Hack Attack (48 page)

The lawyers for those who were suing had taken to meeting in a Japanese sushi restaurant in Bloomsbury, where they would sit cross-legged on floor cushions, round a low black table, pull the batteries out of their phones and plan their next move. They saw News International’s statement for exactly what it was – a means of concealment disguised as a policy of openness.

They had found a grand strategist in Hugh Tomlinson, a particularly clever barrister who had begun his working life as an expert in post-structuralist philosophy, translating the works of Gilles Deleuze, before becoming a lawyer. He specialised in media law – he had acted for numerous public figures who had crossed newspapers, including Prince Charles when he sued the
Mail on Sunday
for publishing a stolen journal – but he was also one of the leading exponents of the UK’s emerging human-rights law. As News International fell back to their new position, Tomlinson and the other lawyers emerged from their sushi meetings with a straightforward response: they would bring up more weapons and intensify their attack.

Charlotte Harris had been forcing the police to hand over records which they had seized in 2006 of the numbers dialled from Glenn Mulcaire’s phones. But, as ever, they had chosen to redact them heavily, so that all she could see were the times when Mulcaire called numbers belonging to her client, Sky Andrew. She strongly suspected that the unredacted version would reveal a pattern: that before he hacked Sky Andrew, Mulcaire would have spoken to the
News of the World
to get his instructions and then would have spoken to them again afterwards to pass on the messages he had intercepted. To test her theory, she contacted a senior figure from the original case, who was not authorised to speak to her. Harris drenched him in charm but, even so, he was worried about saying anything. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘If I’m wrong about this, cough.’

She paused. He didn’t cough. She thanked him.

Then she went back to court to get an order to force the police to hand over unredacted versions of all the data they held for all calls made from all of Mulcaire’s phones.

That became part of the new strategy – not simply to ask for bits of information for current clients but to get hold of everything – every surviving record of every phone call, text, email and invoice, all the links in the web of conspiracy for every possible victim from both the police and News International. This drive for information was coupled with a second new strategy, being guided by Hugh Tomlinson, to increase the flow of cases by identifying a set of ‘generic issues’, i.e. the underlying questions about Mulcaire’s work. By putting it in this way, the lawyers would save everybody’s time because the answers in one case would help to clarify all the others. More than that, it would be a good argument to persuade the court that they must be allowed to see everything. This ‘generic disclosure’ of material could then be examined by all of the lawyers who could create a ‘confidentiality club’ agreeing not to disclose anything about each other’s clients. At last, they would be able to see the whole picture.

It worked. In a series of hearings in April and May, before Mr Justice Vos, the police finally were instructed to hand over to the confidentiality club in virtually unredacted form every single one of the pages of Mulcaire’s notes; and to hand over in unredacted form all of the phone records which they had received; and News International were instructed to search all of their email records for any reference to any of those who were now suing and to any activity which could be related to it. This amounted to the most powerful possible arsenal with which to attack News International’s claim to be telling the truth.

And, week by week, more public figures were coming forward to reinforce those who were willing to stand up and throw the ammunition. For months there had been only six people suing (Sienna Miller, Sky Andrew, Nicola Phillips, George Galloway, Andy Gray, Steve Coogan). By 15 April, there were twenty. By 26 May, there were thirty-one.

Some of what was emerging from Mulcaire’s paperwork was genuinely shocking. It now appeared that the wife and at least one child of the former prime minister, Tony Blair, had been targeted; and the former wife of Prince Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, and her two daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie; and the former prime minister, Gordon Brown. The police had not bothered to warn any of them. And there was the Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten, whose sex life had been a target for the
News of the World
. Scotland Yard originally had replied to his request for information by telling him that Mulcaire’s notes included just one piece of paper with his name on it. Now, Oaten discovered that there were thirty-five pages of Mulcaire notes about him and his voicemail. The investigator had his PIN, his password, transcripts of messages. He had even targeted Oaten’s ninety-eight-year-old father.

