Hack Attack (30 page)

Rebekah and Charlie Brooks live in the same patch. Cameron’s older brother, Alexander, was at Eton with Charlie and they ride out together on Charlie’s horses. And Rebekah, of course, is close to everybody. She goes on business trips with James Murdoch; has girly chats and cigarette breaks with Elisabeth Murdoch and produced a special 32-page edition of the
Sun
for her fortieth birthday; plays the part of daughter, nursemaid and plotter-in-chief to Rupert Murdoch; and, certainly, she has done her best to get close to Cameron.

One of the wedding guests recalls that on the day in October 2007 when her supposed friend, the new prime minister Gordon Brown, shot a near-fatal hole in his credibility by cancelling the general election which he had been planning, Rebekah was straight on the phone to Cameron. ‘Shall I bring the champagne?’ she was heard to ask him. Another suggests that, although the Camerons respond to her endless invitations to come over for a drink, they know her game and that Mrs Cameron has said that ‘I have my old friends, I have my new friends … and I have Rebekah.’

At this moment at the wedding banquet, Rebekah causes a stir by insisting not only on making a speech but on using it to further some plot of hers, to broker a peace between the editor of the
Daily Mail
, Paul Dacre, and Matthew Freud, citing the amount which Freud gives to charity as some kind of counter-balance to Dacre’s view of the young PR wizard as a yob with a gob. ‘I just wish that Paul could see the right side of Matthew,’ she explains to guests, some of whom wonder at the inner workings of a woman using her own wedding day as a platform for politics.

In his struggle to win Murdoch’s favour, Cameron has one other asset on his side – Andy Coulson. For the first eighteen months after Cameron became leader, he tried to avoid playing the newspaper game, attempting to make his pitch to the public through television news bulletins. It didn’t work, and so, in July 2007, he hired Coulson as his director of communications. It changed Cameron’s fortunes. Coulson has several strengths: he comes from a working-class background in Essex and knows what messages to send to help the Conservatives break out of their middle-class electoral ghetto; he spent twenty years working for tabloid newspapers and so he knows how to convert that message into stories which newspapers will use; and, above all, he is connected to Rebekah and Rupert and to all that they represent.

*   *   *

It is dark now at the wedding. The banquet is long over. Most of the guests have taken their Range Rovers into the night; some are sprawled around the mansion gardens; and a few are still playing in the fairground.

There, a small group of them, inspired by much alcohol, clamber into the swinging buckets of the big wheel and, gripping the handrails and grinning as though none of this frightened them in the slightest, they rise slowly into the heights, from where they can gaze down on the world that lies at their feet and on the little people below them until, suddenly and alarmingly, the machine that has raised them up simply breaks down, the big wheel thuds to a halt and they are stuck – stranded in the darkness, exposed for all to see, wagging their legs and waving their arms, like so many beetles flipped over on their backs, totally and obviously powerless.

The moment passes, the big wheel moves on and surely it occurs to nobody that this could be even slightly symbolic of anybody’s future. They are cocooned in security. Indeed, some of them know that they are not just safe; they are moving on up.

James has his eye on the big prize. He wants his father’s job. Since taking over News Corp in Europe and Asia in December 2007, he has made no secret of his ambition to run the whole global corporation. ‘He thinks he’s the smartest person in the world, reckons his father really doesn’t get the modern world,’ according to one of those at the wedding. The grab for power has not been subtle. He alarmed his father’s closest advisers in New York by inserting one of his own people, Beryl Cook, into the key position of head of human resources there, with the potential to give James the final say over all future appointments; and by pushing plans which clearly shifted News Corp’s centre of gravity towards Europe and Asia. He appointed his own chief finance officer, general counsel and director of communications, slicing into the power of those who have the same titles in New York. In 2008, he persuaded the main board to increase its stake in the German pay-TV company Premier, which is about to be rebranded as Sky Deutschland. Now, he is pushing for more money to take over Turkey’s biggest pay-TV company, Digiturk. ‘He is taking on his father. He’s like a young stag locking antlers with an old stag.’ But Murdoch will not confront James’s challenge.

