Hack Attack (60 page)

The following morning, Friday 10 July, Yates chaired another Gold meeting about the
Guardian
story. The minutes record that he was told that the original inquiry had not analysed the call data which might have identified other perpetrators at the
News of the World
; and that the paper had reacted to the attempt to search Clive Goodman’s desk with ‘resistance and threats to use force’, followed by ‘a general lack of co-operation’. Yates duly agreed to hold a second press conference that afternoon and to ask the
Guardian
to hand over any evidence it might hold. However, his officers then reported back on their search for unwarned victims with the news that they included Andy Coulson, who was now sitting at the right hand of the man who looked set to become the next prime minister. Yates now made a series of striking decisions.

He cancelled the plan for a second press conference; decided not to ask the
Guardian
for evidence; and agreed that they would warn Coulson but also that they would speak to senior officials in the Home Office and the London mayor’s office – the two organisations who were responsible for Scotland Yard – and ask them not to mention this to the Home Secretary or the mayor because of ‘political sensitivities’.

That evening, News International released its statement accusing the
Guardian
of misleading the British people, repeatedly citing Scotland Yard’s actions in support of the claim; and the first edition of
The Times
carried the column by Andy Hayman claiming that the original investigation ‘left no stone unturned’ and had found only a handful of victims. The Metropolitan Police said not one word to challenge any of this.

More light is possibly thrown on the state of Yates’s knowledge by a statement submitted to Leveson by Keith Surtees, Phil Williams’s deputy on the original inquiry. Surtees said: ‘On more than one occasion in meetings I attended in 2009 with Assistant Commissioner Yates, I voiced my concern that the original investigation could and should be reopened or re-examined and suggested either Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary or another force undertake such a task.’ Surtees said his immediate boss, Phil Williams, could confirm this and added crucially that he had also ‘set out my view that the criminality extended beyond Mulcaire and Goodman. It was a view held jointly by DCS Williams and myself that the phone interception and other criminal conduct of Mulcaire and Goodman was not limited to them and that the criminality extended further.’

Surtees went on to say that he had recorded his view of the need for a second investigation in the logbook which he had kept in 2006 – and that Yates had had access to that log in 2009: ‘In short, whatever information I obtained and documented in 2006 was relayed and/or available to AC Yates in 2009.’

Yates not only dismissed the need for a new investigation in his first press statement but continued to do so for the following two years, without ever hinting to Parliament or public that Surtees had expressed his concern or given him this information. Yates’s claim to ignorance was further undermined by his own evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, that his ‘establishing the facts’ on 9 July was not the end of his research: ‘It was a continuing exercise of reviewing, considering, reflecting about whether we were on the right track and whether we needed to do something different.’

The week after Yates’s statement in July 2009, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, got involved, and there was a new round of bad judgement. As with Scotland Yard – as typically with the power elite – events were screened by the easy assumptions of official secrecy.

Keir Starmer said publicly that his officials had studied all the material they had been given by the original police inquiry. In fact, they had studied none of it: all they had done was to look at their correspondence with Scotland Yard. Nevertheless, Starmer declared that his office had been given no evidence of other victims or perpetrators. However, the
Guardian
then challenged him to explain the email for Neville. Starmer was worried, as he later admitted to Leveson: ‘It seemed to me to suggest that both the author and the recipient were possible suspects.’

Starmer decided to consult lead counsel from the original inquiry, David Perry QC, who worried him even more by telling him, first, that the police in 2006 had said clearly that they had no evidence of the involvement of other journalists, and, second, that he did not think the police had shown him the email. Clearly alarmed, Starmer sent a message to Yates to ‘invite him to consider’ opening a new investigation. He even drafted a press release to announce this. But Yates then spoke to him on the phone twice in an hour, persuaded him to stall, then had a meeting with him and argued that the email for Neville ‘will go nowhere’. Phil Williams followed up with a long memo to Starmer urging that the email had no evidential value. Starmer sent it to David Perry who – without access to any of the original case papers – agreed with Williams. So Starmer backed down. There would be no new investigation. Nothing of this was revealed at the time. It was on that evening, Thursday 16 July, that Yates and other senior officers dined with Rebekah Brooks at the
Sun
’s Police Bravery Awards.

