Hack Attack (53 page)

On the following day, I had a call from Mark Lewis, who had managed somehow to get himself hired as the Dowlers’ solicitor and who agreed to prepare a statement. Rusbridger and his deputy, Ian Katz, went through the story with the
Guardian
’s in-house lawyer, confirmed with me that there were at least two sources for every key point and then, at 4.30 on Monday afternoon, 4 July, we published it on our website.

There was a white flash and a mighty explosion.

*   *   *

Newspapers who had spent so long ignoring the scandal finally reacted like newspapers. It helped that, when they contacted Scotland Yard, reporters were told off the record that the Yard ‘would not argue with’ the
Guardian
’s report. Surrey police came to my house in search of more information about the hacking of their detectives. Mark Lewis denounced the hacking as ‘heinous’ and ‘despicable’ and told me the Dowlers were happy with the story.

Glenn Mulcaire was not so happy. Max Mosley called to tell me that the investigator was anxious and remorseful and ready to talk. On the Tuesday morning, I met Mulcaire at the office near Trafalgar Square where Mosley was employing him. He was indeed miserable and made no attempt to deny anything. I persuaded him to issue a public statement through me, apologising for the hurt he had caused, describing the ‘relentless pressure’ for results at the
News of the World
and adding that he had not realised that he was breaking the law. ‘I never had any intention of interfering with any police inquiry,’ he said.

I came out of that meeting to find that David Cameron had told reporters that the hacking of Milly’s phone was ‘a dreadful act’; the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, had called for a public inquiry into newspaper malpractice; five major companies had suggested they would withdraw several million pounds’ worth of advertising from the
News of the World
; and some readers were cancelling their subscriptions. Moral outrage was invading the power game.

Rebekah Brooks suddenly found herself up to her neck in news coverage.

She had been editing the
News of the World
when they had hacked Milly Dowler’s phone, and that morning I had published a summary of our evidence about criminal activity on her watch. She issued a statement that it was ‘inconceivable’ that she had known about the incident. News International were soon briefing reporters that ‘anyone except Rebekah’ could lose their jobs over the hacking scandal.

That evening, Amelia Hill revealed that Operation Weeting were reviewing every high-profile case of the murder or abduction of a child since 2001 to look for evidence of hacking. Cambridgeshire police confirmed that the parents of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, who had been murdered in Soham five months after Milly, had also been warned by Weeting that they had been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire.

The outrage rolled out like storm clouds. That same evening, the first editions of Wednesday’s papers revealed that the
Financial Times
were calling for Brooks to resign and – to our great surprise – that
The Times
were joining the criticism. A bold leader comment described the hacking of Milly’s phone as ‘beyond reprehensible’ and added: ‘It ought to go without saying that nothing of this nature can ever happen again. But then it ought to have gone without saying that nothing of this nature could ever have happened in the first place.’

And then we saw the first edition of the
Daily Telegraph
with a devastating front-page story: Operation Weeting had found evidence that some of the fifty-two families who had been bereaved by the terrorist bombings in London in July 2005 had had their phones hacked by the
News of the World
. They quoted Graham Foulkes, whose twenty-two-year-old son, David, had died in the attacks. ‘How low can you get?’ he asked.

The next forty-eight hours saw a stream of new revelations squirting out of the holes in the crumbling walls of News International’s defences: the hacking of families of British military personnel who had died in Iraq and Afghanistan; the targeting by Mulcaire of George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer; and of Michael Mansfield, the barrister who had challenged the official version of events at the inquest into the death of Princess Diana. I ran a detailed account of Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook’s meeting with Rebekah Brooks, when he had warned her that Alex Marunchak had used the
News of the World
’s resources to spy on him while he was investigating murder allegations against Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery.

