Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (5 page)

Wade’s
News of the World
, which prided itself on going harder and further than other titles, also devoted its extensive resources to investigating the disappearance of another child, Milly Dowler, in Surrey in 2002. Through its newsgathering network, it was convinced the thirteen-year-old had been employed by a recruitment agency in the Midlands, or that she was working at a factory in the north of England. Its leads were wrong and responding to them had wasted police time: Milly Dowler had been murdered by a local man.

Wade’s style with her staff could be dictatorial and, sometimes, abusive. For her amusement, in 2001, a year after she became editor, she instructed a reporter, Charles Begley, to change his name to Harry Potter and dress up as the fictional wizard at news conferences. A few hours after the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers, Begley was rebuked for not wearing his robes and being ‘in character’.
*

In January 2003, following the drive-by shooting of two teenagers in Birmingham, Miskiw sent the investigations editor, Mazher Mahmood, to show how easy it was to buy a gun. Mahmood was no stranger to tricky situations: he had hurriedly resigned from
The Sunday Times
in 1989, shortly before he was about to be sacked, for entering the newspaper’s IT system to make it look as if a news agency was responsible for a mistake he had made in a story about a police inspector’s drink-driving. When Mahmood arrived in a car park to buy two handguns, he was mugged by a machete-wielding gang for the £1,500 he had obtained from petty cash. He reported the incident to Miskiw. ‘Greg asked me if I was all right and, as soon as I’d shakily said “Yes, I think, I’m okay,” continued: “OK, don’t worry about the money, but you have got to get me a gun for this week. The editor really wants the story.” ’
¹¹

Mahmood later became the paper’s ‘Fake Sheikh’, a bogus Arab prince who would spend tens of thousands of pounds hiring helicopters, Rolls-Royces, five-star penthouse suites and first-class flights to gull minor celebrities, sportsmen and royals into committing indiscretions, often persuading them to offer him cocaine and then exposing them for doing so.

Despite its tawdry reputation, the
News of the World
lauded itself as a bastion of investigative journalism and cultivated contacts in high places. As well as schmoozing leading politicians – many of whom were persuaded to write columns for a fee several times their MP’s salary – senior journalists were friendly with police officers. Mahmood worked closely with Scotland Yard,
*
which often nabbed the criminals he had exposed after publication, so that his stories would not be foiled by the law of contempt of court, which forbids prejudicial media coverage after arrests have been made. In the late 1990s, Neville Thurlbeck was receiving records of criminal convictions from a detective constable, Richard Farmer, on the National Criminal Intelligence Service, which liaised between Scotland Yard and the domestic security service MI5. Access to the Police National Computer allowed Thurlbeck to write thirty-six stories, including one about a Labour MP committing an obscene act. In return, he had passed tips about criminals back to Farmer. In 2000, the pair stood trial for corruption, but there was no hard evidence of payment and a judge at Luton Crown Court, Justice McKinnon, said the information Thurlbeck had received from Farmer was not especially ‘confidential or sensitive’; both men were acquitted.

There were more exalted links too. Among the paper’s senior police contacts was Sir John Stevens, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police with whom Rebekah Wade dined regularly, three times at London’s top theatreland restaurant, the Ivy, in August 2002, June 2003 and December 2004 – the last after she had admitted at the Culture Committee that News International bribed police. After he left the force in 2005, Sir John wrote for the
News of the World
, receiving £5,000 a column, and the
NoW
and
The Times
serialized his autobiography,
Not for the
Faint-hearted
.

