Hack Attack (7 page)

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It is an odd thing about newspapers, that they live by exposure, yet they keep their own worlds concealed. A little of the truth about Andy Coulson’s newspaper begins to emerge in evidence provided by one of his former staff – hundreds of notes and emails and memos which his executives wrote for each other in 2005 as they strove to repeat the triumphs of the previous twelve months.

It begins with the readers. The friends of tabloid newspapers often point out that their journalism exists only because millions of people choose to pay money to read it. The internal messages go one step further, disclosing the fervour with which readers stepped forward to provide a paper like the
News of the World
with the information which it craved.

Take one week early in 2005. The internal messages record that a male prostitute had contacted them to report ‘romping’ in a sauna with a male TV presenter – ‘He wants to do kiss-and-tell and says his mate can corroborate the tale.’ And a woman who went out with a Hollywood actor when he was fourteen wants to sell the story of how he cheated on her. And a caller ‘claims to have pics of a prominent Crystal Palace player in a gay clinch with pals on holiday’. And another says ‘I’ve got some information regarding [England footballer] and his ex-wife.’

As the weeks go by, the messages disclose an apparently endless line of men and women who have collected some fragment of human interest and are now offering it for sale (almost always for sale). There is a woman who claims that, years ago, she had some kind of relationship with the rock star Pete Doherty: ‘I have some interesting details to give for a good price, although I wish to remain anonymous.’ There is a man whose English-born daughter was in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and who is offering an interview with her, for £1,500. Some simply hope for a sale: ‘I was just wondering how much pictures of Premiership footballers with ladyboys in Bangkok are worth. Got a classic if the price is right.’ Some are surely hopeless: ‘I recently came into possession of a video of [a named male actor] masturbating. Would your paper be interested in purchasing this from me as I have no need for it?’

But as the messages flow on, the commercial side of this auction takes second place to something else more striking, something more human and more secret – a casual treachery. At the very least, these informants are betraying those they have come across through their work. A hotel porter says he has got his hands on paperwork to prove that two TV presenters have just secretly spent the night together; a prison worker reckons he can prove that an old heroin addict in one of his cells is the secret father of a singer in a girl band; a fashion worker has got hold of colour polaroids of Kate Moss at a shoot. ‘She has no make-up on and looks quite washed out. Would you be interested in purchasing these pictures? They have never been published, and I know they were making an effort for them not to be seen by the public.’

At worst, these are people volunteering to sell the secrets of those who most trust them – their friends, lovers, family members. A man is currently having a relationship with a woman whose brother is a notorious criminal. They have been together for seven months, he says. They are still together. No matter: he’s selling her. ‘Would you be interested? Cos I have a lot to say!’ A man was once in drugs rehab with a film director. ‘I spent six months in there with him, went to his family home and got to know him quite well.’ No problem, he’s selling him: ‘This would have to be agreed contractually before I met with anybody from the
News of the World
or said another word.’ A man has been visiting a prostitute. He has discovered she is the aunt of a TV presenter. He wants to sell her out – as long as they don’t identify him: he is married.

Some of them try to make sure of their sale by offering evidence to prove their story. A man has got in touch to say that he has just spent the night with a young actress from a TV soap, and that’s a story worth selling and, even better, he says that he managed to sneak a photograph of her giving him oral sex. Another message records a woman’s story about an England footballer: ‘Paula claims that she had a four-week fling with XX in Dec last year. She says they had sex in the back of his car in XX’s pal’s pub. Paula also says she has a jumper with XX’s semen on it.’

Everything is for sale. Nobody is exempt. What begins to emerge is the internal machinery of a commercial enterprise which has never previously existed, an industry which treats human life itself – the soft tissue of the most private, sensitive moments – as a vast quarry full of raw material to be scooped up and sifted and exploited for entertainment. Back in the 1980s, the
News of the World
had specialised in digging into the privacy of criminals. In the 1990s, enriched by the excavation of Princess Diana’s volatile life, they had widened their work to mine the activities of any celebrity, any public figure. Now, they had gone even further. The whole of human life – of anybody, anywhere who had news value – had become one mass of crude bulk for Andy Coulson’s newsroom to extract and refine in a ruthless search for the most intimate, embarrassing, often painful details which could then be converted into precious nuggets for sale in a massive marketplace.

