Hack Attack (13 page)

And just how many victims were there? The official version was that there were eight, who had been named at the original trial. But Yates had kept it very vague, saying only that it was ‘a far smaller number’ than hundreds. If it was eight, why not say so? And if it was not eight, then why not say that the official version failed to disclose the whole story?

And why had he said nothing about the involvement of other journalists? He said he had been asked to ‘establish the facts’. So why not mention the fact that since August 2006 when they seized material from Mulcaire, the police had been in possession of an email which clearly suggested that Clive Goodman was not the only
News of the World
journalist involved in all this? What other evidence might they be failing to disclose?

I also noticed a few odd points in the statement which News International had put out on Friday evening. The original police investigation, they said, had included ‘live monitoring’ of Goodman and Mulcaire. How could they know that? The statement went on to cite the evidence which the police found. Again, how could they know what the police did or did not find? Maybe they were lying. If they were telling the truth, the police must have given them this information. How many organisations which are the object of police inquiries are given a briefing about the result of those inquiries?

I made several calls to Scotland Yard’s press bureau, trying to find out whether the original inquiry had interviewed anybody from the
News of the World
apart from Clive Goodman; and why they had slipped out this weird statement so late on a Friday evening; and how many other victims they were now approaching. They were unhelpful to the point of being obstructive.

*   *   *

Select committees are famous for being boring. They have no real power to get anything done, they hold meetings which nobody watches and nobody cares about, and most of their members are particularly well known for being useless at the interrogation of their witnesses. This one was a little bit different.

The committee room was stuffed with people. The public seats were filled; there were spectators sitting on windowsills and standing round the doors, all watching the dozen MPs who sat behind a horseshoe-shaped desk. Rusbridger and I were suffering from some stage fright. At a nervy early morning meeting in a greasy café in Whitehall, I had told him about the documents which I was going to give to the committee, but we had no idea quite how things would play out, whether hostile MPs would nevertheless be able to make skewered pork of us. There was a real tension in the air: somebody was going to have a very bad day.

First, there was a warm-up act, a solo performance by the director of the Press Complaints Commission, Tim Toulmin, a tall, thin dark-haired man in his mid-thirties. He lounged backwards in his seat, with one arm tossed over the back of the empty chair beside him, a model of confidence. I could only watch him and wonder whether he had any idea of how wrong he was.

Toulmin explained that there was no problem with the phone-hacking report which the PCC had produced in 2007: ‘Of course, there is absolutely nothing in it for the PCC to cover anything up at all.’ None of the MPs asked him if there might be something in the fact that a large chunk of the PCC’s funding came from News International, or that their ethics committee had been chaired by a Fleet Street executive – Les Hinton – at the same time as he was chief executive of News International.

Toulmin was asked how he could be sure that phone-hacking was not continuing. ‘We cannot be one hundred per cent sure without having some sort of God-given powers of seeing into journalists’ minds and private activity. The point is, if you have any suspicion, you can go to the police, you can complain to a lawyer, you can come to the PCC, you can go to a newspaper, you can tell Nick Davies about it and he will probably write a lengthy story about how frightful journalists are.’

Was this man speaking as the supposedly independent arbiter of press complaints, or was he just a spokesman for Fleet Street? Two or three of the MPs showed signs of standing up to him. A Labour MP, Paul Farrelly, challenged him to follow up on an old report in
Private Eye
magazine that News International had paid Glenn Mulcaire £200,000 in exchange for his silence. Toulmin questioned how that could be relevant, and Farrelly spelled it out to him, that this looked like hush money, the purchase of silence about the very facts in which Toulmin claimed to be interested. Toulmin was not interested: ‘We are not going to chase up every rumour and bit of tittle-tattle that we read in
Private Eye
.’

Farrelly fired back: ‘People will gain a very poor impression of the PCC if that is the line you continue to maintain.’

Farrelly, I knew, had been a Fleet Street journalist before he became a Labour MP, and there were clear signs that he knew what he was talking about and, like a lot of other journalists, might well feel angry at the way that News Corp had dragged newspapers downhill in search of bigger profits. He was also naturally pugnacious: he ran the House of Commons rugby team, playing at scrum half.

There was one other potential ally. Over the weekend, two of the
Guardian
’s political correspondents had emailed me to say that there was a new Labour MP on the committee, Tom Watson, who had told them he wanted to get to the bottom of the hacking scandal. They had explained that he was a former defence minister who had no love at all for the Murdoch papers, which had hounded him because he had been part of the ‘curry-house plot’ in 2006, which had tried to force Tony Blair to resign to make way for Gordon Brown at a time when Blair was the darling of the Murdoch titles.

Toulmin slipped away, evidently content in the knowledge that Rusbridger and I were heading for disaster. Indeed, Rusbridger also had his doubts about me. He knows my mouth sometimes works much faster than my brain and, as we took our seats, he explained that if I started to get wild, he would squeeze my knee under the table. Rusbridger made an opening statement about the regulation of the media and then, with the vague distraction of my editor’s fingers drifting towards my inner thigh, I started talking.

I explained about the gap that often develops between what a reporter knows and what the reporter can say publicly, because so many sources insist on keeping themselves and their evidence hidden. ‘On Friday evening, News International put out a statement which was deemed by one particularly important source to be “designed to deceive” and, as a result, I have now been authorised to show you things that previously were stuck in that gap, and I am talking about paperwork. So what I want to do is to show you, first of all, copies of an email.’

I handed them copies of the email for Neville (as redacted by my children). ‘Now, perhaps I could just leave that with you and move on to a second document which I want to be able to show you—’

John Whittingdale, the chairman, interrupted. ‘With respect, we have quite a lot of questions for you, rather than just—’

I shrugged at him. ‘Do you want the evidence or not? It is up to you.’

