Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (26 page)

Many newspapers that had ignored the hacking scandal were now forced to report the new inquiry. On 27 January, the
Guardian
and the
Independent
made the opening of Operation Weeting their splash and
The Times
and the
Telegraph
ran small pieces on their front pages. The mass market papers tucked the story inside, with the
Sun
running sixty-four words at the bottom of page 2. For the next six months among daily papers, only a few reporters, typically Nick Davies and James Robinson at the
Guardian
, Martin Hickman and Cahal Milmo at the
Independent
, and Ben Fenton at the
Financial Times
would actively pursue the story. Even the Press Association, the national news agency owned by the large newspaper groups, was unenthusiastic. One of its journalists later told Watson: ‘You know we’re partly owned by News International, don’t you?’

The announcement of the inquiry emboldened previously silent victims to speak out. Nick Brown, Labour’s former chief whip, revealed his residential landline had been tapped after he had been outed as gay by the
News of the World
ten years earlier: he had had a ‘chilling’ moment when he heard a recording of his conversation being replayed. A British Telecom engineer had found a manual recorder on the line, placed there, Brown assumed, by someone acting for a newspaper.
⁵
(As part of Operation Reproof, in 2005, Devon and Cornwall Police had contacted Brown to say they were prosecuting an individual for phone bugging and he had been one of the victims, ‘but the case collapsed for legal reasons’.)

Aides to another senior Labour minister, David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary and a close personal friend of Rebekah Brooks, disclosed that he feared that his phone had been hacked around the time of his affair with the publisher of the right-wing
Spectator
magazine, Kimberly Quinn, in 2004. His voicemails had certainly been targeted because of his friendship in 2005 with a former estate agent, Sally King, who was informed by detectives from Operation Weeting that they had obtained eight recordings of phone messages left by Blunkett on her phone. According to the
Sunday Telegraph
in September 2011, at one stage a man (who may have been Glenn Mulcaire), could be heard saying on the recordings: ‘Just say “I love you” and it’s twenty-five thousand.’
⁶
Blunkett, who had been paid up to £150,000 a year for a weekly column in the
Sun
, did not sue. Whatever his attitude towards his own hacking, he was the fifth Labour cabinet minister to suspect or know that his phone had been tampered with by the tabloid press.

At the offices of the
Independent
, Martin Hickman dispatched a journalist on work experience, Louise Sheridan, to the newspaper library at Colindale in north London to comb through back copies of News International titles to identify stories that may have been derived from hacking. As she read through the rolls of microfiche, Sheridan found several potential victims of hacking. Among them were Jude Law and his former wife Sadie Frost, the state of whose relationship had been reported in the
News of the World
. When contacted, Law and Frost thanked the
Independent
but said they had no present intention of taking action.

Sheridan also found a story which suggested that phone hacking at Wapping might have extended beyond the
News of the World –
to the
Sun,
in the first week of Rebekah Brooks’s editorship following her transfer from the
News of the World
. On 20 January 2003, while the Fire Brigade’s Union was running a national strike against Tony Blair’s government, the
Sun
had exposed an extra-marital affair by its leader Andy Gilchrist with a front-page story headlined: ‘Fire strike leader is a love cheat’. A former firefighter in North Wales, Tracey Holland, had given the paper an account of the affair. Early that morning, someone anonymously pushed a copy of the
Sun
through Gilchrist’s letterbox, presumably to ensure that he and his family saw the story.

The assumption, inevitably, was that Holland had approached the
Sun
and sold her story, but when Cahal Milmo tracked her down in 2011, she told him: ‘When they first came to me it was clear that they knew all about it. They had lots of information about how long we’d been together.’ By the time the
Independent
contacted him on 31 January, Gilchrist had already written to Scotland Yard demanding to know whether he was in Mulcaire’s files. News International vigorously denied there was any substance to his claims, and the
Sun’
s managing editor, Graham Dudman, maintained the story had been legitimately obtained, though he could not remember exactly how. The
Independent’
s lawyers were nervous, but the paper ran the story on 9 February:

Detectives are looking into allegations that a second newspaper at Rupert Murdoch’s News International may have used hacked voicemails to publish stories about the private life of a prominent public figure. Andy Gilchrist, a former union leader, has asked Scotland Yard to investigate his belief that interception of his mobile phone messages led to negative stories about him appearing in the
Sun
at the height of an acrimonious national strike by the Fire Brigade’s Union (FBU).

News International’s solicitors Olswang dispatched a strongly worded letter complaining about the article, saying the allegations were ‘completely false’: ‘No unauthorized and illegal access to telephone messages was employed in respect of the article concerning Mr Gilchrist and there is no evidence to suggest there was. Entirely legitimate means were used throughout.’ The letter added the article was ‘not consistent with the obligation on the part of your journalists to conduct themselves in accordance with the principles of responsible journalism’. News International appeared to be drawing a line: the phone hacking scandal must not infect the
Sun
. The
Independent
offered no correction or retraction. It would not be until November 2011 that the words ‘the
Sun
’ were revealed to be in Mulcaire’s notes.