Those close to the old man say he hires bullies because he personally cannot handle any kind of direct confrontation. One recalls how, soon after he separated from his second wife, Anna, she tried to call him in his New York office but, fearing a difficult conversation, he refused to speak to her. Eventually, she called his chief operating officer, Chase Carey, and persuaded him to ask her husband to pick up the phone, but Murdoch swatted him aside, muttering: ‘That’s water under the bridge.’

Murdoch’s refusal to put James in his place is worrying his advisers, because the truth about News Corp is that it is a family business and they have seen before how his failure to deal with family problems can boil over to threaten the company’s welfare. A few years earlier, there was a crisis when Wendi Deng insisted that her two young children, Grace and Chloe, be given votes in the family trust which owns the key shares in News Corp. Murdoch’s four oldest children resisted, not wanting their own voting power to be diluted. Murdoch failed to confront the problem until it reached a point where he had to agree to pay $150 million to each of the six children – to Wendi’s as compensation for not finally being given votes in the trust, and to the four others so that they did not lose out. He failed, too, to deal with the conflict between his oldest son, Lachlan, who had moved to New York as deputy chief operating officer, and several of his most senior executives. That finally blew up with Lachlan quitting and going back to Australia.

As James aims high, so too does Rebekah. For months it has been clear that, with Les Hinton gone and James busy in Europe and Asia, Murdoch needed to find a new chief executive for his UK company. With her eye on the prize, Rebekah has been doing a part-time course in business management at the London School of Economics. She knows Murdoch adores her, because she solves his problems for him and because she’s a ‘larrikin’ – a mischievous free spirit, who, unlike him, is not afraid to confront anybody. Now Murdoch has given Rebekah a lucrative wedding gift. She gets the job. In three months’ time, in September 2009 – twenty years after she started work as a newsroom secretary – she will take over as chief executive of News International, overseeing all four of Murdoch’s UK newspapers.

And, if all goes to plan, Andy Coulson also will move up. He was one of those who was caught in the broken big wheel, in a bucket with the former Labour Secretary of State for the media, Tessa Jowell. Only two and a half years after he was forced to resign as editor of the
News of the World
, he stands poised to move into Downing Street. There is an election to win, and politics is never predictable, but all the indications are that sometime next year, Cameron will become prime minister, and Coulson will become one of his closest advisers, managing the government’s communication with the nation and the world and serving too as a crucial link between the government and the Murdoch network.

They are wealthy, they are powerful and they have nothing to fear.

8. November 2009 to March 2010

An outsider might have looked at our efforts to crack the walls around Rupert Murdoch’s castle and concluded that we were puny no-hopers.

By November 2009, I had spent four months since the
Guardian
’s original story about crime at the
News of the World
trying to break through Murdoch’s defences – looking for more evidence, writing more stories – but News International, Scotland Yard, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Press Complaints Commission had all stepped forward like well-drilled guardsmen and told the world that we were wrong. I kept trying, but the truth is that a lot of the shots I fired missed their targets or simply bounced harmlessly off the barricades.

I tried to get Glenn Mulcaire to talk. He is very sharp, but also paranoid. I had to wait in my car near his house until I saw him pull up and walk in. He never so much as glanced my way, but when I knocked on the door, he said immediately: ‘Yeah, I saw you sitting there, eight cars down on the right.’ Which was correct. He was very likeable and showed a real affection for his wife and four daughters, but he was also very highly strung, his thoughts leaping all over the place, constantly on the alert in case I was taping him or tricking him. I visited him several times. We talked, but he told me nothing. I chased down rumours that when he came out of prison, he had written a book proposal, but it turned out to be an extremely dull piece of work, advising people how to improve their personal security and revealing nothing at all about the phone-hacking.

I traced some of the officers who had worked on Operation Glade, the Scotland Yard inquiry into Steve Whittamore, and was politely told to get lost. I called Greg Miskiw several times, urging him to get out of the rotten house before the masonry collapsed on his head: he just breathed heavily and uttered not a word. I tried to identify the mysterious ‘Ryan’ or ‘Ryall’ who was said to figure in a taped recording of Mulcaire explaining how to hack Gordon Taylor’s phone – and failed with that too.