Charlotte Harris was representing the actress Leslie Ash and her husband, Lee Chapman. When they went to Putney so that the Weeting officers could show them the notes which Mulcaire had made from their voicemail, Harris realised that some of the notes were about a different Chapman, and that the police had misread a scribbled address. They thought it referred to Fulham in west London. Harris realised that what it really said was ‘Soham’ – home town of two ten-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, who had been abducted and murdered in August 2002. If the
News of the World
had hacked the phone of Jessica Chapman’s family …

There was a real struggle now taking place in the High Court. News International won some important skirmishes. Armed with their new strategy of admitting liability, they faced Sienna Miller’s case head on – and stopped it. Essentially, they forced her to admit that she had won. News International’s barrister, Michael Silverleaf QC, said they were admitting liability for all the wrongs which Miller alleged, and this included not only hacking her voicemail but also hacking her email. They undertook never to repeat any of the intrusions. And they offered her £100,000 in damages, an amount that was carefully calculated to exceed anything that she could possibly be awarded if she went to trial. That was the end of the case, Silverleaf argued: ‘We accept liability. We have given her all the undertakings that she could possibly obtain, and we have offered to pay the amount of damages claimed.’ It would be an abuse of process, he said, for Miller to continue.

For her part, Miller was not interested in the damages; she wanted the police and News International to disclose all that they held on her, for the truth to come out in open court. Silverleaf, however, told Mr Justice Vos that she must admit that she had won and stop. ‘The civil justice system exists in order to adjudicate upon and remedy wrongs. It is not to allow people to vent their feelings or just to obtain information … What she wants is a public inquiry, and that goes beyond the remedies that civil law provides.’ The judge indicated his agreement.

So judgement was entered in Miller’s favour. She won – and News International were delighted. In principle, there was nothing to stop them doing the same with just about any case which any of the lawyers might bring. Murdoch’s company could start by opposing them and might well get some of them thrown out. But any case which appeared to have a real chance of coming to trial could be killed simply by surrendering. With dozens of cases queuing up in the background, this could cost a great deal of money, and the newspaper might suffer a large dent to its reputation, but its individual journalists and executives (and owners) need no longer fear exposure in the civil courts.

There was a similar problem with Tamsin Allen’s application for a judicial review of the original police inquiry. It was going too well to succeed. In the High Court on 23 May, there was an extraordinary hearing, which I tried to describe in the
Guardian
:

The Royal Courts of Justice have heard hundreds of professional criminals claim that the police are bent. Yesterday, however, it was a respectable group of public figures including three Cabinet ministers and a former police chief who claimed that Scotland Yard had twisted the truth and buried the evidence in their case. In a series of withering attacks, the Metropolitan Police were accused of misleading the High Court, Parliament and the public over the phone-hacking scandal; and of keeping hundreds, possibly thousands of victims in the dark in a way which shielded Rupert Murdoch’s News International from embarrassment and expensive legal settlements.

The former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, and the former Media Secretary, Tessa Jowell, had joined the former Europe minister, Chris Bryant, and the former deputy assistant commissioner, Brian Paddick, in asking the court to agree that High Court judges should review the original police inquiry. The real sting for the police was that in the face of this unusually prestigious attack on their behaviour, they were forced to admit what their barrister gently described as ‘some operational shortcomings’.

It emerged that when finally (and very quietly) John Yates’s crew had searched the material seized from Glenn Mulcaire in August 2006, they had overlooked numerous documents and scanned others on to their database in a form which was not searchable, with the result that Operation Weeting were having to start the job all over again. And not only had they sent completely misleading letters to those who suspected they were victims, according to Hugh Tomlinson, they had also submitted a formal response to this judicial review which contained ‘patent factual inaccuracies’. In a written submission to the court, Tamsin Allen wrote that the effect of Scotland Yard’s failure had been to protect News International from expense and embarrassment: ‘We share the disquiet of the public about the police’s motivation for playing down the scale of unlawful behaviour and the way in which News International has, as a result, been shielded.’

