Hack Attack (46 page)

Meanwhile, there were reports and rumours that, with Jeremy Hunt now handling the BSkyB bid instead of the troublesome Vince Cable, News Corp were secretly negotiating some compromise with the Cameron government which would allow them to seal the deal without facing an inquiry by the Competition Commission.

But if anybody in the Murdoch empire thought that Coulson’s departure would end the hacking scandal, they were wrong. It kept getting in their way, like some small dog yapping at their ankles. Now it was getting ready to bite them. Two of their most powerful allies were about to desert them.

*   *   *

It had been brewing for a while. On the day that we published the paperwork in Sienna Miller’s case, 15 December 2010, I had emailed the Director of Public Prosecutions to ask whether this clear evidence of crime against the actress and her friends had been passed to prosecutors by the original Scotland Yard inquiry. I was sure it had not been. The DPP simply failed to reply. I emailed again. He said nothing. Tom Watson wrote to him to urge him to reply to my question, and still he stayed quiet – until 15 January, when suddenly he announced that he was commissioning a senior barrister, Alison Levitt QC, to conduct a ‘comprehensive review’ of the material which Scotland Yard had in its possession.

Looking in from the outside, it was hard to read exactly what was going on behind closed doors, but big wheels must have been turning within the DPP’s office and probably the Home Office too, to produce a decision like this. Effectively, it meant that finally the DPP was willing to expose the failure at Scotland Yard. It seemed unlikely that John Yates and his friends at the top of the Metropolitan Police would have encouraged that.

I had a small practical difficulty, that I had chosen this moment to head off to east Africa to rest and get my breath back. I was trying to follow events from under a mosquito net with a mobile phone which stopped working in a house that had no Internet link. I ended up filing a story on my laptop from a roadside café. But I had the consolation of knowing that the Murdoch camp faced far worse problems.

Knowing that the civil actions by Sienna Miller and Sky Andrew would expose more hard evidence about Ian Edmondson if they came to court, News International chose to try to get ahead of the game, by exposing Edmondson themselves. This might have worked if he truly had been a ‘rogue’ news editor, so that he could be sacrificed without jeopardising others. But the reality wasn’t like that.

On Monday 24 January, three days after Coulson’s resignation, Rupert Murdoch flew into London, cancelled his planned visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and attempted to sort out the mess. On Wednesday, News International passed to police three email messages which they said they had found in Ian Edmondson’s computer. They refused to say what they contained but clearly there was some kind of strong evidence of crime in there – evidence which was likely to emerge anyway in Sky Andrew’s case.

That afternoon, as I prepared to fly back early to London, the
Guardian
learned that Ian Edmondson was no longer suspended: he had been sacked the previous day, simply abandoned to the enemy, as though he had never been part of their army. And far, far more important, Scotland Yard announced that, having seen the three emails, they were setting up a new inquiry into the phone-hacking affair, and that this would not be run by John Yates’s Specialist Operations but would be handed over to a deputy assistant commissioner from the Serious Crime Directorate, Sue Akers.

In any revolution, it’s a turning point if the military desert the government and allow the rebels to take power. This was no revolution, but the idea was the same. Scotland Yard didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing: like the DPP, they were changing sides.

For News International, pursuing their new strategy of selective sacrifice, the decision to hand three damning emails to the police was an attempt at an orderly retreat: admit that Ian Edmondson had been up to no good; chuck him over the battlements to join Clive Goodman; if necessary, chuck Greg Miskiw too (he had left the paper years ago, he was expendable); and then fall back to a new position to try and defend the rest of the outfit. It was a doomed move. They had lost Andy Coulson from government, with whatever cracks that left in their relationship with the prime minister; they had lost the benefit of inaction by Scotland Yard and the DPP’s office; and, more than that – most unusual for the Murdoch organisation, most uncomfortable – they had lost control of events.

*   *   *

Scotland Yard called the new inquiry Operation Weeting. In the beginning, none of us trusted it. This was surely just a PR move, bound to fail.

