Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (7 page)

Meyer’s PCC failed to change its code until four years later, in 2007.

Over the following months the Information Commissioner’s investigators interviewed around seventy ‘victims’ of Whittamore’s, including the actor Hugh Grant, the singer Charlotte Church and TV presecuter Chris Tarrant. In February 2004, it handed over all evidence to the ICO’s Legal Department.

In the meantime, the Metropolitan Police had begun Operation Glade into the procurement of criminal records from the Police National Computer. Fortunately for the crooked information-gatherers, they were to have a stroke of luck. When, in August 2003, as a result of the Whittamore raid, police arrested Paul Marshall, the civilian police worker who had been accessing the PNC at Tooting police station, they also found he had stolen a truncheon, handcuffs and other equipment for sex games with his partner. He was dying, and at a court hearing for the thefts, a judge gave him a conditional discharge.

On 15 April 2005, the prosecution at Blackfriars Crown Court – quoting from articles in the
Sunday Mirror
,
Mail on Sunday
and the
News of the World –
said Whittamore had provided journalists with ‘very personal and confidential details’ about high-profile figures, including the general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, Bob Crow, the
EastEnders
actors Jessie Wallace and Clifton Tomlinson, and the troubled son of the actor Ricky Tomlinson. Whittamore and a fellow private detective with whom he had worked, John Boyall, pleaded guilty to breaching the Data Protection Act, while Paul Marshall and Alan King, a recently retired police detective, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit misconduct in public office. But because Marshall had been given a conditional discharge for the more serious offence of the theft of police equipment, Judge John Samuels QC felt unable to give him and his fellow conspirators a higher sentence for the lesser data offence. The four men received two-year conditional discharges and walked triumphantly out of court. None of the 305 journalists who had requested information from Whittamore was put in the dock by the ICO.

In 2010, Whittamore would complain about the failure to call the newspapers to account. ‘I suppose you could view it as my Oliver Twist to the press’s Fagin,’ he said. ‘Requests were asked of me by people whom I viewed as really being above reproach. They were huge corporations.’
⁶
Alec Owens said: ‘I was disappointed and somewhat disillusioned with senior management because I felt as though they were burying their heads in the sand. It was like being on an ostrich farm.’
⁷
He believed the ICO was ‘frightened’ of the press.
⁸
The Information Commissioner, Richard Thomas, claimed there was no clear evidence Whittamore’s journalistic customers knew he was breaking the law, and that the disappointing outcome of the Blackfriars Crown Court case made further prosecutions impracticable. Thomas told Lord Leveson
*
: ‘We were subsequently advised by external counsel that the leniency of the sentence meant that it would not be in the public interest to continue or pursue parallel and further prosecutions.’ The ICO dropped its prosecution of Steve Whittamore, Taff Jones, the Hell’s Angel in Sussex who had been blagging phone numbers, another private detective, John Gunning, who denied any wrongdoing, and the surviving corrupt DVLA worker, who has never been named.

During its three-year investigation, Devon and Cornwall Police had identified its own shadowy data network. It discovered that the retired police inspector in Exmouth, Alan Stidwill, had been supplying criminal records checks on Labour politicians to Glen Lawson, a private detective in Newcastle upon Tyne. In February 2003 Devon and Cornwall had raided Lawson’s firm, Abbey Investigations, and found that in late 2000 Lawson had supplied a national newspaper with checks of the criminal records of Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, his close ally Nick Brown, the Agriculture Minister, and another Labour MP, Martin Salter. The newspaper which bought the checks (which came back blank) has never been named but, in 2000 and 2001, News International was siding with Tony Blair in his frequent rows with Gordon Brown, and Rebekah Wade’s
News of the World
had placed Salter on a ‘naming and shaming’ list for criticising the ‘For Sarah’ campaign.

During their operation, Devon and Cornwall had investigated thirty-seven people and had evidence of checks on ninety-three individuals, including Gordon Brown and Nick Brown. In order not to over-complicate the prosecution, Glen Lawson had not been charged, but six others stood in the dock: Philip Diss; Alan Stidwill; a serving CID officer; a council investigations officer with access to the Department for Work and Pensions system; and two others. But at Gloucester Crown Court in March 2006, Judge Paul Darlow threw out the case, saying: ‘In my judgment it is not a proportionate use of valuable resources to prosecute these matters.’ Stidwill, the retired policeman who ran SAS Investigations, said: ‘It’s been a dreadful waste of taxpayers’ money.’ Devon and Cornwall’s investigation, like that of the ICO, had ended in failure. The trade in illegal newsgathering techniques continued to flourish.