Several of the MPs said certainly they wanted it. I could see Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson nodding with particular energy.

Whittingdale gave in. ‘Go on.’

We were winning. Happy that somebody else’s plans were coming unstuck, I handed out the redacted copies of the contract signed by Greg Miskiw, offering £7,000 to Mulcaire if he would bring in the story about Gordon Taylor. I talked about the police, who had been sitting on these two documents since they had raided Mulcaire three years earlier and the curious fact that, if News International were to be believed, detectives had never arrested or interviewed Neville Thurlbeck who had been sent all these voicemail transcripts, or the junior reporter who had sent them to him (I held back Ross Hindley’s name), or Greg Miskiw, who had signed a contract with a private investigator using a false name.

‘If News International are correct in saying that these people have not been arrested or questioned,’ I told them, ‘the implications, I am sure you can see, are very, very worrying. I spent yesterday on the phone, asking Scotland Yard for an answer to this question. At the end of the day, they eventually confirmed that they had not arrested any other
News of the World
staff other than Clive Goodman, but they would not tell me whether they had questioned any. Clearly, that is terribly important.’

And what about John Yates? ‘For reasons which I cannot explain, he made no reference to the fact that Scotland Yard has had in its possession for well over two years paperwork which implicates other
News of the World
journalists. I do not know why he did not tell us, but again it worries me.’

Just what was the truth about whether the police had warned all the victims of the hacking? ‘Why were we told on Thursday that everybody had been approached and then quietly, in this almost invisible fashion – because I do not think any newspaper picked this up for Saturday morning – on Friday evening were we told “We are now contacting people”?’ Why had Yates said blandly that there was no evidence that John Prescott’s phone had been hacked? ‘So far as we know, there was no attempt by Scotland Yard to investigate what it was that Mulcaire had done in relation to Prescott – and, therefore, of course there is no evidence.’

By now, the atmosphere in the room had changed. The MPs on the committee were flicking through the paperwork I had given them, frowning, shaking their heads, exchanging whispers. Rusbridger had relaxed and taken his hand off my knee.

I handed the committee a third clutch of paperwork, a collection of rather elderly invoices which had been released years earlier, in redacted form, by the Information Commissioner as samples of the material which his officers had seized from Steve Whittamore in March 2003. ‘The reason I am showing this to you is not because it tracks down some specific criminal offence but because it shows the systematic and open character of what is going on. These payments have not been made with bags of cash under the counter, they are being made by the News International accounts department.’ The invoices explicitly recorded Whittamore being paid for extracting confidential data from phone companies and the DVLA, all potentially illegal.

I explained that I had seen records of Whittamore’s dealings with the
News of the World
, identifying twenty-seven journalists who had commissioned him. I named the former assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, who was recorded making ninety requests, thirty-five of which would be illegal if they could not be justified in the public interest. ‘I want to say, because it is important to make it clear, that Andy Coulson’s name does not show up in that list.’ I decided not to name any others: ‘I would just feel uneasy if I started running around with a blue light on my head … The organisation will blame the lowly individuals rather than accepting whatever responsibility is due to themselves.’

There was a brief puff of barbecue smoke from one of the Tory MPs who quoted Stephen Glover, the right-wing columnist from the
Independent
, with his odd theory that the story was ‘to do with the BBC and the
Guardian
ganging up on the Murdoch press’. It was all that was left of News International’s attack, and it was too little and too late. We were safe.

I tried to end on a clear note: ‘I think it is very hard to resist the conclusion that News International have been involved in covering up their journalists’ involvement with private investigators who are breaking the law, and it is very worrying that Scotland Yard do not appear to have always said or done as much as they could have done to stop that cover-up.’

Later that day, I phoned a friendly source at News International. ‘We’re depressed,’ she said.

*   *   *

Of course, we hadn’t really won much of a victory. All we had done was to avoid the barbecue.

The fact was that we had started a fight and we couldn’t stop it. There was a small sign of that when Rebekah Brooks backed out of a
Guardian
project which the
Sun
had been planning to support, the 10/10 campaign to cut carbon emissions by 10% during the year 2010, which was due to be launched in September 2009. It was made clear that she was backing out because of our coverage of the hacking affair. James Murdoch evidently agreed with her, even though he makes much of his concern about the environment. ‘He’s passionately green,’ according to one source who knows him well, ‘but that’s second. First, he’s tribal.’

There was an even clearer sign of News International’s mood a few days later when an MP contacted me to report a conversation with Rebekah Brooks. On the day after the select-committee hearing, she had been asked how she thought the hacking affair might end. ‘With Alan Rusbridger on his knees, begging for mercy,’ she had replied.

Murdoch’s
Times
disposed of the
Guardian
’s evidence to the select committee in 115 words tucked away on page 20. The
Sun
did not mention it at all.

It was as if now there were two versions of reality. There was the official version, aggressively promoted by News International and endorsed by the police and the PCC and the Conservative Party and most of the rest of Fleet Street. Then there was the version which was being shown to me by a small collection of nervous off-the-record sources – journalists, private investigators, the managers and lawyers of various celebrities – who told a very different story. They weren’t talking about a rogue reporter. What they were describing was a rogue newspaper.

4. Crime in Fleet Street

Based on interviews with private investigators who worked for newspapers; journalists who hired them; evidence collected by police officers and others who investigated the investigators
; ‘Stick it Up Your Punter!
by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie; as well as material obtained by the Leveson Inquiry
.

Rupert Murdoch has consistently denied ever having any knowledge of illegal activity in his newsrooms. Not everyone sees it that way.