Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (11 page)

Lewis reasoned that because Mulcaire had admitted intercepting the voicemails of five individuals outside the orbit of the royal family, those individuals would have a civil claim against News International for breach of privacy – and, given that Goodman was a royal reporter and other victims came from sport, showbusiness and politics, other News International journalists were likely too to have been hacking phones. In early 2007, Lewis wrote to each of the non-royal hacking victims (Max Clifford, Taylor, Sky Andrew, Simon Hughes and Elle Macpherson). Only Taylor wanted to pursue a case; Lewis wrote to News International making a civil claim for invasion of privacy.

At that stage, had News International offered £20,000 damages under a legal manoeuvre known as a Part 36 offer (which puts pressure on a litigant to settle or risk paying the other side’s costs if a case goes to court and a judge awards a lower amount), Lewis would have advised Taylor to settle, since he had no evidence other than Mulcaire’s court admission – which was not itself proof that he had acted on behalf of the
News of the World
. Instead, to his surprise, the
NoW
’s legendary Tom Crone asked if he could visit him in person in Manchester, which he did at the offices of George Davies on 3 May 2007. ‘That was their big mistake,’ Lewis said later. ‘Crone never went outside London. It flagged up they thought they had a really big problem. His starting point was: “We thought this had all gone away, let’s settle.” ’
¹
Lewis asked for £200,000 damages. Crone rejected the request, grabbed his coat and left.

News International was now facing trouble on five fronts: the PCC and Culture Committee investigations, which did not know about the use of the dark arts; Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, who did; and Gordon Taylor, who suspected but had no proof.

The PCC was easily dispatched. On 18 May 2007, the commission – which had not been told of Goodman’s letter of 2 March, nor of Gordon Taylor’s legal complaint – ruled that while Goodman’s behaviour had been appalling, there was ‘no evidence’ to challenge the
Screws
’ insistence that he was a rogue reporter. Praising the ‘numerous examples’ of good practice throughout the industry towards data privacy, the watchdog issued six new technical recommendations on covert newsgathering, such as inserting its code of practice into staff contracts and introducing stricter controls on cash payments. With that it let the matter drop.

With one problem gone, News International tried again to get rid of Clive Goodman. News International’s legal director, Jonathan Chapman, asked an external firm of lawyers, Harbottle & Lewis, to confirm its decision to reject his employment appeal. In a delicately phrased letter to Harbottle’s senior partner Lawrence Abramson on 9 May, Chapman wrote that News International’s own review had determined there was no reasonable evidence to support Goodman’s contention that phone hacking had been widespread. However, he continued: ‘Because of the bad publicity that could result from an allegation in an employment tribunal that we had covered up potentially damaging evidence found on our email trawl, I would ask that you or a colleague carry out an independent review of the emails in question and report back to me with any findings of material that could possibly tend to support either of Goodman’s contentions.’
²
Abramson and junior colleagues were given electronic access to the same emails Chapman and Cloke had reviewed, though some were strangely blank and others cut off halfway through. Because Abramson could not access some of them electronically he requested paper copies, which were sent to his offices. Abramson agreed with his client: there was no reasonable evidence in the emails to support Goodman’s case (again overlooking police corruption, which he was under no professional obligation to report to the police). After some haggling, on 29 May Abramson agreed with Chapman the following wording of the results of the independent review of Goodman’s emails:

Re: Clive Goodman

We have on your instructions reviewed the emails to which you have provided access from the accounts of:

Andy Coulson

Stuart Kuttner

Ian Edmondson

Clive Goodman

Neil Wallis

Jules Stenson
*

I can confirm that we did not find anything in those emails which appeared to us to be reasonable evidence that Clive Goodman’s illegal actions were known about and supported by both or either of Andy Coulson, the editor, and Neil Wallis, the Deputy Editor, and/or that Ian Edmondson, the News Editor, and others were carrying out similar illegal procedures.