Working in Coulson’s newsroom was not easy. It was dirty and difficult and, in some ways, it was dangerous. But they had to get the story. To run this place required a special kind of team.

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There is a story that Ian Edmondson often liked to tell, about the time when he was still only a junior reporter on the
News of the World
and he had a girlfriend who was a reporter on another newspaper. He liked to call her ‘Boobs’. It so happened, he would explain, that Boobs made friends with Tracy Shaw, a particularly eye-catching young actress from the TV soap opera
Coronation Street
who was of great interest to the tabloids. As Edmondson told it, there was one night when the two women had gone out on the town together and afterwards, Boobs had confided in him that Shaw had done some coke. This was obviously a secret, he would say, and one which could cause trouble for Tracy Shaw and potentially for his girlfriend – but also it was obviously a good story for the
News of the World
. So, he recalled with some relish, he had persuaded the trusting Boobs to tell him the whole tale again, secretly recorded her every word and gave it to the paper.

Edmondson liked to play the bastard. It worked for him. From that position at the bottom of the editorial pile at the
News of the World
in the mid-1990s, he rose to become assistant editor, running the newsroom and still playing the bastard. He went through a phase of telling people that his nickname was ‘Love Rat’. It wasn’t, but Edmondson liked the idea. One reporter says he even taped the name to the front of his pigeonhole, apparently hoping that it would catch on. However, it is clear from those who worked for him that he had no need to go to such lengths to give himself a bad name. A lot of people genuinely didn’t like Ian Edmondson. He was relentlessly competitive, with everybody around him. He had to have the biggest car, the biggest salary. He was very fit. He bicycled to work and ran during the lunch hour, but other people ran too, so he made a big show of carrying a rucksack full of bricks when he went out. He used to tell improbable stories about his achievements – that he had rowed for England; that he had a football trial with the Blackburn Rovers youth team and scored the winning goal, in the dying minutes of the game, with an overhead scissors kick; and then told exactly the same story about a trial for Ipswich Town …

He had made friends with Dave Courtney, a burly, shaven-headed Londoner who earned a living by playing the part of a media-friendly gangster. Edmondson liked to confide that he spent a lot of time with gangsters and he reckoned that, after spending a particularly intimate day smoking cigars by the pool with a group of them, one of them had taken him for a ride in his Range Rover, stopped in the middle of nowhere, pulled out a gun and told him he had heard too much that day. Edmondson claimed this guy had made it very clear what would happen if ever he talked but that the gangster had then relaxed and handed him an envelope full of cash. Not everybody believed him.

Andy Coulson was apparently quite happy to take advantage of Edmondson’s burning urge to compete. In November 2004, when he hired him as associate news editor, he already had somebody doing the same job, Jimmy Weatherup. Coulson left both of them in place to fight for his approval. They loathed each other. The results were often chaotic. Jimmy Weatherup would send out a reporter to cover a story. Ian Edmondson would call the reporter and send him somewhere else. A reporter would come up with a story idea and tell it to Edmondson, who would take him aside and tell him to keep the idea quiet for a week – ‘Jimmy’s off next week, and I’d like to have something good for myself.’