A former Devon and Cornwall detective was quoted in the
Western Morning News
in July 2011 as saying: ‘Between 2002 and 2006, Devon and Cornwall Police were right at the heart of what we now know was going on at the
News of the World
. It was a very thorough and professional investigation. The question is why it was kicked out of the courts and why, particularly, the Metropolitan Police didn’t follow up on it.’

For the moment, the ‘dark arts’ had stayed hidden.

In November 2005, courtiers at Clarence House, Prince Charles’s official residence in London, became alarmed when they read stories about his sons, Princes William and Harry, in the
News of the World
. These were not the usual royal stories about the death of Princess Diana, Prince Charles meddling in politics, or whether his wife, Camilla, would become queen. They were tittle-tattle. The first appeared on page 32 on 6 November, at the top of the ‘Blackadder’ gossip column (‘Your snake in the grass of the rich and powerful’). Although only six paragraphs, it became one of the most infamous stories in Fleet Street’s history. It began: ‘Royal action man Prince William has had to postpone a mountain rescue course – after being crocked by a ten-year-old during football training.’ The Prince, it explained, had pulled a tendon in his knee after a kickabout and was having physiotherapy near Highgrove, Prince Charles’s country home in Gloucestershire.

On the Richter scale of royal revelations, this was barely a tremor, but it caused a shock at St James’s Palace because nobody there could understand how it had appeared in print. The following Sunday, Blackadder reported that Prince William had borrowed some television equipment from a journalist: ‘If ITN do a stock take on their portable editing suites this week, they might notice they’re one down. That’s because their pin-up political editor Tom Bradby has lent it to close pal Prince William so he can edit together all his gap year videos and DVDs into one very posh home movie.’ Neither William nor Tom Bradby had leaked the story; together they worked out that it had been known only by themselves and two people ‘incredibly close’ to the prince. Bradby explained to William and his brother Harry that during his time as a royal correspondent, redtop reporters sometimes hacked voicemail messages. Later, Bradby recalled: ‘They felt – rightly, as it turned out – that the tabloids were invading every aspect of their lives and the question who might be betraying them and how was a preoccupation, bordering on an obsession. So I told them what I thought was going on and suggested it might be a good idea to talk to the police.’
⁹
St James’s Palace called in the Metropolitan Police’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, responsible for royal security, and on 21 December began one of the most controversial inquiries in Scotland Yard’s 183-year history, Operation Caryatid.

First Heads Roll

Undoubtedly the newspaper business is a tough business

– John Kelsey-Fry QC, Old Bailey, 26 January 2007

For Scotland Yard, the investigation could not have come at a worse time. Six months before, on 7 July 2005, Islamic extremists had detonated four bombs on London’s transport system, killing fifty-two people and injuring 700 – the first suicide bombing in Britain after the September 11 attack in the US. Across the country in 2005 and 2006, the Met’s Counter-Terrorist Branch was investigating the attacks and hunting down Al Qaeda cells. London’s police force, which had national responsibility for counter-terrorism, had drafted in hundreds of officers from other constabularies to help the dragnet.

Still, the suspected interception of royal voicemails was a concern, since anyone accessing them might have knowledge of the movements of members of the royal family. Six members of the counter-terrorism unit assigned the job, SO13, began Operation Caryatid in great secrecy. Within days, SO13 had advised members of the royal household to continue leaving messages for each other and not to let their friends or relatives know that they suspected that, somewhere, the
News of the World
was listening. Britain’s elite counter-terrorism officers, skilled at penetrating terrorist cells, did not have far to look for a suspect.