After completing the exercise, Harbottle and Lewis filed away its report, together with the paper copies of the emails, where they lay until they re-emerged with devastating impact four years later. For now, nothing was publicly known about corruption at News International, nor of the attempts to influence the outcome of Goodman’s prosecution, nor of his legal action, nor of the ill-treatment of the sports reporter Matt Driscoll. What happened next, though, would dramatically raise the stakes when these things resurfaced.

In the spring of 2007, David Cameron was looking for a new press secretary. On becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 2005, aged thirty-nine, he faced two personal electoral difficulties: his privileged background and his lack of experience. Educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was a member of the boisterous Bullingdon dining club of rich young men, Cameron’s only jobs prior to entering Parliament had been as a Tory Party worker, ministerial aide and public relations executive at Carlton Television. After three successive general election defeats to the Murdoch-backed Tony Blair, Cameron wanted to reposition the Conservatives as kinder and concerned about public services, poverty and the environment. Cameron’s closest aides espoused a more mature politics and believed that newspaper proprietors were enjoying political power without accountability; they sought to curb the power of the press barons. Speaking in 2011, Cameron’s press chief at the time, George Eustice, said: ‘Part of David Cameron’s whole prescription of where Blair had gone wrong was that it was all about headlines and endless initiatives and nothing being done, so part of his argument was … we’re not going to deviate things just to get a headline in a Sunday paper.’
³
Cameron’s team decided they would cultivate political reporters rather than their proprietors and would politely decline invitations to address News Corp conferences. Eustice recalled: ‘We didn’t want to say to them [proprietors]: “We’re going to put you in your box.” We didn’t want it to be like that. We just wanted them to get used to it.’
⁴

Launching a mission to soften the Conservative brand, in February 2006 Cameron made a speech saying that youths who wore hooded tops were misunderstood rather than dangerous (the perception of many voters), and in April 2006 posed on a husky sled on a Norwegian glacier to vaunt his credentials on climate change. Despite successfully reshaping attitudes towards his party, the approach alienated some traditional supporters. Rupert Murdoch was particularly unimpressed. In an interview on US television on 20 July 2006, he described Cameron as ‘charming’, but when asked what he thought of him replied: ‘Not much. He’s bright. He’s quick. He’s totally inexperienced.’
⁵
With Blair having already announced he would not stand for another term, Murdoch hoped Gordon Brown would become prime minister a year or two before the next general election due in 2010 to allow a ‘match up between Brown and the new Conservative leadership.’
⁶
In effect, Murdoch was giving notice to the leaders that his endorsement was winnable.

By early 2007, Cameron began to fear his aloofness towards editors and proprietors risked a backlash at election time, partly because Blair’s likely successor, Gordon Brown, was courting the media so much. According to Eustice: ‘The media wouldn’t say: “We respect what David Cameron is doing,” they would react to the game. They would literally say: “Gordon Brown came over for dinner and David Cameron won’t speak at our conference, why should we back him?” ’
⁷

Cameron and his closest political ally George Osborne, the shadow Chancellor and fellow Bullingdonian, began looking for a new press chief to replace Eustice, who wanted in any case to become an MP.

Osborne thought particularly warmly of Andy Coulson, who a year earlier had taken the sting out of a highly controversial story that could have wrecked his career. When he was twenty-two, Osborne had known a dominatrix, Natalie Rowe, who was expecting the baby of one of his friends, William Sinclair, who had developed a drug habit. In 2005, Rowe (professional name Mistress Pain), had been hawking around a picture of herself with the rising star of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition just out of university. In the picture, Osborne was putting his arm around Rowe, with a line of white powder in the background which she claimed was cocaine.