But two weeks after it was launched, on 9 February, Operation Weeting released a statement which contained the following solid-gold sentence: ‘The new evidence recently provided by News International is being considered alongside material already in the Metropolitan Police Service’s possession.’ At last! Such a simple move and so absolutely vital – finally, they were going to investigate the evidence they had been sitting on for more than four years. And then another gold bar, which must surely have struck Andy Hayman and John Yates like a fist in the face: ‘All actions and decisions by the previous investigation are being reviewed.’ Quite right, too. Finally, there were also clear clues about a total reversal of the bad-faith treatment of victims: ‘Adopting a fresh approach towards informing victims and potential victims … identified some individuals who were previously advised that there was little or no information held by the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] relating to them … will make contact with everyone who had some of their personal contact details found in the documents seized in 2006.’

Within minutes, I was swapping phone calls with allies. I was still inclined to be suspicious, but they knew more. During the previous forty-eight hours, Weeting officers had already started approaching some of those public figures who had tried so hard to get the truth out of Scotland Yard and who had been so ruthlessly frustrated. They had been to see the former deputy prime minister John Prescott – now Lord Prescott – and, instead of mucking him about and publicly declaring that he had never been hacked, they had simply shown him paperwork which revealed beyond doubt that in the spring of 2006 – just as we had always said – he had been a prime target for Glenn Mulcaire who had succeeded in listening to at least forty-five messages which he had left on the mobile phone of his special adviser, Joan Hammell; and that Mulcaire had then emailed Ian Edmondson to tell him about them.

Prescott was furious, both with the police and with News International. And truly it was breathtaking that the police had had evidence of this scale of interception of the communications of the second most powerful politician in the land, handling all kinds of sensitive government secrets – and they had chosen to do nothing, not even to mention it to him, not even when he and his lawyers spent months asking them. Instead, they had chosen to deny it and, in the case of Andy Hayman, to accuse him of ranting.

Over the next few days, I heard that the former Media Secretary Tessa Jowell was ‘absolutely furious’ after being told by Weeting that Scotland Yard had previously let her know about only a fraction of the illegal eavesdropping which she and her family and friends had suffered; that the former deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick was similarly shocked to be shown paperwork which revealed that his private life had been a special project for Mulcaire, even though Scotland Yard originally had told him that there was no sign of him at all in Mulcaire’s records.

Weeting officers also had been to see the former Europe minister, Chris Bryant, whose suspicions previously had been airily dismissed by John Yates’s men. Now, Weeting showed him how Mulcaire had made copious notes about him, including the phone numbers of twenty-three people who were close to him.

This became a tale of two battlefields. One was a dreary office block next to a cinema in a busy high street in Putney, south-west London, an old police building which for years had been used by anti-corruption squads and which now became the base for Operation Weeting. This was where a group of forty officers now gathered to force their way inside Murdoch’s empire. The fight in Putney was often hidden, though we could always pick up the distant sounds and rumours of action.

The second battlefield was far more visible. The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, home of the High Court, looks like something out of a fairy tale: outside, a confusion of antique turrets and archways; inside, a vast flagstone hall like a cathedral with a labyrinth of corridors and twisting stairs leading off to oak-lined courts and dusty back rooms full of forgotten files and half-forgotten functionaries. The half-dozen public figures who had dared to sue the Murdochs had already found their way here with important results. In the background, more had been approaching the hacking lawyers, because they had found their courage and/or because they had been approached by Operation Weeting and shown solid evidence that they had been targets.

Mark Lewis was about to sue on behalf of the former champion jockey Kieren Fallon, who in 2009 had been sent a letter by Scotland Yard which gulled him into thinking they had no evidence that he had been hacked: now he had been shown extracts from Mulcaire’s notebooks which clearly suggested that the
News of the World
had been listening to his voicemail in the autumn of 2004 when he was in the midst of suing the paper for libel, a particularly serious matter if it involved cheating to win the court case.