Weatherup was older and more experienced than Edmondson and he, too, was capable of playing the bastard. He used to like ordering young reporters to go and knock on the door at a particular address, warning them that the man who lived there was notoriously vile-tempered and often physically violent. This was just a trap: the address didn’t exist, and if the reporter claimed to have been there and found nobody in, Weatherup would dump ordure on them. But Weatherup was no kind of street fighter. He appeared to be stuck in a 1970s time warp, playing the Travolta part in
Saturday Night Fever
, tall and slim and with a great deal of preening in front of the mirror. His hair was surprisingly dark, and Edmondson regularly accused him of dyeing it. He wore expensive suits and special gloves for driving and he had a well-known tendency, at the first sight of a sunny day, to turn up in the office in tight-fitting white tennis shorts; and an equally well-known tendency to slide up behind the young female reporters and massage their shoulders or even kiss their necks. He was known as Whispering Jimmy partly because of his smooth, oozing style on the phone and partly because he was so obsessively secretive. Some colleagues knew Weatherup as ‘Secrets’ and Edmondson as ‘Lies’.

All this created a regime in which the naturally intense rivalry between a mass-market newspaper and its competitors was made all the more furious by the back-stabbing tension between the two news editors. Coulson managed to raise the friction still higher by aggravating the long-standing competition between the news desk and the features department. The two sections rarely spoke and frequently fought, hiding their plans from each other, constantly attempting to outdo each other.

The features editor, Jules Stenson, was tough, clever, an unrivalled expert on TV soap operas and widely seen as most likely to succeed Coulson in the editor’s chair. He was also aggressive, particularly with Clive Goodman, with whom, according to one colleague, he had a relationship of mutual loathing. Stenson’s relationship with Ian Edmondson was just as bad. One of the journalists who worked there remembers the news desk in April 2005 trying to buy the story of a woman in Yorkshire who had admitted helping her seriously ill husband to die. She had been cleared in court, and the news desk sent a reporter to offer her £5,000 for the intimate close-up tale of her husband’s death, but the reporter found that she had already been offered £6,000 by somebody else. The news desk bid higher; the rival went higher too. At £14,000, the news desk pulled out and then discovered that they had been bidding against Jules Stenson.

Andy Coulson kept his hands close to the steering wheel. He chaired the daily conference when the heads of all the editorial departments – news, features, sport, showbiz, royal, politics – would pitch their ideas. He liked to show that he was on top of stories. During the spring of 2005, for example, he personally oversaw a project to snatch an interview with the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, where he was serving his time for the murder of thirteen women. This was kept very secret. The reporter on the job was instructed not to tell colleagues. For maximum discretion, Edmondson could have managed the job himself, but Coulson liked to think he knew how to run an investigation and he duly authorised the payment of a hefty fee to Sutcliffe’s brother, Carl, and also the purchase of a camera and recorder which were specially designed to trick the metal detectors at Broadmoor. Carl Sutcliffe concealed them inside a plaster cast and visited his unsuspecting brother who then found himself splashed across the
News of the World
, primarily on the grounds that he had become fat – ‘a balding 17-stone slob’, as the paper put it.

Still, there was a limit to how much Coulson could intervene. He would sit in his office, banging out emails with terse instructions to those around him, but he relied on two right-hand men to enforce his will. Each of them had offices which flanked his own at the top end of the newsroom. To Coulson’s left, looking out, was Stuart Kuttner, who had been the managing editor at the
News of the World
for nearly fifteen years.

There was something dark about Kuttner with his skeletal face, his slow, calculating manner and his original London accent only slightly disguised as posh. Since 1987, he had served half a dozen editors in a role like that of the Harvey Keitel character in
Pulp Fiction
– he cleaned up mess. If any kind of threat came out of any kind of dark corner – scandals in the newsroom, rebellious reporters, angry victims – Kuttner would deal with it, get rid of the body, clear up the blood. He told one colleague that his favourite book was Machiavelli’s
The Prince
with its admiration for manipulation and deceit as the necessary tools of power. Kuttner enjoyed power. Former colleagues say he liked to use the messengers as his private staff, sending them out to buy him fresh fruit in the morning or to take his briefcase down to his car at the end of the day. He was notorious for the violence of his bollockings. But primarily his power was financial. He was responsible for the editorial budget, and all those who worked for him agree that he treated the newspaper’s money as though it were his own: he wanted every penny accounted for.