished novel, some paperwork and a conker. When the prosecution tried to tie both Brookses and the security head, Mark Hanna, to the disappearance on the same day of various electronic devices, the evidence stretched and snapped, and all three were acquitted. Rebekah Brooks and her PA, Cheryl Carter, were found not guilty on a similar charge of hiding Brooks’s old notebooks from police.
For Weeting, the trial was a fair result. On phone-hacking: six guilty; two not guilty. On paying public officials: one not guilty; two for retrial. But Fleet Street focused on the acquittal of Brooks and the collapse of the charges on destroying evidence, complaining loudly that the whole prosecution had been a waste of public money and claiming that the trial had cost £100 million. In reality, the total cost of Weeting had been £18.7 million, for this case but also for others in the pipeline; and the cost of the prosecution in court had been £1.7 million. Murdoch had spent at least thirty times as much on the defendants. So it goes on and on.