One of the lawyers whom I had approached in my efforts to generate legal actions was Graham Shear. He was now suing on his own behalf. Shear had acted for a string of public figures including footballers who had been the targets of attempted entrapment for the tabloids by professional kiss-and-tell girls. Over the years, Shear had found himself being physically followed by journalists and had suspected that his phone was being monitored. After I contacted him in 2010, he had written to Scotland Yard who told him that there was no trace of him in Mulcaire’s notes. Now he discovered that this was not true: the
News of the World
had been able to listen not only to his personal voicemail but also to legally privileged messages from clients.

Some of the hearings in the High Court were landmarks. On 17 February, an open court finally dealt with Mark Thomson’s mysterious ‘dynamite’ case which had already led to the suspension of Dan Evans, the
News of the World
feature writer who was also a specialist hacker. The anonymous victim who was suing turned out to be Sienna Miller’s stepmother, Kelly Hoppen, who was a tabloid target not only because of her link to Miller but also because she was an interior designer with various celebs among her clients and had made TV programmes.

Her counsel, David Sherborne, made very clear the significance of Hoppen’s complaint. Since Dan Evans was alleged to have tried to hack her voicemail in June 2009 – nearly three years after the arrest of Goodman and Mulcaire – it ‘drives a coach and horses’ through News International’s claim that the hacking was all in the past.

Sherborne told the court that telephone billing records showed that on the morning of 22 June 2009, on the day after a Sunday newspaper had made Hoppen newsworthy by claiming that she was in a new relationship, Dan Evans had dialled her number twice: on the first occasion, she had answered, and he had hung up; on the second occasion, she had not answered, and yet he had stayed connected for twenty-five seconds, allegedly trying but failing to listen to her voicemail. News International and Evans insisted that it had all been a mistake, that the keys on his phone had got stuck and accidentally dialled her and stayed connected. It was, according to News International’s counsel, Michael Silverleaf QC, in an unfortunate choice of words, simply ‘one rogue call’.

The bad news for News International was matched by equally bad news for Scotland Yard. The hearing revealed that in the last few days, Operation Weeting had presented Kelly Hoppen with three different sheets of notes from Mulcaire’s records which showed that – quite separately from any activity by Dan Evans in the features department – Mulcaire himself, working for the news desk, had been monitoring and attempting to intercept her mobile telephones during 2005. Weeting had also disclosed a sheet from the original police investigation in 2006 which showed that even then detectives had seen and understood the meaning of those records and had linked one of the phone numbers in Mulcaire’s notes to a former boyfriend of Hoppen’s, believed to be the England footballer Sol Campbell. And yet, as the hearing revealed, Scotland Yard on two occasions had then told Kelly Hoppen that they had ‘no evidence to suggest that [she] was subjected to unlawful monitoring or interception of [her] mobile telephones’.

On 25 February, the High Court administrators appointed a specialist ‘hacking judge’ to handle the impending torrent of cases. They chose Geoffrey Vos. It was a popular decision. Vos had already sat on several of the early hearings and shown that he was quick and clever but also that he had a waspish sense of humour which made his hearings more enjoyable than most. He also clearly saw the big picture and understood what News International and the police had been doing. Most important of all, he showed absolutely no sign of being frightened of them.

A week later, in a further hearing about whether Glenn Mulcaire should answer questions about the hacking of Andy Gray and Steve Coogan, Vos made a simple, strong background point: ‘The documents from Mr Mulcaire’s own handwritten notes are more than enough to satisfy me that interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly … What possible other inferences could be drawn from the fact that Mr Mulcaire set up the procedures and obtained the necessary numbers to intercept Mr Gray’s messages?… Mr Mulcaire clearly intercepted Mr Gray’s voicemail … It is a fair inference from the fact that Mr Mulcaire had the wherewithal to intercept Mr Coogan’s telephone that he is likely to have done so.’