Through an old friend who has worked in the darker end of Fleet Street, I made contact with a very interesting private investigator. He had bent the law for newspapers but he seemed to have a conscience, to have worked only on stories where real wrongdoing was being exposed. He took a dim view of cowboy investigators who would do anything for a dollar bill. He named a few of them and started to explain their history. He also came up with one stunning piece of information – that there was a second phone-hacker on the
News of the World
, not a private investigator, but a features writer called Dan Evans who specialised in eavesdropping on phone messages. I checked and found he was still working for the paper – and so possibly still hacking, while News International and the police and the PCC said that all this had stopped with the jailing of Clive Goodman. But I couldn’t publish that without hard evidence.

And while I was failing, the enemy were reinforcing their position. The media select committee were being stalled by News International’s new chief executive, Rebekah Brooks: the committee wanted her to testify; she was politely refusing; some of the committee wanted to compel her to appear before them; one or two committee members were showing signs of nerves and were not so sure that they wanted to start a fight with Murdoch’s new UK chief executive; the dispute dragged on, delaying the committee’s report.

The PCC’s whitewash had been reinforced by a bizarre move by its new chair, Lady Buscombe, a Conservative peer, who made a speech to the Society of Editors in which she suggested that Mark Lewis had misled Parliament. Lewis had given evidence to the media select committee and had said that, during the Gordon Taylor case, he had spoken to one of the Caryatid officers, Mark Maberly, who had told him that there could be as many as 6,000 people who had either had their own phones hacked or had their messages intercepted on the phones of others. Scotland Yard, however, had told the PCC that Maberly never said this. Instead of treating that as a claim which might or might not be true, Lady Buscombe had made no attempt to check and had announced Scotland Yard’s denial in her speech as ‘new evidence’, thus suggesting that she was not operating as an entirely independent judge of the facts. She had also recycled the police claim that there had been only a handful of victims and undertaken to report her new evidence to the media select committee: ‘Any suggestion that a parliamentary inquiry has been misled is, of course, an extremely serious matter.’ Faithful editors reported this as though it were true. Mark Lewis sued her for defamation.

In the same week, an employment tribunal in London awarded nearly £800,000 to Matt Driscoll, who had been forced out of his job as a
News of the World
sports reporter after what the tribunal called ‘a consistent pattern of bullying behaviour’, led by the then editor Andy Coulson. It was believed to be the highest award ever made against a media company. The tribunal found witnesses from the
News of the World
to have been variously unsatisfactory, evasive and dishonest. The
Guardian
carried a report. The story had a special significance because Coulson was now clearly likely to be working in Downing Street within six months. Not one other national newspaper published a single word about it.

In spite of all these signs of our weakness, the reality was that there was never much serious doubt that we were going to break through. In part, this was because of the sheer scale of the buried truth. If newspapers had routinely been exposing the crime in their own newsrooms; if the Press Complaints Commission had been any kind of regulator; if the police and the ICO had had a history of enforcing the law against powerful media companies; if News Corp had ever acquired the habit of honesty: the truth would have been exposed in stories and scandals over the years. As it was, of course, inside the walls of Murdoch’s castle, there was something like a mass grave full of several decades of buried secrets, so big and so stinking that once you started to dig, there really was no doubt at all about what was down there.

There was another reason why we were always going to break through – the amazing vigour of the alliance of oddballs who had decided to start digging. This was a collection of strangers. Most of them had never come across each other before. Yet, in spite of the fact that each of them had a natural tendency to be confrontational and generally difficult, they locked together with extraordinary ease. That’s because rebels don’t like bullies. And in Rupert Murdoch, they had found their perfect target. You can’t become a master of the universe unless you are willing to hurt people along the way – a man like Murdoch accumulates far more than his share of money and power but also of victims and enemies. Resentment of his history bound together the alliance. It also continually attracted more support, some of it covert, some of it open, from journalists, private investigators, police officers and others.