For me, sitting at the back of the court and scribbling notes, certainly it was reassuring to hear the
Guardian
’s coverage being vindicated (and to hear John Yates’s threats and denials put firmly in their place). But it was also frustrating. The real value of the judicial review for me was that it would force the police to hand over exciting bundles of internal paperwork which might reveal what had gone on behind the scenes. Why had they behaved like this? Had they had any kind of secret contact with News International? Who exactly had been involved in all these lousy decisions? And now it looked like this paperwork would never come out in open court because, even though this particular hearing agreed that the judicial review should happen at some point, we all knew that it would not. The purpose of a judicial review is to seek a remedy for some failure in public administration. In this case, the remedy would be a new investigation – and we already had that, in Operation Weeting. At the next stage, the police would surely and easily be able to argue that there was no longer any justification for the courts to hold the review.

Just as the victory in the civil actions meant that cases like Sienna Miller’s would never actually be heard in open court, our success in forcing Scotland Yard to run a real inquiry ironically also meant that they would not now have to disclose the inner history of their failure.

Meanwhile, I knew, News Corp were waiting impatiently for Ofcom to decide whether the BSkyB deal could be completed.

*   *   *

We still had two big shots to get to the truth – Operation Weeting, and whatever else we could come up with at the
Guardian
.

Weeting were going strong. On 14 April, they made their third arrest, of the former news editor, Whispering Jimmy Weatherup. This produced a couple of interesting sidelines.

First, I discovered that a reporter in the
Guardian
newsroom, Amelia Hill, had a brilliant source who knew exactly what Weeting were up to. As a result, she was able to report that, while News International were claiming to want to co-operate with police, the reality was that, as soon as they heard that Weatherup had been arrested, several executives went to his desk in the office, shovelled everything they could find into bin bags and then handed them over to Burton Copeland, the same law firm which Andy Coulson had hired five years earlier after the arrest of Clive Goodman.

Weeting officers had then turned up to search Weatherup’s desk and were furious at this blatant obstruction. There had been a showdown during which, according to Amelia Hill’s source, the police made it clear that they regarded this as a criminal offence and they would arrest those responsible and even search the offices of Burton Copeland if the contents of Weatherup’s desk were not returned. News International blinked and told the lawyers to hand back the bin bags.

I had never met Amelia Hill, but clearly she was in touch with somebody very useful. I contacted her. She agreed to work with me. I didn’t ask her who the source was. I guessed it was either an officer on Operation Weeting, or somebody so senior at Scotland Yard that they knew what Weeting were up to. We’ll call him Jingle.

Immediately, he proved his value on a second sideline. Speaking to another officer from Weeting, Mark Lewis had picked up a hint that there was something odd about the place where Weatherup had been arrested, something which we needed to be aware of. This was a mysterious tease, which might have led nowhere, but Lewis asked me if I could find out more. I asked Amelia Hill to ask Jingle, who explained that Weeting had gone to Weatherup’s marital home to arrest him and been told that he no longer lived there. They had gone to the flat which was his new base and found that this was not much more than a place where he stored some belongings. Finally, they had traced him to the home of a young woman, with whom he was having a relationship – and this young woman happened to work for Mishcon de Reya, the law firm where Charlotte Harris was now acting for several dozen hacking victims. I could see why a police officer would be worried and I warned Harris, who was able to establish that the young woman posed no threat to her work.

Over the weeks, I stayed in touch with Amelia Hill, who is tall and dark with a husky voice from the school of Marlene Dietrich, and, through her, Jingle supplied a stream of invaluable intelligence. Its first effect was to encourage us to trust Operation Weeting. Jingle said that they had been told not to worry about causing damage to the reputation of Scotland Yard and that there were officers in Weeting who thought John Yates had behaved so badly that he should resign. He said they had no doubt that Andy Coulson had known all about the crime in his newsroom, that 50% of the hacking had been done from phones belonging to the
News of the World
. They had seized masses of new material during the arrests of Edmondson, Thurlbeck and Weatherup; they were consulting prosecutors about the possibility of busting somebody at News International or Burton Copeland for obstructing them in the search of Weatherup’s desk; they were thinking of prosecuting Glenn Mulcaire for a second time.