Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (32 page)

Answers were demanded from individuals and institutions. Outside his home in Sutton, south London, Glenn Mulcaire made a statement. ‘I want to apologize to anybody who was hurt or upset by what I have done,’ he said. ‘I’ve been to court, pleaded guilty. And I’ve gone to prison and been punished. I still face the possibility of further criminal prosecution. Working for the
News of the World
was never easy. There was relentless pressure. There was a constant demand for results. I knew what we did pushed the limits ethically. But, at the time, I didn’t understand I’d broken the law at all.’ To the incredulity of some, he appealed for the media to respect the privacy of his wife and children.

On the BBC TV show
Daily Politics
at midday on 5 July, presented by Andrew Neil, the Press Complaints Commission’s chair, Peta Buscombe, finally grasped how seriously she had been misled by the country’s biggest newspaper group: she was furious. ‘We personally, and the PCC, are so angry because clearly we were misled … There’s only so much we can do when people are lying to us,’ she said. The BBC’s political editor Nick Robinson, who had seldom covered the controversy up to this point, suddenly decided it was worth reporting. He blogged that while the hacking story had previously united those hostile to the Murdoch empire and those angered by its switch to the Conservatives, ‘now Murdoch, Brooks and Cameron will be aware that for the first time the hacking story may be engaging and horrifying readers’.

In the Commons, Labour MPs began agitating for action. Chris Bryant applied for an emergency Commons debate using Standing Order 24, an obscure parliamentary device. Labour MPs supported the move and the Speaker granted a three-hour debate for the following day into whether the government should hold a public inquiry. In the Lords, the government did not accede to one, but softened its opposition. (In a masterpiece of Whitehall speak, the Home Office minister Baroness Browning said: ‘If the allegations were found to be true there will need to be new avenues to explore.’) At Deputy Prime Minister’s Questions, Nick Clegg described the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone as ‘grotesque’: ‘If these allegations are true,’ he said, ‘they are simply beneath contempt.’ He, too, rejected a public inquiry.

Events now crashed down upon each other every few minutes, panicking the institutions of national life. For years, Scotland Yard had stubbornly refused to inspect the evidence, dismissed any suggestion that its inquiry had failed and frustrated the attempts of individuals to discover whether they had been victims of crime. Now its Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson – who the previous week had said he would rather his officers were investigating burglaries than phone hacking – was shocked by the same evidence:

My heart goes out to the Dowler family. Whose heart wouldn’t with the additional distress this must have caused them? I have to be very careful to say nothing that could prejudice our live investigation but if it proved to be true, then irrespective of the legality or illegality of it, I’m not sure there is anyone who wouldn’t be appalled and repulsed by such behaviour.
⁶

Other equally ghastly ‘new’ cases began to be verified. Shortly after 4 p.m., Cambridgeshire Police confirmed what campaigners had known for months – that Glenn Mulcaire had targeted the parents of the Soham children.

Rupert Murdoch had failed to understand the dramatic arrival of new media; now his
News of the World
, one of Britain’s oldest newspapers, was about to discover the protest power of an electronic age which could unite hitherto disparate individuals in a common cause, in a short space of time with devastating effect. Campaigners realized that hitting the tycoon in the pocket was likely to be the most effective tactic. At least five Facebook pages sprung up with titles such as ‘Boycott the
News of the World
’ and ‘Dear NOTW, Millie Dowler is the Final Straw’ and on Twitter, campaigners urged advertisers to shun the paper. Caitlin Moran,
The Times
columnist, advised her 100,000 followers to support a reader and advertiser boycott.