Flush with cash
*
and comforted by the company’s friendliness with senior politicians and police officers, a sleazy, drink-fuelled atmosphere prevailed inside the
News of the World
’s newsroom; one senior Wapping executive remarked that after walking through it he ‘felt like taking a shower’.
¹²
A former reporter, Sharon Marshall, gave what she said was a frank account of the alcohol-fuelled shenanigans at the paper in
Tabloid Girl
:
A True Story,
straplined ‘Sex. Scandal. Celebrities. All in a Day’s Work’. Published in 2010, the book purported to be an amalgam of newspaper newsrooms, but was often a thinly disguised account of the
Screws
, where she worked between 2002 and 2004 (between 1998 and 2002 she was at the
People
). Marshall’s tabloid days were a blast of infiltrated ‘vice dens’, exaggerated kiss and tells, marathon drinking sessions, fiddled expenses and dodgy stories. Discussing whether reporters made up stories, Marshall wrote: ‘Yes. Sometimes the quotes were written before we ever left the office. Before we knew who we were interviewing.’ Asked to write an article that ‘sounded’ as if it had been written by the glamour model Jordan, she went home, drank two bottles of white wine and fabricated 1,000 words. The drinking was ‘harsh’: often a 9.a.m. whisky in the pub as the executives departed for the morning news conference, followed by a bottle of wine at lunch, followed by more drinking with contacts in the afternoon, ‘slipping casually into an evening’s absolute bender’.

‘My career was kick-started with booze and it carried on that way for the ten years I worked on tabloids.’ It was expected and, in times of need when you’d overdone it, your colleagues would rally round to help. We had a small glass box – about four foot square – next to the newsdesk, with soundproofed walls. It contained an armchair and a TV. If someone was so supremely drunk they could no longer be relied on to stay conscious at their desk, or ran the risk of disrobing and hurling obscenities at the editor at a moment’s notice, we’d throw them into the chair, stick on a DVD of some footage from an undercover job and lock the door …

During Wade’s tenure, the
News of the World
fleshed out its obsession with sex with another fixation: celebrity. In the early 2000s, demand soared for stories delving into the private lives of actors, pop stars and TV presenters. Paparazzi pictures which would have fetched £5,000 in 2000 made £100,000 in 2005. Getting stories about stars, however, became harder. Publicists had become cannier about maximizing commercial opportunities and arranged interviews only when their clients had a product to promote. Unpaid interviews became bland to the point where
Heat
’s editor, Mark Frith, observed, readers no longer wanted glossy PR pictures and fawning, product-shifting interviews, but ‘fast, pacy and unapproved’ stories. The
News of the World
and
Heat
exemplified this new proposition: celebrities in the raw; too skinny, too fat, too plain, too gaudy, too slovenly, too much Botox, taking drink, drugs, lovers, becoming mentally ill. In February 2003
NOW
magazine (unconnected to the
Screws
) experimented with the new approach by running a cover with unflattering pictures of the actress Lisa Kudrow, TV host Fiona Phillips and the actress Nicole Kidman with the headline: ‘ROUGH! Even the stars have bad days’. It worked: the magazine sold 730,000 copies, up 150,000. The advent of reality TV shows, starting with Channel 4’s
Big Brother
in 2000, manufactured a stream of manipulable young new stars without agents or experience. Reporters became inured to the idea that ‘slebs’ might have feelings.

After he handed Rebekah Wade the editorship of the
Sun
in January 2003, Rupert Murdoch made her friend and deputy, Andy Coulson, thirty-two, editor of the
News of the World
. The bespectacled Coulson did not look like a stereotypical tabloid hack: he was neat, calm and polite, but had cold eyes and hard edges. Educated at a comprehensive school in Wickford, Essex, Coulson had shone on the
Sun’
s showbusiness column, landing story after story about the lives of celebrities.

Coulson had an instinctive feel for what made tabloids edgy and fun. He sent a reporter to find the ‘family’ of a whale stranded in the Thames and suspended a showbusiness reporter in a perspex box in the newsroom for twenty-four hours to emulate a stunt by the illusionist David Blaine. He recruited powerful columnists, including the former Conservative leader William Hague in December 2003 (for an annual fee of around £200,000). He also poached executives from other papers, most notably the editor of the rival
People,
Neil ‘Wolfman’ Wallis. A legend in tabloid newsrooms, the 52-year-old Wallis had acquired his ‘Wolfman’ tag on account of his pinched facial features and his theory that the Yorkshire Ripper struck only during full moons. A grinning chancer, Wallis had a volcanic temper and a gift for innovation. His false story that the pop star Elton John had visited a rent boy led to the
Sun
paying record libel damages of £1 million in 1988. At the
Sun,
where he had been deputy editor and Coulson’s mentor, he had launched the Police Bravery Awards in 1996 and become friendly with senior officers, including Sir John Stevens. Appointed in Coulson’s first month, Wallis the following year recruited to the
Screws
two of his news editors at the
People
, Ian Edmondson and James Weatherup.