In Scotland, Strathclyde police revealed they were investigating allegations of hacking there by the
News of the World
and of perjury by Andy Coulson at the trial of the Scottish radical, Tommy Sheridan. Stories were running on the front page of Fleet Street papers and all around the world, although Murdoch’s Fox News continued to ignore it. On Wednesday, in an emergency debate in the House of Commons, an increasingly confident Ed Miliband raised the stakes by urging that the BSkyB bid must now be blocked.

In the nine months since he had become Labour leader, Miliband had followed Blair and Brown in attempting to befriend the Murdoch papers. Early on, he had arranged a private meal with Rebekah Brooks, although reports hinted it had not gone well with Miliband inquiring twice about her children even though she had none; and suggesting she should read
Sun
editorials from the 1930s although the paper had not been launched until the 1960s. But now it was safe to end the pretence of alliance.

News International did their best to fight back, insisting that they would be ‘absolutely appalled and horrified’ if it were confirmed that the
News of the World
had hacked the phones of dead soldiers’ families. They said that Rebekah Brooks had been on holiday when the paper published the story about Milly Dowler’s voicemail and also when they ran stories about Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. The clear implication was that we should blame her deputy, Andy Coulson.

They also tried some tactical leaking, laced with falsehood and hypocrisy. In the midst of the turmoil, Will Lewis’s old friend, Robert Peston of the BBC, disclosed that News International had ‘uncovered emails that indicate payments were made to the police by the
News of the World
during the editorship of Andy Coulson’. Peston reported that the company had handed them to Scotland Yard.

News International then followed up by claiming that this demonstrated their ‘full co-operation with the Metropolitan Police’. Not only did they fail to mention that they had sat on this information for four years; that they had retrieved the emails only because the police had told them to do so; and that they had then delayed handing them over for nearly three months: they also failed to mention that they had promised the police that they would say nothing about them, for fear of tipping off suspects who might then destroy evidence. They were rewarded with the private fury of Sue Akers and her officers, and a helpful front-page story in
The Times
.

By noon on Thursday 7 July, the boycott by advertisers had gathered devastating force, with thirty-three companies withdrawing their business from the paper and a particularly vocal Mitsubishi describing the seventy-two hours of revelation as ‘unbelievable, unspeakable and despicable’. Some newsagents were saying they would refuse to sell the paper on Sunday. Equally bad for News International, old allies were changing sides.

The Press Complaints Commission finally withdrew their 2009 report which had cleared the
News of the World
and criticised the
Guardian
’s coverage. The London mayor, Boris Johnson, who had been happy to describe the
Guardian
’s stories as ‘codswallop’ now called for allegations of corruption to be investigated ‘ruthlessly and openly’. David Cameron denounced the
News of the World
’s behaviour as ‘absolutely disgusting’ and promised a public inquiry, though he refused to join the calls for the resignation of Rebekah Brooks. The
Guardian
, the
Daily Mirror
and a swelling group of MPs from all parties were now calling for an end to the BSkyB bid.

And then, that Thursday afternoon, the Murdochs made a move which was stunning in its desperation. They announced the death of the
News of the World
. Sunday’s edition would be the last. It would carry no advertising, and the income from sales would be given to charities. ‘Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad,’ James Murdoch explained. Rusbridger and I were dumbstruck by the move. Nobody had called for this, nobody had expected it. The ruthlessness was amazing to see – to chuck not just one or two bodies but the entire newspaper over the battlements to save their grab for BSkyB.

But if they thought this would clear the air or even relieve the pressure, the Murdochs were wrong. They had done too little for too long and, in the flood of revelation, this looked less like a commitment to good conduct than a confession of guilt. Within minutes of the news breaking, Twitter was alive with bitter complaints that the Murdochs had sacrificed several hundred jobs to save their own and Rebekah Brooks’s. Thirty journalists from the
Sun
walked out in protest. A throng of MPs now called loudly for Brooks to resign. Within an hour, Tweeters had discovered that, two days earlier, News International had registered the domain name sunonsunday.co.uk, clearly suggesting that the closure was a PR move and that the
News of the World
would reopen at some point as the
Sun on Sunday
. The leak to Robert Peston two days earlier now looked nastier than ever – an attempt to smear their own newspaper before they sentenced it to death.