Yates faced a new difficulty when he and Phil Williams were called to give evidence to the media select committee three months later, in September 2009. Preparing for this, Williams wrote a draft statement, which included the following very revealing passage: ‘The size of the potential pool of people that Mulcaire had an interest in could be in the region of 600 individuals … Out of this pool of 600-plus persons of interest, there were in the region of seventy to eighty who the phone companies could indicate may have had their voicemails called … At the time, the strategy recognised that there was still extensive research to be done with the phone companies to identify what the full extent of victims might be … This could be a vastly bigger group of people, and in reality we would probably never know the true scale.’

That clashed directly with several of Yates’s public comments. That whole passage was cut from the final version of the statement given to the committee. Yates sat in front of them and told them baldly: ‘There was nothing to take us any further forward from an investigation point of view.’

Four months later, Yates was confronted with another problem, the Freedom of Information application from the
Guardian
to which Scotland Yard had responded with many weeks of stalling in breach of their legal duty before finally conceding that they would have to disclose that Mulcaire’s records included ninety-one PIN codes. In January 2010, on the eve of that disclosure, Phil Williams wrote another internal memo, headed ‘Options for dealing with the potential victims issue’. Williams noted that at the end of his press statement about the Gordon Taylor story, Yates had said he would ensure that potential victims would now be warned if ‘there is any suspicion that they might have been’ hacked. The Freedom of Information request, Williams observed, was ‘a good question’, and he saw the immediate problem: ‘The key part of that statement is for us to decide what constitutes “any suspicion that they might have been”. From the moment the reply to the Nick Davies letter is sent out, with the answer ninety-one, we need to be ready to stand by our interpretation.’

Ignoring the obvious inference that if a professional phone-hacker had obtained somebody’s PIN code, that in itself raised the suspicion that they might have been hacked, Williams suggested they narrow the definition to include only those of the ninety-one where the available evidence showed that Mulcaire had also dialled into their voicemail and stayed on the line long enough to listen to a message. The difficulty, he explained, was that thirteen of the ninety-one who met even that restrictive definition, still had not been warned.

He suggested they might immediately warn those thirteen before sending the information to the
Guardian
. Or they could get the phone companies to do so, which would have the advantage of spreading responsibility to them but the disadvantage that ‘this would take an unknown time, and it is important to send out the Nick Davies FoIA this week’. Both options would have had the effect of concealing the police failure to fulfil Yates’s undertaking. In the event, they said nothing about the unwarned thirteen, nothing about the failure to warn others among the ninety-one and, when the
Guardian
ran a story about the significance of the ninety-one PIN codes, they complained, and Yates and Dick Fedorcio visited Rusbridger. Quietly, they also warned seventeen more victims.

In the background, Scotland Yard wrote a memo for government ministers which included the claim that ‘Where there was evidence or mere suspicion that an individual had been subject to unlawful interception by use of a PIN, all reasonable steps were taken to ensure that individuals were informed.’

Even when, a year later, in January 2011, he finally agreed that the DPP should review all the evidence in the case, Yates tried to take the credit. It emerged at the Leveson Inquiry that, following the Sienna Miller revelations, Keir Starmer had told Scotland Yard that this was his plan. Yates had come to his office. Starmer recalled: ‘By then, I had reached the stage where I really was not in a mood for being dissuaded.’ But in agreeing to the review, Yates urged that he should be allowed to pretend that the review was his own idea. With the DPP’s consent, he then wrote Starmer a fundamentally misleading letter in which he said: ‘I consider it would be wise to invite you to further re-examine all the material collected in this matter.’

