Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (16 page)

Not much was known, they said, about the ‘For Neville’ email, except that it showed the
NoW
had hacked Taylor’s phone and thus the paper had settled. The MPs wanted to know if the Neville in the email was Neville Thurlbeck
,
the paper’s chief reporter. ‘I questioned Neville Thurlbeck then, and I have spoken to him about the same subject since,’ Crone replied. ‘His position is that he has never seen that email, nor had any knowledge of it.’ He explained that Ross Hindley, the journalist who transcribed the hacked messages, had been unable to remember whether he had sent the email on to Thurlbeck.

Myler and Crone flatly denied any reporter other than Clive Goodman had been involved in phone hacking. When the Conservative MP Philip Davies challenged that, Myler replied: ‘No evidence, Mr Davies, has been produced internally or externally by the police, by any lawyers, to suggest that what you have said is the truth, is the case.’ Myler failed to point out that Thurlbeck himself – not a lawyer or a police officer – had alleged the involvement of others. (See Chapter 21.)

The committee was incredulous. Despite the
News of the
World
paying a convicted phone hacker more than £100,000 a year, only Goodman had colluded in his illegal work. Asked whether Mulcaire had been paid £200,000 to stay silent – a report in
Private Eye
– Myler said: ‘I am not aware of any payment that has been made.’ Crone said: ‘I had nothing to do with that area, because if there is any sort of payment or dealings with Mulcaire it is not going to be in my area.’

Pressed on this carefully worded evasion by Davies: ‘It did not take place?’ Crone reluctantly agreed that Mulcaire had been paid something:

The employment laws as they stand, as I understand it, and I am certainly no expert in this area, mean that if someone works for you for X hours a week it does not matter whether he is staff, he is freelance or is on a contract, whatever, he has certain employment rights. Given those employment rights there is a process that has to be followed when that relationship comes to an end. Because of failures, and we can possibly check it out (I do not have the information in detail) there was a sum of money paid to him. I do not know exactly what it is, but it bears no relation to the figure you have given us.

As senior executives knew, News International had paid Mulcaire £85,000 two years previously. (See Chapter 5.) The Labour MP Paul Farrelly, a former journalist on the
Observer
, asked whether Goodman, too, had received a pay-off. Initially Crone said he was not ‘aware’ of one, but he later added: ‘I have a feeling there may have been a payment of some sort.’ (Goodman had received payments totalling £243,000.)

Tom Watson had barely noticed the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire in 2007, but he was riled by Crone’s attempt to have him thrown out of the hearing. Since returning to the backbenches, he had watched every episode of the American detective TV series
The Wire
and decided to follow the advice of one of its characters, Lester Freamon, to ‘follow the money’ (itself Deepthroat’s advice to the
Washington Post
during Watergate). Watson asked if News International’s board had authorized the Taylor pay-off. The exchanges give a flavour of the extent to which its executives blustered and stalled:

WATSON: A £700,000 payment would be a decision taken at board level. Is that right?

CRONE: I am not aware of that.

WATSON: So the News International board did not agree the payment in any way?

MYLER: What do you mean by the ‘board’?

WATSON: Your managing board, the directors of the company.

MYLER: Why would they need to be involved?

WATSON: Because it is a huge amount of money and they have got a responsibility to the proprietor and the shareholders, I assume?

MYLER: Yes, and as I have said, Mr Watson, the sum of money that Mr Taylor first set out to receive was significantly higher than the sum he did receive.

WATSON: I am sorry, I thought that was the easy question. So the board did not know about the payment …

CRONE: I do not know. I am sorry. All I do is report to the next stage up.

WATSON: So you could write to us and let us know whether the board took the decision?

CRONE: I could ask the question and give you the answer, yes.

The executives had been unable to say whether News International’s board had authorized the payment, but had agreed to find out. Watson changed tack. He asked Crone: ‘When did you tell Rupert Murdoch?’, to which Crone fired back: ‘I did not tell Rupert Murdoch.’ Myler then intervened.

MYLER: The sequence of events, Mr Watson, is very simple. Mr Crone advised me, as the editor, what the legal advice was and it was to settle. Myself and Mr Crone then went to see James Murdoch and told him where we were with the situation. Mr Crone then continued with our outside lawyers the negotiation with Mr Taylor. Eventually a settlement was agreed. That was it.

WATSON: So James Murdoch took the ultimate decision?

MYLER: James Murdoch was advised of the situation and agreed with our legal advice that we should settle.

Crone looked unhappy: Myler had just admitted that James Murdoch, the heir to the Murdoch dynasty and a News Corp director, had authorized a hush payment to a victim of phone hacking. If James knew that its rogue reporter defence was untrue, neither he nor anyone else at News International had corrected the company’s earlier testimony, nor alerted the police to the possibility of more widespread criminality.

In the afternoon, Andy Coulson and Stuart Kuttner gave evidence. Coulson was now the Opposition leader’s director of communications and his credibility was at stake. He was smooth and assured, insisting that he had neither condoned hacking nor had any ‘recollection’ of it taking place. During his four-year editorship, he said, his instructions to staff were clear: they were to work within the Press Complaints Commission code. Alas, he recalled, Clive Goodman had deceived him. ‘I have thought long and hard about this,’ he told MPs. ‘What could I have done to stop this happening? But, if a rogue reporter decides to behave in that fashion I am not sure that there is an awful lot more I could have done.’