A media buying agency, Starcom MediaVest agency, advised clients to avoid that Sunday’s
News of the World
, and hinted that the trouble could spread to the
Sun
. Ford, the US car giant responsible for about 10 per cent of the
News of the World’
s annual advertising revenue, pulled its advertisements from the title, saying it cared about the behaviour of its partners. Bombarded with protests following Ford’s decision, Currys, Npower, Halifax, T-Mobile and Renault began to review their accounts. Tesco said that while the allegations were distressing, it would await the results of the police investigation before acting. Advertisers who failed to heed the public anger were warned; one disgruntled shopper who lived close to the Dowlers told Tesco: ‘You will find that your sales in this area will be hit in the next couple of weeks.’
⁷

One of the difficulties for Wapping was that Rebekah Brooks was heading the company’s investigation into its behaviour towards Milly Dowler. Hugh Grant compared the situation to allowing Hitler ‘to clean up the Nazi party’.
⁸
Wapping’s spokesman, Simon Greenberg, struggled to explain the anomaly. On
Channel
4
News
, when Jon Snow asked: ‘How can she investigate herself?’, Greenberg responded: ‘When we have got to the facts we will be able to establish exactly how that will be possible.’ Alastair Campbell, Labour’s former communications director, described Greenberg’s media appearances as ‘car crash interviews’.
⁹

As the outlook for Brooks grew ever grimmer, the BBC’s Robert Peston popped up again to pitch the news in a different direction. On the BBC
Ten O
’
Clock News
that night, 5 July, he disclosed that News International had passed evidence of police corruption at the
NoW
between 2003 and 2007 – during Andy Coulson’s editorship – to Scotland Yard. Peston’s story helped to deflect attention away from Rebekah Brooks and on to Coulson, but it failed to mention that the company had actually had the emails since retrieving them from Harbottle & Lewis on 1 April and had handed them to police two weeks beforehand, on 20 June.

Another BBC programme,
Newsnight
, devoted itself to phone hacking night after night. Paul McMullan, the former
News of the World
features executive, began to appear on the show regularly, wearing a crumpled cream suit and surprising viewers with his insouciance. That evening as presenter Jeremy Paxman looked on aghast, McMullan suggested that phone hacking was commonplace: ‘When they first said it’s just a rogue reporter, I thought that’s so unfair, what about all the legitimate investigations that we’ve done, where we’ve had to go into these grey areas and do these things, surely you should be protecting us by saying: “Yes, sometimes we have to do these things” rather than “It’s just one person and we didn’t know anything about it.” ’ The paper was ruthless, he explained: ‘You’re only as good as your next story, and they used to do a byline count every year and if you didn’t have enough bylines in the paper it was goodbye.’ Asked whether he could ever have imagined listening to Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages, he replied:

Yes. I thought about that today and initially the first time someone asked me, I thought: I’ve always been really proud to be a
News of the World
reporter, the biggest circulating English language newspaper in the world, but suddenly I felt a bit shamed because of what the parents had gone through. But in reality I’ve been thinking about it, taking a step back, and it’s not such a big deal. I was talking to someone from Kenya earlier today who said: ‘Well, you know, the journalists may have helped’ if they had a little bit of extra information … but I shouldn’t be trying to defend the indefensible because it’s not going to be a very popular position.

News International journalists became concerned that McMullan might not be representing their views very attractively.

Wednesday 6 July offered no respite for the Murdochs. Hacking stories dominated the newspapers, though Wapping’s papers were still minimizing the story.
The Times
splashed on an item about judges being old and white, running a single column down its front page on police corruption: ‘Hacking: Coulson authorized payments to police for stories’. The story stated that Rebekah Brooks was ‘determined to stay in her job and steer the company through the scandal’. A
Times
leader described phone hacking as ‘beyond reprehensible’, adding: ‘This is why it is so important that the truth be known.’ The
Daily Mirror
,
Daily Mail
and
Daily Express
ran front-page pictures of the Soham girls. The
Guardian
and
Telegraph
splashed that detectives were urgently checking whether there was further evidence about high-profile murders and abductions in Mulcaire’s notes and were contacting victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London in 2005. Only the
Sun
left the story off the front, writing on page 6: ‘Former
News of the World
editor Rebekah Brooks yesterday said she was “sickened” by allegations that a private eye hired by the paper hacked tragic Milly Dowler’s phone.’
*

As they raced to contact other victims of crimes, Scotland Yard had informed Graham Foulkes, whose 22-year-old son died in the Edgware Road bombing in July 2005, of evidence that his phone had been hacked. He told the
Today
programme’s 7 million listeners: ‘The thought that these guys may have been listening to that is just horrendous. It kind of fills you with horror really because we were in a very dark place, and you think that it’s about as dark as it can get, and then you realize that there’s somebody out there that can make it even darker.’

