Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (6 page)

Another technique was ‘blagging’ confidential records, or paying corrupt police, tax or other officials for private data. At the
News of the World
, a sports reporter, Matt Driscoll, stumbled across the practice after he received a tip that Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Manchester United, had a health problem. He went about the story the old way, calling his contacts; it was clear it might be true.

But then I couldn’t get any further forward on it because I hit a brick wall in terms of getting anyone to go on record … and in the end I had to go to my sports desk and say: ‘I really don’t think I can get any further forward with this.’ And then my sports editor said: ‘Leave it with me. We’ll see what we can come up with.’

Later that day his sports editor said: ‘You’re absolutely right. The story is true. I have his medical records with me at the moment.’

Driscoll said: ‘I was told that sometimes you’d get a situation where if an investigator sent a fax to a GP or a hospital saying: “I’m his specialist, I need these details,” it was incredible how many times they would just get sent straight back.’
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The
Screws
used another technique, ‘leverage’, with Sir Alex. The paper offered to keep his health problem secret ‘and because of that, he then started cooperating with the paper … a few months later he gave us some stories.’
*

Driscoll said:

It seemed to me that any method that could stand a story up was fair game. It was also clear that there was massive pressure from the top to break stories. It was largely accepted that this pressure came from the proprietors and editors on the basis that big, sensational stories sell papers and therefore make more money. There were times when I would return from interviewing a prominent Premier League football manager only to find the paper using material from a months old interview in order to obtain a better headline. I didn’t consider this to be true journalism or true live reporting – and I often voiced my disapproval. But all of this was simply a reflection of the growing pressures being placed on editors to try and combat the decline of sales. There was an ever growing trend to get the big story or headline by any means possible.’
¹⁷

The paper bullied staff who failed to perform or who questioned its methods. Driscoll became a marked man when he failed to stand up a tip from Andy Coulson that Arsenal would play in purple shirts to mark their last season at Highbury. Arsenal told Driscoll the story was not true, but a few months later it surfaced in the
Screws
daily sister and rival, the
Sun
. The reporter recalled: ‘I got a phone call from my sports editor at the time saying: “We’re dead. Coulson’s going to go absolutely crazy over this and will want to know why we got this wrong and why this appeared in the
Sun
.” ’
¹⁸

After being disciplined for failing to tape an interview with the footballer Kolo Toure (taking a shorthand note instead), Driscoll wrote to Coulson saying he would take the warning but still did not feel he had done anything wrong. On 11 November 2005, Coulson replied: ‘In my view your actions on this matter merited dismissal.’
¹⁹

In 2005, another long-standing reporter, Sean Hoare, fell foul of Coulson – his old friend and former boss on the
Sun’
s ‘Bizarre’ column in the late 1990s. As a showbusiness reporter during the cash-rich glory years of redtops, Hoare had lived a rock and roll lifestyle with the pop stars he was covering, but when he became addicted to drink and drugs and struggled at work, he was sacked.

The
News of the World
was vicious, but Driscoll and Hoare knew secrets about its workings that would one day return to haunt Andy Coulson.

The Dark Arts

Oliver Twist to the press’s Fagin

– private investigator Steve Whittamore on his relationship with newspapers, 21 September 2010

Fleet Street was never innocent. Newspapers had always paid dubious characters for tip-offs and exclusives, and deployed sweet-talking reporters to the doorsteps of the bereaved and badly behaved to extract confessions and heartache. In the analogue age, reporters traced individuals by flicking through phone books, checking the electoral roll and Companies House register and calling friends, neighbours and colleagues. But, while entirely legal, these methods were time-consuming and did not always produce results. By the late 1990s, many reporters were relying on private investigators who could instantly and illegally access the growing volume of information stored on computer databases. Private detectives knew people inside the police, vehicle and tax offices – and blaggers who could extract health records from GPs’ receptionists and phone numbers from phone companies.

One of the first signs to the outside world of the existence of this shadowy network emerged not in London, the powerhouse of Britain’s national media, but in rural Devon, after David Welsh, a former nightclub owner who wanted to develop an outdoor swimming pool in Plymouth, complained to the police in 2001 that he was being blackmailed about his criminal record. In January 2002, Devon and Cornwall Police launched Operation Re-proof into the sale of confidential data and discovered that a serving detective constable in Exeter, Philip Diss, had been checking criminal records on the Police National Computer and passing them on to his former boss, Alan Stidwill, a retired police inspector who ran a company called SAS Investigations in the seaside town of Exmouth. As they began to unpick his network, in autumn 2002, Devon and Cornwall asked the Information Commissioner’s Office, which polices confidential databases, for one of its officers to accompany its detectives on a raid of a private investigator – just in case it found any data protection breaches in addition to those of the Police National Computer. Alec Owens, the ICO’s senior investigating officer and former police detective inspector, accompanied Devon and Cornwall’s officers when they raided a private detective agency in Surrey, Data Research Ltd, in November 2002. As he wandered around the agency’s office, Owens saw a sheaf of car registration numbers on a desk, picked them up and contacted the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Cardiff. The DVLA checked the numbers and found they had been checked by a now deceased manager at a regional branch, and, after his death in March 2002, by a junior employee. In the diary of the dead manager, the DVLA found one number marked ‘Protected’, which Owens, a former Special Branch officer, knew was either an unmarked undercover police vehicle or the car of a senior police officer. That check had been ordered by another private detective, who turned out to be one of the most important figures in the phone hacking scandal: Steve Whittamore.

