Hack Attack (63 page)

By the time the big trial was over, the police had run riot through the world of tabloid journalism, arresting or interviewing 210 people including 101 journalists from six different national newspapers; thirteen private investigators; and thirty-seven public officials who were suspected of taking cash bribes. Eleven public officials had already been jailed. Eleven more trials were scheduled on charges of hacking phones, paying cash to public officials and breaking into allegedly stolen mobile phones, while the CPS was still reviewing other cases which could generate still more trials on similar charges including email-hacking. Among those waiting to hear whether they would be prosecuted were Coulson’s deputy editor, Neil Wallis, who had been arrested for a second time; his features editor, Jules Stenson; his in-house lawyer, Tom Crone; and four senior journalists from the Mirror Group. Police had also interviewed as a suspect Murdoch’s former UK chief executive, Les Hinton, and were planning to do the same with Rupert Murdoch himself. In the wings, Murdoch’s UK company – now rebranded as News UK – had paid compensation or damages to 718 of Mulcaire’s victims, while many more of Dan Evans’s alleged victims queued to sue.

There were some interesting loose ends. I established that the Mail newspaper group was one of the favoured few who had been approached as victims by Caryatid in the autumn of 2006, when they had been told about all four of the
Mail on Sunday
journalists who had been on the wrong end of the
News of the World
’s espionage. Oddly, neither the
Mail on Sunday
nor the
Daily Mail
had published a word about their own role as victims of the scandal. Even stranger, the Press Complaints Commission had published two reports (in 2007 and 2009) which supported the
News of the World
’s lies about itself without ever mentioning that there were at least four other victims to add to the official list of only eight. This was particularly weird since the editor of the
Daily Mail
, Paul Dacre, was one of the commissioners who produced the 2006 report; and the editor of the
Mail on Sunday
, Peter Wright, was part of the commission which was responsible for the 2009 one, which also rubbished the
Guardian
. Did they not know?

And there was an intriguing piece of evidence about the police which surfaced during the trial: the minutes of a meeting at the
News of the World
on 20 January 2010, as Rebekah Brooks was trying to persuade Max Clifford not to take them to court for hacking his phone. The minutes noted that when Scotland Yard first disclosed Mulcaire’s notes about Clifford, ‘there was nothing there’. That had sent Clifford’s lawyer, Charlotte Harris, back to the High Court for an order to disclose an unredacted version of the notes. And, according to the minutes, it had also provoked a comment from the then editor, Colin Myler: ‘CM said that Andy Hayman and John Yates had indicated to him previously that this was probably going to be the case.’ Was that accurate? Did one of those men really tip off Myler about the material they would be disclosing? I contacted all three. None would comment.

*   *   *

Back in Court 12, the judge has finished reading his comments. The guilty men stand silent and contrite, perhaps aware that the door at the end of the dock opens on to a dark staircase which leads to the grim old cells in the basement below. The machinery of justice which so badly failed to deal with them for years has finally trapped them. The oldest form of democracy in the land – not voters but jurors – has finally found a voice. The judge sighs and looks to the dock where Coulson, Miskiw and Thurlbeck now know they have lost their freedom. ‘Go down please,’ he says. The door to the cells is open.

Epilogue

This was never simply a story about a journalist who broke the law. The rogue reporter turned out to be working for a rogue newspaper which, in turn, proved to be part of a rogue corporation. Beyond that, the rogue corporation had been allowed to flourish – and to break the rules and to make comrades of the police and the government – because it had grown up in a wider system which positively encouraged it and other corporations to do all of these things.

All this is relatively new. This ‘neoliberalism’, this revival of laissez-faire capitalism, has reversed several hundred years of struggle by labour movements, political campaigns and radical thinkers across the world who saw the effects of a free-market economy, red in tooth and claw, and who determined that they must create democratic governments with power to take hold of the commercial wealth of their societies and to enforce rules which would protect working people and to create institutions which would provide for their health and education and welfare. This neoliberalism was conceived by conservative economists and then put into effect in the early 1970s by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who tortured and murdered his political opponents in Chile and was celebrated by conservatives for the freedom of his economy. It was promoted most powerfully from the early 1980s by the right-wing governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and then reproduced and reinforced by the Australian governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating; in New Zealand by Robert Muldoon; in Canada by Brian Mulroney; and so on around the world, penetrating by the 1990s even the dark empires of China and the former Soviet Union.

Neoliberalism worked, for some. It generated economic growth which in turn delivered short-term political benefits for the governments who sponsored it and enormous wealth for those who owned and ran the corporations which were its flagships. But …

When you allow global corporations to roam global markets, you make them more powerful than nation states; when you ‘roll back the state’, you reduce the power of the people in each nation; when you ‘cut back regulation’, you allow the biggest corporations to dominate and exploit their territories; when you break trade unions and tear up employment laws, you allow those corporations to ride roughshod over those who work for them. The simple, beautiful idea that people should run their own societies disintegrates, allowing the few to rule and the many to follow.

Over and again, you allow the hard logic of the market to usurp human choice and so you create a society with the morality of an anthill, where all human life is reduced to labour, all freedom flattened by the demand for efficient production, all weakness punished, all violence justified, where schools and hospitals are cut while crime and alienation flourish and millions are thrown into the deep pit of unemployment.

You privatise your industries, so you lose control of the essential raw materials of life; you cut taxes for the rich and cut welfare for the poor, so you manufacture deep layers of inequality, great pools of poverty. Listen to the words of Joseph Stiglitz who, from his vantage point as chief economist at the World Bank in the late 1990s, watched as neoliberalism infected the whole planet: ‘Those at the top have learned how to suck money from the rest in ways that the rest are hardly aware of. That is their true innovation.’