As public revulsion spread, 60,000 people signed a petition set up by the online campaigning organization Avaaz calling for a halt to the BSkyB deal. Attention was now focused firmly not just on the
News of the World
, but on the wider commercial ambitions of News Corp. On the Liberal Conspiracy blog, Sunny Hundal called for readers to pressurize advertisers to pull out of the
NoW
. Halifax and Lloyds bank did so.

Shortly before midday the Metropolitan Police publicly announced the launch of Operation Elveden – which had actually been under way for two weeks already – to investigate police corruption. Confirming that the force had been passed emails by News International, the Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson, said: ‘Our initial assessment shows that these documents include information relating to alleged inappropriate payments to a small number of MPS officers …’ He assured the public that the inquiry would be as ‘thorough and robust’ as Operation Weeting.

At its daily briefing for political journalists, Downing Street said that David Cameron stood by his statement on Coulson’s resignation in January when he had praised his director of communications. But he was about to do a U-turn on a public inquiry. In the Commons at midday, a hush descended as the Prime Minister told Ed Miliband: ‘Yes, we do need to have an inquiry – possibly inquiries – into what has happened. We are no longer talking about politicians and celebrities; we are talking about murder victims – potentially terrorist victims – having their phones hacked into. What has taken place is absolutely disgusting …’

Cameron would not commit himself to a judge-led inquiry, nor say that it would be able to compel witnesses to give evidence on oath. He also resisted attempts to halt the BSkyB bid. Miliband, whose own communications director had insisted in March that the takeover was totally separate from phone hacking, pressed: ‘The Prime Minister must realize that the public will react with disbelief if next week the decision is taken to go ahead with this deal at a time when News International is subject to a major criminal investigation and we do not yet know who charges will be laid against.’ Cameron insisted that criminality in the newspaper group which had supported him and the commercial ambitions of its owner were separate: ‘One is an issue about morality and ethics and a police investigation that needs to be carried out in the proper way, the other is an issue about plurality and competition which has to act within the law.’ He declined to call for Rebekah Brooks’s resignation.

Launching his emergency debate at 1.42 p.m. with references to the cases of Milly Dowler and 7/7 victims, Chris Bryant told MPs: ‘These are not just the amoral actions of some lone private investigator tied to a rogue
News of the World
reporter; they are the immoral and almost certainly criminal deeds of an organization that was appallingly led and had completely lost sight of any idea of decency or shared humanity.’ Frank Dobson, the former Health Secretary, remarked that News International’s record of wrongdoing would bar it from getting a mini-cab licence. The Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, whose sister Jemima Khan had been hacked by the
NoW
, said: ‘Rupert Murdoch is clearly a very talented businessman and possibly even a genius, but his organization has grown too powerful and it has abused its power. It has systematically corrupted the police and in my view has gelded this Parliament, to our shame.’

Shortly after 2 p.m. that day, Ofcom, the organization which in his MacTaggart lecture in 2009 James Murdoch wanted to neuter, pointed out its duty to be satisfied that the holder of a broadcasting licence was ‘fit and proper’, adding that it was closely monitoring developments. In early trading in New York, News Corp shares fell by 3.3 per cent to $17.56. More advertisers fled: Aldi, Co-op, Renault, Vauxhall, Virgin Holidays and Mitsubishi (which that evening described the allegations as ‘unbelievable, unspeakable and despicable’), all announced they would not advertise in the
Screws
. Other blue-chip advertisers including Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Vodafone and the supermarkets Asda and Sainsbury were urgently reviewing their plans. It was turning into a commercial rout.