He denied that he had received any money from News International while working for the Conservatives. Watson asked him: ‘You have not got any secondary income other than that have you?’ ‘No,’ replied Coulson. Watson double-checked: ‘So your sole income was News International and then your sole income was the Conservative Party?’ ‘Yes,’ said Coulson. Adam Price, a Welsh Nationalist MP who had vigorously challenged the executives, asked: ‘So far as you were aware the
News of the World
while you were editor or deputy editor never paid a serving police officer for information?’ ‘Not to my knowledge,’ Coulson replied. Price checked: ‘No journalist on the
News of the World
?’ Coulson: ‘No.’

As managing editor, Stuart Kuttner signed off payments and was the paper’s public face, appearing in Rebekah Wade’s absence in July 2000 to defend its ‘For Sarah’ campaign. On 8 July 2009, the day Nick Davies broke the Taylor story, NI had announced Kuttner’s resignation. Kuttner demanded that Philip Davies withdraw from the hearing for suggesting – falsely, Kuttner insisted – that his departure was linked to the Taylor story. Again, Whittingdale rebuffed the request, but it deepened MPs’ suspicions that News International was hiding something.

By the close of the session, its executives had wriggled out of trouble by flatly denying anything was wrong. This was difficult to dispute without conflicting evidence, even though their story sounded very dubious. Despite the smokescreen, there were anomalies for the MPs to probe: the company had admitted James Murdoch had authorized the Taylor payment and that Goodman and Mulcaire had been paid off after they had been jailed.

With its story faltering in public, News International began to strike back aggressively in private. Unbeknown to members of the Culture Committee
,
the
News of the
World
established a secret team to investigate their private lives. For several days, as chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck would later tell Tom Watson, reporters searched for any secret lovers or extra-marital affairs that could be used as leverage against the MPs. Thurlbeck said:

All I know is that, when the DCMS [Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee] was formed or rather when it got onto all the hacking stuff, there was an edict came down from the editor and it was find out every single thing you can about every single member: who was gay, who had affairs, anything we can use. Each reporter was given two members and there were six reporters that went on for around ten days. I don’t know who looked at you. It fell by the wayside; I think even Ian Edmondson [the news editor] realized there was something quite horrible about doing this.
¹¹

Separately, a
News of the World
figure tasked with talking to Watson and other committee members to glean their question plan let them know that Rebekah Brooks believed Watson and Farrelly were the inquiry’s ‘ringleaders’. Watson was privately told by Downing Street insiders that Wapping was using its connections to persuade senior politicians to urge him to hold back. Gordon Brown called Watson to tell him that Rupert Murdoch had phoned Tony Blair to tell him to call Watson off.
*

Speaking three years later, Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former communications director, recalled the ‘bullying culture’:

I recall Rebekah Wade telling me that so far as she was concerned, with Tom Watson it’s personal, and we won’t stop till we get him. In July 2009, when the
Guardian
published a story indicating phone hacking was even more widespread than had been thought, I did a number of TV interviews saying this was a story that was not going away, that News International and the police had to grip it and come clean, that David Cameron should reconsider his appointment of Andy Coulson, and that what appeared to be emerging was evidence of systematic criminal activity on a near industrial basis at the
News of the World
. I received a series of what can only be termed threatening text and phone messages from both Rebekah and the office of James Murdoch.
¹³

News International’s cover-up was becoming ever more desperate.

Intimidating Parliament

I absolutely do not know

– Les Hinton, 15 September 2009

News International attacked from every direction. At the end of July, its solicitors Farrer & Co wrote to Mark Lewis threatening him with an injunction if he represented any more phone hacking victims, on the grounds that he was privy to sensitive information from earlier cases:

It goes without saying that our client will object to your involvement in this or any other related case against our client for the reasons set out above. We reserve our client’s rights to take injunctive proceedings against you, should you choose to disregard the matters contained in this letter. However, you have an opportunity to correct matters by confirming that you will now accept that you cannot act for any individual wishing to bring a claim against News Group in respect of the voicemail accessing allegations …
¹

Lewis paraphrased the letter as saying: ‘You know too much, please don’t act against us or we will bring the whole weight of the organization down on you.’ He said: ‘I think it was designed to upset me, but it did not.’
²
In his reply, he threatened to pass the work to another firm, thus informing another lawyer about the prevalence of hacking at Wapping. The injunction never materialized.

Inside News International, executives would soon begin using another tactic in the cover-up – ordering the deletion of millions of emails to destroy evidence that might help victims of phone hacking in the civil courts. (See chapter 11.) Publicly, Colin Myler insisted to the Press Complaints Commission that the company’s ‘internal inquiries’ had found no evidence aside from the ‘For Neville’ email that any staff beyond Goodman had intercepted messages. Allegations by the
Guardian
that thousands of phones had been hacked were, he told the regulator, ‘not just unsubstantiated and irresponsible, they were wholly false’. The PCC continued its inquiry.

Separately, Myler indicated to the Culture Committee that News International’s patience was wearing thin with its unceasing investigation. In August 2009, he confirmed in writing that payments had been made to Goodman and Mulcaire to settle employment law cases, but declined to disclose the amounts on the grounds that they were confidential. He told the MPs: ‘We have now answered all the outstanding questions from the committee on 21 July and trust that this now brings to a close our involvement in your committee’s proceedings.’