By Friday, Murdoch’s Fleet Street allies were running for cover. The right-wing
Daily Mail
attacked Murdoch by name: ‘Never again must one man be allowed to hold such power.’ Stephen Glover at the
Independent
, who had tied himself in such angry knots in his efforts to support the official line, now attacked the closure of the
News of the World
as ‘a desperate ploy by a dysfunctional company’ and called for Brooks to resign. Brooks herself addressed the
News of the World
’s surly staff, telling them that there was still more dirt to be revealed: ‘I think in a year’s time, every single one of you in this room might come up and say “OK, well, I see what you saw now.”’ True to the paper’s form, one of the journalists secretly taped her and leaked her comments.

By the time she had finished speaking, Andy Coulson had been arrested on suspicion of conspiring to hack phones and pay bribes to police – exactly two years to the day since we had published the Gordon Taylor story. Clive Goodman, who could have been forgiven for thinking he had seen the end of his nightmare, also had been arrested, on suspicion of conspiring to pay bribes to police. It was clear that the arrests had been informed by the Harbottle & Lewis emails which had been suppressed for so long by Murdoch’s executives.

That Friday afternoon, Amelia Hill and I posted a story on the
Guardian
website, challenging News International’s claim to be co-operating with police, disclosing that Weeting were investigating evidence that a senior executive had deleted millions of emails from their servers; that the company had infuriated police by leaking the story about the Harbottle & Lewis emails; and that prosecutors were considering charging those who had removed material from Jimmy Weatherup’s desk on the day of his arrest in April and initially refused to hand it over.

Parliament was in uproar. Those who had always resented Murdoch’s power now spoke out, a sleeping army waking up from years of silent fear. Others who had been happy to support him now raced to abandon him. David Cameron, in particular, shrugged off his cosy friendship with Rebekah Brooks, saying that if it were his choice, he would accept her resignation. He formally announced two public inquiries, one into the press, another into the police. ‘The truth is, we have all been in this together,’ he said. ‘The press, the politicians and the leaders of all the parties – and, yes, that includes me … Throughout all this, all the warnings, all the concern, the government at the time did nothing.’

But the really bad news for the Murdochs came from Jeremy Hunt. This was the day of the deadline for the final consultation on the BSkyB bid, the day they had planned to celebrate victory. Yet things had changed. Public revulsion had by now produced 156,000 responses, almost all of them hostile. Hunt announced that he had decided to delay his decision. The bid was not dead, but it was in deep trouble.

At the beginning of the week, BSkyB shares had been trading at 850p. By Friday evening, they had fallen to 748p, wiping an estimated £1.7 billion from the company’s value.

*   *   *

Watching from my study as the masonry collapsed around the Murdochs’ heads, I could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes that week. Much later, sources from News International and News Corp described their panic and confusion, all redoubled by the warring factions within the empire fighting like cats in a sack.

They say that as soon as they saw the Milly Dowler story on the
Guardian
website that Monday afternoon, they understood that the hacking scandal was finally a real threat to the BSkyB deal. As one of them put it, it ‘broke the fallacy’ that the two could be kept apart. Their immediate decision was that James Murdoch must take centre stage instead of Rebekah Brooks. But it was not as easy as that.

By Tuesday evening, some of James’s team were saying that Brooks had to get out of the building: either she knew about the Dowler hacking and had to go; or she didn’t know but was nevertheless responsible because she had been the editor, so she still had to go. They believed that her staff were briefing the press against James. Some of Brooks’s camp believed James’s people were briefing against them. James nevertheless continued to defend Brooks, aware perhaps that an argument with Brooks was effectively an argument with his father. Brooks herself was buoyed by an email from Tony Blair offering his help. ‘I have been through things like this,’ he wrote.