With these new signings, the
News of the World
led the tabloid pack, breaking a string of circulation-boosting stories about the private lives of the famous and powerful, such as the kiss and tell on David Beckham (‘Beckham’s Secret Affair’) in April 2004, for which Beckham’s personal assistant Rebecca Loos was paid £300,000, and ‘Blunkett’s Affair with a Married Woman’ in August 2004, which prompted Home Secretary David Blunkett’s resignation. In October 2004, the paper made damaging allegations about the sex life of the founder of the Scottish Socialist Party, Tommy Sheridan, marking the start of an epic legal battle between Sheridan and News International.

On a Tuesday night in March 2005, Coulson’s
News of the World
won Newspaper of the Year at the British Press Awards, whose judges said it had shown vitality and originality and, in the Beckham and Blunkett exposés, had broken ‘important stories with far-reaching consequences’. In keeping with the heady atmosphere in newspapers at the time, the event at the Hilton Hotel in London’s Park Lane was a raucous affair. Journalists booed and jeered the handing of gongs to rivals. As the
Sun
accepted the Cudlipp Award for Popular Journalism, the Live Aid founder Sir Bob Geldof stormed the stage and swore at papers whose coverage of his charity work had displeased him. He told the guests that a visit to the lavatory had confirmed that rock stars ‘have bigger knobs than journalists’. Jeremy Clarkson, the motoring writer and TV presenter who at the previous year’s awards had punched Piers Morgan (who had left the
Screws
in 1995 to edit the
Daily Mirror
), renewed the feud onstage, announcing: ‘Piers Morgan, you are an arsehole.’

‘Even by its normal debased standards it was a remarkable event,’ noted the
Independent’
s media commentator, Stephen Glover.
¹³
The
New York Times
said the awards less resembled a mutually respectful celebration of the British newspaper industry than a football match attended by ‘a club of misanthropic inebriates’. Editors of quality papers had their sensibilities upset by the
News of the World
’s triumph. Soon after, the editors of ten non-Murdoch national newspapers agreed to boycott the awards. In a rare celebratory interview with the
Evening Standard
, Coulson shrugged off criticism, pointing out that Britain’s best-selling paper was not all about sex. He had a simple answer to those questioning his paper’s conduct: ‘If we’d done anything wrong, there’s a pretty well-established set of Press Complaints Commission rules, and there’s the law. We know the law, we know the PCC code, and we work within it.’
¹⁴

Media pundits wondered how the
News of the World
ferreted out its agenda-setting stories. A
News of the World
‘source’ explained the mystery to the journalist Tim Luckhurst for an article in the
Independent
, saying that while luck played a part, ‘it’s mainly down to good old-fashioned journalism and a reputation for paying well for good news, pictures and information’.
¹⁵

But all the while, the
News of the World
was having a secret affair of its own. As well as opening its large chequebook for celebrity kiss and tells, the paper was short-circuiting the usual journalistic methods. One technique in particular transformed the newsroom: phone hacking. Eavesdropping on the trivia of people’s lives unearthed, message by message, political intrigue, illicit love and showbusiness secrets.

Listening to other people’s mobile phone messages was a trick discovered by tabloid showbusiness reporters in the late 1990s. A reporter called the mobile number of a celebrity and, if the line was engaged, the call would go through to their inbox. Inboxes also had their own number, and, if that was known, it could be rung directly. Either way, once the inbox had been accessed, the voicemails could be unlocked by inputting a personal identification number, or PIN code. Usually the manufacturer’s default code worked because people tended not to bother setting their own code, but if PINs had been changed, private investigators could obtain them from corrupt phone company employees.