While Devon and Cornwall carried on its investigation for another two years, the ICO began an investigation into Whittamore: Operation Motorman. On 8 March 2003 – two years before Andy Coulson stepped on stage at the Hilton Hotel – Owens and four other investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office raided Whittamore’s house in Orchard Grove, New Milton, a market town on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire. ‘We went there not knowing what the hell we would find,’ Owens recalled later.
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They were amazed at what they discovered: Britain’s best-selling newspapers and magazines were driving a thriving black market in illegal data, requesting (and receiving) ex-directory numbers, car registration numbers, health records and criminal records. The targets ranged from glamorous actresses such as Elizabeth Hurley to the families of victims of newsworthy crimes, such as the parents of Holly Wells, a child murdered by the paedophile Ian Huntley at Soham, Cambridgeshire, in 2002.

From an office in his three-bed bungalow Whittamore had been running a network of corrupt officials and blaggers who conned data out of unsuspecting office workers or bribed them into handing it over. Among them were a civilian worker at Tooting police station in London who invented reasons for checking criminal records on the National Police Computer; DVLA workers who sold names and number plates; and a Hell’s Angel who blagged ex-directory and Friends & Family numbers from British Telecom.

Unfortunately for his Fleet Street customers, Whittamore had kept detailed notes of his work, recording thousands of orders from some of the best-known publications. His best customers were the
Daily Mail
, the
People
,
Daily Mirror
,
Mail on Sunday
and
News of the World
– and some of the individual journalists requesting searches were very senior: they included the
News of the World’
s executive news editor, Greg Miskiw, and its editor, Rebekah Wade. Wade had asked Whittamore to ‘convert’ a mobile phone number to find its registered owner. Whittamore recorded each request with a code – ‘XD’ for an ex-directory number, ‘CRO’ for a criminal records check and ‘Veh Reg’ for tracing the owner of a number plate: all of which broke the law on data protection, fraud or bribery, depending on the method.

The trade was highly lucrative. Whittamore’s company, JJ Services Ltd, charged £75 to find the address of the owner of a mobile phone, £150 to £500 for a DVLA check and £750 for mobile phone records. Between 2001 and 2003 he had received 17,489 orders and made £1.8 million, though some of that went to his corrupt contacts. Owens recalled: ‘He was living the high life. He had just come back from a fortnight in Goa. There was an extensive wine cellar in his garage.’
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But despite facing a jail term, he would not snitch on his paymasters. Owens said: ‘Whittamore made it very [clear] that whilst he would admit to his own wrongdoing, under no circumstances would he say anything which would incriminate any member of the press. I was undecided as to whether this was because he feared the press or whether he anticipated some financial recompense in return for his silence.’
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Whittamore’s records showed clear breaches of Section 55 of the Data Protection Act, which made it a criminal offence to obtain, disclose or ‘procure the disclosure’ of personal information ‘knowingly or recklessly’ – punishable by a fine of up to £5,000 in the magistrates’ court and an unlimited fine in the Crown Court. In the Information Commissioner’s Office in Wilmslow, Cheshire, Owens and his fellow investigators started working through the material with a view to prosecuting the journalists who had commissioned the private detective. What happened next is still a matter of controversy. According to Owens in 2011, a week after the raid:

An informal meeting was arranged with Richard Thomas, the Commissioner, and Francis Aldhouse, Deputy Commissioner and Head of Operations, to update them. It was at this meeting that I was able, by using examples of the paperwork seized, to show ICO were in a position to prove that a paper chain existed right through from identified journalists working for named newspaper groups requesting information be obtained from a private detective who in turn used corrupt sources or ‘blaggers’ to obtain such information. We could also prove by way of the seized bills for payment and numbered invoices for payments settled by the newspaper groups exactly how much money had been paid for each transaction and by and to whom it had been paid. Where the information involved such requests as Criminal Record Checks, VRM details, ex-directory numbers, conversions and family and friends without any claim of ‘public interest’ we were in a position to prosecute everyone in the chain from the ‘blagger’ right up to the journalists and possibly even the newspaper groups.

It was at this point Francis Aldhouse with a shocked look on his face said: ‘We can’t take the press on, they are too big for us.’ Richard Thomas did not respond, he merely looked straight ahead appearing to be somewhat bemused by the course of action I was recommending. For my own part I remember thinking ‘It’s our job to take them or indeed anyone else on, that’s what we are paid to do. If we do not do it then who does?’ At this point Richard Thomas thanked me for updating him and at the same time congratulated me and the team for a job well done.
⁴

Owens and his investigators started to prepare twenty-five to thirty prosecution cases, but within weeks ‘were informed that we were not to make contact with any of the newspapers identified and we were not to speak to, let alone interview any journalists. Despite our protests we were told that this was the decision of Richard Thomas and that he would deal with the press involvement by way of the Press Complaints Commission. We were now instructed to restrict our investigation solely to the bottom of the pyramid, those involved with correctly supplying information or “blagging” information.’

On 4 November 2003, Richard Thomas wrote to Sir Christopher Meyer, the new chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, indicating that the matter could be dealt with by rewriting the PCC’s code of practice to warn against breaching data protection laws, rather than by prosecuting journalists. He told Meyer:

I am considering whether to take action under the Data Protection Act against individual journalists and/or newspapers. My provisional conclusion, however, is that it would be appropriate first to give the Press Complaints Commission and its Code Committee the prior opportunity to deal with the issue in a way which would put an end to these unacceptable practices across the media as a whole … Following your review of any such material, I anticipate that this would at least lead to revision of the code. The approach I have in mind … could provide a more satisfactory outcome than legal proceedings.
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