Rowe had contracted Max Clifford, who sold the story to the
Sunday Mirror
, which published it on 16 October 2005 under the headline: ‘Vice Girl: I Snorted Cocaine with Top Tory Boy’. Despite not agreeing a deal with Rowe, Andy Coulson’s
News of the
World
had also somehow obtained the picture and splashed the story. It was noticeably gentler on Osborne and included sympathetic quotes from him, such as: ‘It was a stark lesson to me at a young age of the destruction which drugs bring to so many people’s lives.’ Coulson’s editorial suggested that Osborne had been a young man caught up in a shadowy world, pointing out that he robustly condemned drugs.

Rebekah Wade also reportedly recommended Coulson to David Cameron.
⁸
Aware that the
News of the World’
s former editor had resigned over a scandal, Cameron asked Coulson whether there was anything in his past that could embarrass them. Coulson gave the necessary assurances, and on 31 May 2007 was appointed as the new director of communications to the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. With his working-class background and redtop newspaper experience, Coulson provided an earthy counter-weight to the upper-class Cameron and Osborne, and could ‘tabloid proof’ policies. In his new role, Coulson started reaching out to right-wing journalists and proprietors, particularly Rupert Murdoch, and almost simultaneously the Conservatives began to roll out policies designed to hit the sweet spots of right-wing voters and editors. At the party conference in October 2007, George Osborne launched a plan to raise the threshold for inheritance tax from £300,000 to £1 million, which would benefit thousands of homeowners in the South-East and in his leader’s address David Cameron vaunted traditional values and backed a cap on migrants from outside the European Union. The BBC’s political reporter Brian Wheeler noted that Cameron had reprised his optimism and sincerity. ‘But there was none of the New Age rhetoric of last year’s “let the sun shine in” speech. He spoke at length about education, calling for a return to traditional standards in the classroom, more discipline and “setting by ability”. He set out policies to strengthen the family, including removing incentives in the benefit system for couples to live apart.’
⁹

Under Coulson, Cameron quickly adopted the
Sun’
s ‘Broken Britain’ campaign against social breakdown, at odds with his earlier message of understanding. On 10 January 2008, for instance, in a ‘time to reclaim our streets’ speech in Salford, he said: ‘Today, I want to speak about the senseless, barbaric and seemingly remorseless prevalance of violence in our country. A violence that takes our families, torments them with suffering and tears them apart.’ Rebekah Wade’s
Sun
backed the hard line and on 30 January blazoned Cameron’s tough talking on the police on a front page headlined ‘Police Cameron Action’. Its helpful political editor George Pascoe-Watson wrote: ‘David Cameron yesterday unveiled his plans to mend broken Britain … and give power back to the police. In an exclusive interview he said officers could be given free rein to stop and search youngsters on the street.’
¹⁰

For Rupert Murdoch, the hacking scandal was now in the past and he returned to his quest to dominate the world’s media. While an enthusiast for the new medium of television in the 1950s and 60s, the septuagenarian tycoon had been caught out by the sudden and disruptive arrival of the Internet. Setting aside his initial scepticism, he had embraced the information age in July 2005, buying the social networking site MySpace for $580 million. Under News Corp’s management, MySpace initially prospered, and two years after its acquisition had become the world’s largest social networking site, with 110 million subscribers. Murdoch’s true love, though, remained his first – print – and, in May 2007, he sought to acquire one of the grand American newspapers he had long coveted, the
Wall Street Journal
. There was just one problem: its parent company, Dow Jones, was owned by the Bancroft family, who saw themselves as responsible custodians of independent journalism. Murdoch offered $60 a share, a 67 per cent premium to Dow Jones’s recent price, but the Bancrofts raised the phone hacking prosecutions and allegations that Murdoch interfered in his newspapers. In a swooning 1,200-word letter to the Bancrofts published by the
Wall Street Journal
on 14 May 2007, Murdoch praised the family’s ‘record of journalistic independence’, while attesting to his own virtues: ‘Any interference – or even a hint of interference – would break the trust that exists between the paper and its readers, something I am unwilling to countenance … I don’t apologize for the fact that I’ve always had strong opinions and strong ideas about newspapers, but I have always respected the independence and integrity of the news organizations with which I am associated.’