We discovered only later that during the months following the
Guardian
’s first story, senior Yard personnel – including Sir Paul Stephenson, Dick Fedorcio and John Yates – continued to meet, drink or, more often, dine with senior figures from the
News of the World
on a total of at least ten occasions. In November 2009 – while his decision to refuse to reopen the inquiry was being challenged by the
Guardian
and MPs – Yates was happy to dine at the Ivy with the paper’s editor, Colin Myler, and its crime editor, Lucy Panton. He continued to meet socially with Neil Wallis. The then deputy commissioner, Tim Godwin, warned Yates about these meetings at the time, but Yates ignored his request to cut back on his contact with journalists.

It was in this context that Yates and Dick Fedorcio gave their blessing to Wallis becoming a media consultant for the Yard and that Yates helped Wallis’s daughter to find a temporary job. The Independent Police Complaints Commission found that, while these events involved ‘blurred boundaries, imprudent decisions and poor judgement’, neither Yates nor Fedorcio had been guilty of corruption. (Fedorcio faced disciplinary charges for gross misconduct but quit before they could take place.) The IPCC found that Sir Paul was guilty of no misconduct over his free stay at Wallis’s other PR client, Champneys. The real question is whether or how this social contact influenced police thinking. Yates and his colleagues continued to insist that it had made no difference. There is no objective way of finding an answer.

Lord Justice Leveson concluded that there was no evidence that the social contact had influenced Yates or any other officer and that the real problem was that from the outset Yates had adopted an ‘inappropriately dismissive and close-minded attitude’ which was aggravated by genuine misunderstanding about the meaning of RIPA and some inaccurate briefings. Yates and Phil Williams had been dogmatic and defensive, Leveson said, in part because the allegations were being made by a newspaper and appeared to be attacking the police.

Certainly, there was some hostility to the
Guardian
. One of the paper’s crime correspondents recalls that at a police social event during the hacking saga, the then commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson, a little red in the face and apparently enjoying the refreshments, informed him that the whole story was ‘a load of middle-class wank’.

Having reviewed all of the evidence, Leveson made numerous criticisms of Yates and some of Williams but concluded emphatically that neither man had acted in bad faith at any stage.

One footnote. When Keith Surtees submitted his statement to Leveson, he complained about the minutes of one of the Gold meetings on Friday 10 July, the day after Yates’s controversial statement about the
Guardian
. Surtees said they were ‘not a wholly complete or accurate reflection of what was discussed’.

Separately, researching this book, I noticed that two of the Gold minutes were obviously inaccurate, including those for one of the meetings on 10 July. In both cases, the header which listed the time, date and those attending was for one meeting, while the text below recorded the proceedings of a different meeting. I asked Scotland Yard to explain. They never did.

On the sidelines, the Press Complaints Commission too was exposed. In amongst hundreds of pages of internal paperwork which they disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry was one particularly revealing memo from Tim Toulmin, who had been the PCC director when they produced their report which not only exonerated the
News of the World
but also attacked the
Guardian
. Their report’s most damning line was that we had suggested in our Gordon Taylor story that the hacking had continued after the jailing of Goodman and Mulcaire but had been unable to produce any evidence to support this. This happened to be untrue: there was nothing in the
Guardian
story to suggest that. And the memo revealed that the PCC knew that. Preparing their report, Toulmin had written to the commission: ‘There is no suggestion in the latest
Guardian
allegations that such activities are ongoing at the
NoW
or anywhere else.’

Toulmin left the PCC before the scandal broke. The chair, Lady Buscombe, resigned in the wake of the Dowler story.

*   *   *

All of this exposure and the brief humbling of Rupert Murdoch easily seduced us into thinking that we had won a great victory, that truth had caught up with power. Very soon, however, as attention faded and the scandal slipped into the past, the elite simply took back their power, as if we had never challenged it – as if the tide had stayed out just long enough to allow us to build our castles in the sand, and now we watched as waves of irrestistible force returned to wash them all away.