Despite considerable scepticism about the likely effectiveness of the new inquiry, Sue Akers had drafted forty-five officers to work on Operation Weeting, three times the number who investigated the MPs’ expenses scandal. As they began ploughing through Mulcaire’s paperwork, Akers’s team quickly realized that the original investigation had failed. In its first public update on Operation Weeting on 9 February, Scotland Yard said it had identified a new group of victims previously told by the police that there was ‘little or no evidence’ about them. As part of ‘urgent steps’ to inform the misled victims, Akers personally visited John Prescott to tell him he had been targeted in April 2006, the month the
Daily Mirror
had revealed his affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple. Chris Bryant, party to the judicial review against the Met, remarked wryly: ‘Until now, it has been the victims that have had to do the investigative work, so it’s a welcome development that the police have finally taken on the responsibility.’
⁷

While the police had previously handed over hacking evidence only under court order, detectives now started allowing some victims to view Glenn Mulcaire’s notes. Under conditions of secrecy in a windowless room at Scotland Yard, victims could inspect the notes about them, though they were not allowed to photograph or copy them. As the actress Leslie Ash and her husband Lee Chapman read Mulcaire’s references to them, they accidentally discovered the
News of the World
had targeted Leslie Chapman – who was not Leslie Ash using her husband’s surname, but the father of one of the two children killed at Soham in 2002. For weeks in 2002, the disappearance of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman (they were murdered by the local school caretaker, Ian Huntley) had horrified the public. Charlotte Harris, the couple’s lawyer, recalled: ‘Leslie Chapman’s papers were in front of us and the police were saying of the address: “Yeah, well it’s Fulham”, but it wasn’t a Fulham postcode and I was looking at it, and being so familiar with Glenn Mulcaire’s handwriting, I said: “It doesn’t say ‘Fulham’, it says ‘Soham’.”’ Harris added: ‘In my discussions with News International, I kept mentioning it. I told them: “What have you done? Do you know how serious this is? Do you know what’s going to happen here?” ’

Harris – who had been watched by the
News of the World
in April 2010 – was apparently put under surveillance again, by persons unknown, between January and April 2011. She discovered this only in May when she was handed a twenty-page document containing details about individuals in the scandal, including a section on the private lives of herself, Mark Lewis and Mark Thomson – the lawyers bringing most cases against News International. Harris told the Leveson Inquiry in December 2011:

There is a section in the report that is headed ‘Report III’ which contains material on the lawyers involved in the phone hacking cases including me and two others. The material is highly intrusive. The individual who gave me the documents told me that I should ‘watch myself’ because I was being followed. I read the report immediately. It was clear that an intrusive personal investigation had been conducted on me simply because I was a lawyer involved in the phone hacking cases. The purpose of the report was to obtain information which could be made public in the hope of putting pressure on me presumably to deter me (and my clients) from pursuing claims against the company.

One section of the document, which has not been released publicly in its entirety, read:

The motivation of and association between the key civil lawyers opposing News International is becoming clear. Specifically, the main protagonists are politically motivated with a number being strong Labour supporters, their cases helping promote their professional advancement. The
News of the World
is planning to use these tensions and motivations as a way to force compromise and settlement.

Under the heading ‘
News of the World
strategy’, the document continued: ‘The
News of the World
is aware of these facts and is planning to put pressure back on the solicitors by revealing these facts and by linking their political affiliations and career benefits from the cases. They plan to do this publicly and through discreet lobbying.’

As the BBC, ITV and the liberal quality papers reported on Wapping’s apparently widespread use of the dark arts, the number of individuals taking court action against News International, or inquiring about doing so, rose to 115. By now twelve cases were under way in the High Court, including those of Steve Coogan, Sienna Miller, her stepmother Kelly Hoppen and the TV presenter Chris Tarrant. The former Labour MP George Galloway – one of the few individuals warned by the police in 2006 of his appearance in the Mulcaire files – had also begun proceedings. (As the controversial founder of the far-left Respect Party, Galloway had in March 2006 been the target of a failed sting by the
News of the World
’s ‘Fake Sheik’ Mazher Mahmood, which had been thwarted when Galloway spotted one of the few tell-tale signs of Mahmood’s operation – the metal teeth of his minder.) Given Glenn Mulcaire’s former profession and the
News of the World
’s interest in footballers, many litigants came from that world: Gordon Taylor’s deputy Mick McGuire, Sky Andrew, Andy Gray and Paul Gascoigne, the troubled former England star. Two other prominent football figures also asked police whether they had been targeted: the former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, and David Davies, the former executive director of the Football Association, whose flat had been broken into in a burglary in which nothing was stolen.

In February, the civil lawyers were methodically dismantling the rogue reporter defence, which Rupert Murdoch’s company was still maintaining in court, despite the suspension of Ian Edmondson. On 1 February at the Court of Appeal, Sky Andrew’s team, led by Charlotte Harris, made an important breakthrough when three judges agreed that Glenn Mulcaire should divulge who at the
News of the World
commissioned him to hack phones. In a statement to the High Court on 18 February, Mulcaire said: ‘Information was supplied to the news desk at the
News of the World
. This was manned by different people …’
*

For more than a year lawyers had been grinding out cases in the High Court to establish that Mulcaire worked for more than a single reporter. News International had spent millions trying to suppress that fact. The ‘rogue reporter’ line had now finally collapsed, but the company did not amend its defence in court. There was still a very big deal in progress – the takeover of BSkyB.

Despite the agitations of backbenchers, News International still enjoyed the support of all political parties. This was vital to the firm because while it was fighting off allegations about its newspapers, it was in the endgame of its bid to take over BSkyB – and still required Jeremy Hunt’s sign-off. Provided it stepped over the regulatory hurdle set by the government – spinning off Sky News – the deal would be done. But News International still wanted opposition parties to acquiesce – or at least not make too much fuss, which might focus more attention on phone hacking and stir up further public and media opposition to the bid. On 27 January, Tom Baldwin, formerly a political reporter on
The Times
and now Labour’s director of communications, had warned Labour shadow ministers against linking BSkyB with the phone hacking scandal. A Labour press officer distilled Baldwin’s thoughts into a memo circulated to Labour frontbenchers (and subsequently leaked) which read: