Hack Attack (33 page)

They left no doubt that they believed they were dealing with a cover-up in which the
News of the World
had enjoyed significant assistance: ‘We are concerned at the readiness of all those involved – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat, without carrying out a full investigation at the time.’

This was strong – just about as strong as a report from a select committee can possibly be. And yet it made no difference. There was no sudden roar of indignation from MPs or from the government, not even a hint of irritation that this powerful corporation could commit crime and rely on the authorities to fail to do anything about it and then to come before a select committee and engage in a display of ‘collective amnesia’.

The Murdoch papers played out a parody of bent reporting.

At the press conference, the
Sun
’s political correspondent, Tom Newton Dunn, swooped like a buzzard on the one paragraph in the report where the MPs had split. Tom Watson and other Labour members had written a paragraph about Matt Driscoll, the former
News of the World
sports reporter who had been given £800,000 compensation for the campaign of bullying led by Andy Coulson. Conservative members saw this as a political stunt, aimed at distracting attention from newspaper stories about the bullying of staff in Downing Street by the Labour prime minister Gordon Brown. The committee split in its vote on whether to include the point. One of the Conservative MPs, Philip Davies, was quick to give Newton Dunn a quote and so it came to pass that in the
Sun
the next day, the committee’s report was covered in a short story on page 2 under the headline ‘Report Hijack’. In its entirety, this read:

A key Commons committee report on the press was hijacked by Labour MPs for political gain, one of its members has alleged. It was supposed to concentrate on issues of freedom of speech, privacy and libel ‘tourism’. But Labour MPs tried to link the Tories with bullying allegations that shamed Downing Street.

The committee also spent seven months probing a phone-tapping scandal for which a
News of the World
journalist was jailed but uncovered no new evidence. Tory MP Philip Davies said: ‘There was a feeling the report was being abused for narrow, petty party political advantage. The main purpose was to defend freedom of speech.’ Labour MPs wanted to smear Tory communications boss Andy Coulson, an ex
News of the World
editor. But the report found ‘no evidence’ he knew phone-hacking was taking place.

On page 8, the
Sun
also ran a leader comment, headed ‘Cheap, pathetic and worthless’, explaining to its readers that this was another dark day for Parliament, as the media select committee had abandoned fairness and independence and shamefully wasted seven months on unfounded claims by the
Guardian
. Since they had found no new evidence to support the
Guardian
, the committee had fallen back on ‘familiar Labour tactics of smear and innuendo’ by trying to link the Conservative Party to allegations of bullying. ‘Its report is accordingly worthless.’

Murdoch’s
Times
managed a grand total of six paragraphs at the bottom of page 15 on the committee’s comments on the hacking scandal, matching the committee’s view that News International had displayed ‘collective amnesia’ with a claim from the company that some members of the committee were guilty of ‘innuendo, unwarranted inference and exaggeration’.

And on Sunday, the
News of the World
informed its readers: ‘Your right to know is mired in MPs’ bias. But a free press is too precious to lose.’ After accusing the committee of a ‘descent into bias, spite and bile’ they went on to declare that ‘We’ll take no lessons in standards from MPs – nor from the self-serving pygmies who run the circulation-challenged
Guardian
.’ No spite or bile there, then.

Rusbridger contacted the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, and sent him a detailed summary of the story so far, suggesting that his party might call for a public inquiry. They didn’t. I contacted a senior official at the Information Commissioner’s Office and asked if they would consider running a new inquiry. They wouldn’t.

*   *   *

Still, we had more ammunition. I was ready to publish all I had found about Jonathan Rees and his corrupt activities for the
News of the World
.

I had drafted a front-page story with a long feature to go inside the paper, revealing that Rees had been re-hired by Coulson’s paper in spite of his prison sentence. It disclosed that three other private investigators – Glenn Mulcaire, Steve Whittamore and John Boyall – also had worked under Coulson at the
News of the World
, gathering information by illegal means. And yet, on Coulson’s account, he had never known anything about any of them.

Drawing on Mango’s information, the story also pointed out that during this time, Coulson’s assistant editor, Greg Miskiw, had been arrested and questioned about his involvement with John Boyall and with the payment of bribes, and yet Coulson apparently had never known anything about that either. I had got fed up with calling Greg Miskiw and listening to his heavy breathing while I attempted to persuade him to talk to me. So I simply emailed him and told him that I was going to report the fact that he had been questioned by police unless he told me otherwise. He didn’t reply. Fine.

However, there was a problem. As a result of Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook’s work, Rees was now awaiting trial with several other men for the 1987 murder of Daniel Morgan. We could possibly be accused of being in contempt of court if we published such powerful material before the trial had taken place. We decided to run the story but to hide Rees’s identity behind the unimaginative name, Mr A. With the draft story written, I emailed Coulson, pressing him over his claims of ignorance.

I reminded him of the conviction in April 2005 of Steve Whittamore, who had been working for his paper: ‘This conviction was reported in national news media. Can you tell me whether you became aware of this at the time and, if so, what steps you took to investigate the involvement of your journalists in this illegal activity?’

I told him that I knew that when police were investigating John Boyall, they had questioned Greg Miskiw. ‘Can you tell me what steps you took to investigate and prevent a recurrence?’

I confronted him with the very public history of Jonathan Rees’s crimes – not only his prison sentence for the cocaine plot but a long story in the
Guardian
in September 2002 which had detailed Rees’s activities for the
News of the World
, and I asked him ‘whether you were aware that, in spite of all of the above, Rees was hired again by the News of the World, after his release from prison, when you were editor, and paid from your editorial budget to carry out more work for the paper and that this work continued to involve the use of illegal methods?’

I ended the message:

Finally, the thrust of the piece as a whole is that your statement to the select committee, that you had never had any involvement at all in any form of illegal activity at any stage in your career as a journalist, is one which remains in doubt, largely as a result of the sheer scale of the illegal activity which was being conducted by private investigators in the pay of the
News of the World
during your time as deputy editor and editor. The core of this is whether it is conceivable that you were unaware of the explicit invoices which were being submitted, the considerable amount of money which was being spent, the considerable amount of information which was being supplied for stories which you were supervising, the number of your journalists who were directly involved in handling this information.

If it is possible to come back to me before four o’clock in the afternoon, that would be helpful.

Many thanks.

Nick.

He replied simply: ‘I have nothing to add to the evidence I gave to the select committee.’

On 25 February 2010, the
Guardian
published a front-page story, headed ‘Coulson hit by new charges: Paper hired convicted private eye while Tory PR chief was still in charge’. Inside, the feature was headed ‘The strange case of Mr A and the editor who saw nothing’. Rusbridger ran a leader comment, summarising the refusal by the Murdoch papers and most of the rest of Fleet Street to report the findings of the media select committee, and, once more, he contacted the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, and alerted him that he had published significant new information. Rusbridger’s deputy, Ian Katz, also contacted Steve Hilton, the closest adviser to the Conservative leader David Cameron, in whose office Coulson was working, to warn him. Later, Katz repeated the warning to Ed Llewellyn, Cameron’s chief of staff. As far as we could tell, neither political leader took any significant step as a result of this.

It was not clear that any of this information was having any appreciable effect on anybody outside the
Guardian
office.

*   *   *

At last, the big gun was ready to fire. Max Clifford’s case was heading for court. And Clifford was clear: his silence was not for sale. He wanted the truth. He was a lifelong Labour supporter who wanted to expose Andy Coulson. All we needed was for the court to order the police to hand over the evidence in his case.

For months, Scotland Yard had been dragging their heels. Finally, under orders from a High Court judge, they had handed over Mulcaire’s notes about Clifford – but they had redacted key parts of the document, blacking out anything which would have identified the
News of the World
journalists who had commissioned the hacking. This smelled bad: the police had not redacted anything when they disclosed paperwork for Gordon Taylor’s case, so why start now? Charlotte Harris had also asked for an order for News International and Glenn Mulcaire to hand over relevant evidence. Now, she went back to court for yet another order, for the police to disclose the blacked-out parts of their paperwork.

In the background, one highly reliable source claimed to know that the name which Mulcaire had written on his notes about Clifford was ‘Ian’. If that turned out to be the name behind Scotland Yard’s redactions, that would be a stick of dynamite in News International’s castle wall. ‘Ian’ would be no rogue reporter. ‘Ian’ would be Ian Edmondson – the assistant editor (news) since December 2004.

Everything stalled for Christmas and stalled again when Charlotte Harris was rushed into hospital for an operation. However, by mid-January, I was picking up reports that Rebekah Brooks had struck some kind of deal with Max Clifford and also that she was spreading a little smear that ‘Nick Davies has been throwing money around left, right and centre to get people to talk.’ There was also a nasty suggestion that the
News of the World
were digging into Clifford’s private and financial affairs, trying to find something embarrassing that they could agree to keep quiet, just in case they needed a little whitemail.

And yet the case was still alive. On 3 February 2010, Mr Justice Vos issued new orders. He told News International that within one week, they must hand over copies of the
News of the World
’s original contract with Glenn Mulcaire; and of their secret settlement with him after he came out of prison; and of their secret settlement in the case of Gordon Taylor. The judge went on to tell Glenn Mulcaire that within two weeks, he must produce a sworn affidavit naming all those who had instructed him to hack Clifford’s voicemail and all those to whom he had passed Clifford’s messages. Finally, the judge also ordered the Information Commissioner to hand over Steve Whittamore’s blue book, recording all the requests he had handled from News International journalists (the same document which had already been disclosed and then sealed in the Gordon Taylor case).

Charlotte Harris was now almost ready to go back to court to force the police to disclose Mulcaire’s notes about Clifford in unredacted form. She had also taken a statement from the ICO’s chief investigator, David Clancy, that there was ‘a widespread and unlawful trade in confidential information commissioned by journalists of the
News of the World
’.

If all this came out in court, it would blow a gaping and irreparable hole in the Murdoch defences. And yet, as the days ticked by towards the judge’s deadlines, I heard again that Max Clifford had agreed some kind of deal with News International, and that the
News of the World
’s lawyer, Tom Crone, had been called in to finalise it.

The first deadline, 10 February, came and went with no sign that News International had handed over the documents which the judge had called for. On 16 February, we ran a story warning that ‘the
News of the World
is believed to be planning to settle a court case which threatens to disclose further evidence of the involvement of its journalists in illegal information-gathering by private investigators’.

The second deadline, 17 February, came and went with no sign of Mulcaire providing the affidavit which the judge had called for. But also there was no sign of a final agreement between Clifford and News International. I spoke to Max Clifford and then sent him an email, urging him not to give in, attempting to appeal to his long-standing support for the Labour Party: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that some of the most powerful people in Britain are hanging on your next move, hoping you’ll stick with it, because they know the size of the scandal that is waiting to emerge … You’ve ended up being the man with the future in his hands. You can settle, and the whole thing gets covered up for the foreseeable future. You can stand firm and be the man who made the difference.’

It was too late. The rumours were right. In spite of all his claims to want to expose the truth, Clifford had agreed to back off. On 25 February, Mr Justice Vos issued a new order, closing down the case because Clifford was no longer pursuing it. The truth would remain concealed. As flimsy compensation, I set out to discover exactly how News International had engineered this cover-up.