And all of this is cloaked in the twisted language of the power elite in which the ways of the wealthy have always been disguised as a service for the needs of the poor. The predecessors of those who promoted this neoliberal backlash sat on the boards of Victorian coal mines, explaining gently that they must preserve the right of children to work down the pit and that they must resist the do-gooders who would take away the free choice of those children and deprive their families of their income. They were the shipmasters who argued that it was nothing less than their duty to provide good strong cheap labour from Africa for the king’s dominions in the West Indies and beyond, whose growth was essential to England’s own well-being, and that good people must understand that the conditions endured by a savage on the verge of starvation in darkest Africa were far inferior to those of a bonded labourer in the care of an employer who had every reason to ensure that he was well kept.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

So it was that a whole generation of English men and women were told that they should lose the welfare state and the trade unions and the protective laws for which their ancestors had fought and that the balance of power should be tipped backwards by a century and more, because this would make them free; and, in case they hesitated for a moment and questioned the idea that the wealthy elite would know and care more about their welfare than their own parents and grandparents, they were also offered a little cash. ‘Vote to return to laissez-faire capitalism, and we will cut your taxes. You may lose your society but you will gain a bigger TV.’ A very great theft was organised on the simple basis that its victims had nothing to lose but a decent life.

Like all corporations, News Corp has taken advantage of this reversal to increase its wealth and to increase its power – over governments and their regulators, over competitors and their own workforce. However, far more than most corporations, News Corp also was instrumental in engineering this reversal. Like some ideological vanguard, Rupert Murdoch and his lieutenants have used their news outlets to shift the centre of power – the centre of thinking – far over to the right; and they have used their political muscle to press these ideas on governments who sought their support. They have done this not only in the UK but also in the US and Australia, wherever their business has flourished. They have left us with a world that demonstrably is a worse place to live, unless you happen to belong to the power elite.

And the importance of this in the aftermath of the hacking scandal is to shake ourselves free of the illusion that because we won a really important battle, we won the war; that by exposing some secret machinations, we stopped the machinations occurring. In truth, very little has changed.

Some people resigned – from the PCC, the police, Murdoch’s company. Others soon replaced them. One paper closed. Another replaced it. The BSkyB bid was blocked, but there is nothing to stop Rupert Murdoch coming back to try again, to use his reservoir of cash to buy the rest of that marvellously lucrative business, so that he has an even bigger reservoir of cash to buy still more, to become still bigger, to become the biggest.

And when Rupert Murdoch dies, another chairman will replace him. It might not be a man or woman from his bloodline, but that chairman’s power will be the same. Or if Rupert Murdoch sells every newspaper he owns in the UK – or if he sells every newspaper he owns in the world – there will always be another ambitious businessman waiting to fill his place, some Russian oligarch or Middle Eastern oil magnate or Chinese billionaire.

For a while, we snatched a handful of power away from one man. We did nothing to change the power of the elite.

Appendix

Private investigators who worked for Fleet Street

Many of those listed here have been convicted of crime, but it should not be assumed that any others have broken the law. Some are tracers and tracing is not illegal. A tracer may lawfully blag confidential data if there is a public interest in doing so. It should also not be assumed from inclusion in this list that any newspaper was aware of any criminal act that may have been committed.

Barry, Rachel. Blagger, phone and medical records.
Mail on Sunday
,
News of the World
,
Sunday People
,
Sunday Express
. Convicted, October 1997.

Beardall, Barry. Blagger, political targets.
Sunday Times
. Convicted of unrelated fraud, April 2001.

‘Blue’. Blagger, all records.
Mail on Sunday
,
Sunday Times
. Founder member of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) group.

Boddy, Micky. Blagger, phone companies. Most Fleet Street papers. Worked with Gary Lowe and NA group.

Boyall, John. Middleman.
News of the World
,
Sunday Mirror
. Member of Whittamore network. Trained Glenn Mulcaire and Andy Gadd. Previously worked with former South African intelligence officer John Ferrer Smith at Argen Investigations. Convicted, April 2005.

Bullen, Shaun. Blagger, phone companies. Unidentified papers. Employed by Code Ten agency. Member of Southern Investigations network.

Burrows, Gavin. Middleman.
News of the World
,
Sunday People
. Ran Rhodes Associates.

Campbell Smith, Philip. Covert surveillance and email-hacking.
News of the World
. Former British intelligence officer in Northern Ireland. Convicted, February 2012.

Clarke, Steve. Phone-tapper.
News of the World
. Former police officer. Ran Metshield.

Coghlan, David. Phone-tapper. Worked with Phil Winton. Former army intelligence officer. Convicted, February 1987 and January 1995.

Coulson, Dean. Middleman for phone-tapping. Worked with Active Investigation Services (AIS). Convicted, February 2008.

Creasey, Steven ‘Sid’. Covert surveillance, email-hacking, phone-bugging.
News of the World
and TV. Former London detective. Convicted of unrelated crimes.

Dewse, Chris. Tracer, driver records. Member of Whittamore network. Charged but not prosecuted.

Dowling, Stuart. Manufactured bugs for phone lines. Worked with AIS. Convicted, January 2007.

Edwards, David. Phone-tapper. Used by NA group and Phil Winton. Former British Telecom engineer.

Fillery, Sid. Police corruption, blagging, suspected burglary.
Daily Mirror
,
News of the World
,
Sunday Mirror
,
Sunday Times
. Ran Southern Investigations. Convicted of child pornography offences, October 2003.