The ‘Blackadder’ column was written by the
News of the World’
s royal editor, Clive Goodman. In the late 1990s, Goodman had been one of the paper’s stars, landing ‘splash’ after ‘splash’ about the troubles of Charles and Diana, and her death. He had cultivated a network of royal informants and some of their rarefied airs, wearing Savile Row suits, tweeds and occasionally a fob chain and monocle. But now he was forty-eight and the Royal story had moved on, St James’s Palace had rooted out leaks by staff and his pre-eminence on the royal beat was being challenged by a young reporter, Ryan Sabey. Under the dynamic regime of Andy Coulson, Goodman turned to a trick to unearth stories without leaving his home or his office: phone hacking. He was nicknamed ‘the eternal flame’ because, it was said, he never went out.

Inside New Scotland Yard, the office block which headquartered the Met, SO13 began checking Blackadder’s work each Sunday and the numbers calling the voicemails of those inside St James’s Palace. By the end of January, SO13 had established from Vodafone that nine ‘rogue’ numbers were calling the inboxes of two royal aides with intimate knowledge of William and Harry’s lives: Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, the princes’ private secretary, and another aide, Helen Asprey, their personal secretary. One of the numbers was that of Goodman’s home in Putney, south-west London. The princes’ phones were being accessed too.

While the detectives continued their covert inquiries, slowly uncovering ever more victims, Goodman continued chronicling the minutiae of the princes’ lives. In April 2006, one of his stories – co-authored by Neville Thurlbeck – was based on a phone call made by Prince William to Prince Harry. Headlined ‘Fury After He Ogled Lapdancer’s Boobs’, it read:

Shame-faced Prince Harry has been given a furious dressing-down by Chelsy Davy over his late-night antics in a lapdancing bar. His loyal girlfriend discovered how strippers perched on the edge of his chair as he partied with a string of naked dancers and ogled their boobs. Yesterday the repentant prince took an ear-bashing call as news broke.

‘It’s Chelsy. How could you? I see you had a lovely time without me. But I miss you so much, you big ginger, and I want you to know I love you,’ said a hysterical voice.

Luckily the caller was joker brother, Prince William. He thought the whole episode was hilarious and decided to take the mickey by putting on a high-pitched South African accent like Chelsy’s.
¹

Police had identified ‘five or six potential victims’ and had rumbled an embarrassing security problem. Not only were the targets very high-profile, but continuing the monitoring operation increased the security risk. At the same time, Detective Superintendent Philip Williams, who was leading the operation, was concerned that it was taking resources away from counter-terrorism and that ‘the media might seek to criticize the [Metropolitan Police] and SO13 for the use of anti-terrorist resources against what, albeit [with] far wider security implications of the voicemail networks, appears to be a non-terrorist-motivated intrusion on the privacy of a member of the royal family where non-terrorist-related criminal offences have been committed’.
²

In April, SO13
*
held a case conference with the Crown Prosecution Service to discuss what charges might be laid against Goodman. The CPS advised that one reading of one of three relevant laws, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, suggested that a crime was committed only if the intended recipient had not listened to a message before it was intercepted – but added that that interpretation was ‘untested’. In essence, the provisional advice from the CPS was that if someone had already heard a message in their inbox, someone else – such as a reporter – hacking into that message would not have committed a crime. This was an odd interpretation of the law and would become important, because the police would later claim that it significantly limited their investigation.

While SO13 continued monitoring Goodman’s calls, Scotland Yard was keen, as always, to maintain its good relationship with the press – and in particular the country’s biggest newspaper group, News International. Dick Fedorcio, the director of the Met’s Public Affairs Directorate, had forged close relationships with editors since the days of the former Commissioner Sir John Stevens. One of the officers most friendly with Fleet Street papers was the country’s top counter-terrorism officer, 46-year-old Andy Hayman, who wanted to ensure they understood the gravity of the growing terrorism threat. Assistant Commissioner Hayman, who had enterprisingly combined his early career in uniform in Essex with running a mobile disco, was also the Association of Chief Police Officers’ ‘media lead’, a duty he carried out with enthusiasm. He was in close touch with the
News of the World’
s crime editor, Lucy Panton, herself married to a serving Scotland Yard officer, and was also on good terms with its editors. On 25 April, in the middle of Operation Caryatid – on which he had been briefed – he and the Director of Public Affairs, Dick Fedorcio, dined at the Soho House private members’ club in central London with the
News of the World’
s editor, Andy Coulson, and his deputy, Neil ‘Wolfman’ Wallis, the executives running the newspaper his junior officers were investigating.