Hack Attack Page 5
The best sight was over to his right, just to the side of the back bench, where he could always see it, where everybody could see it – the trophy cabinet. He had just ordered it brand new, in April 2005, because he was proud of what his staff had achieved. This was the biggest-selling paper in the country – 3.5 million copies every Sunday. It was probably the biggest-selling paper in the Western world. It had the biggest budgets, the biggest impact. Nobody beat the News of the World. Which was why the new cabinet now displayed the biggest prize in British journalism – the award for Newspaper of the Year for 2004/5.
In the last twelve months, they had brought in one big scoop after another. David Beckham might be a great footballer and he might have thought he was clever enough to have an affair without his wife or anybody else finding out, but they’d caught him and exposed him for sleeping with his personal assistant, Rebecca Loos, and spread the story over seven pages. A few months later, they’d done the same with the England football manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, when they caught him having an affair with Faria Alam, a secretary at the Football Association. To top that, a month later they had exposed the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, who had been having an affair with a married American publisher, Kimberly Quinn. As a bonus, they discovered that a Guardian journalist, Simon Hoggart, was also having an affair with Quinn, so a few weeks later they had tossed him into the mix as well. Week after week, they had pounded the opposition papers.
For Andy Coulson, aged thirty-seven, this was a peak. He had come a long way in a short time. He had left school at the age of eighteen, armed only with some A levels, a very good brain and one burning ambition: to become a showbiz reporter. It took him just two years of working on a local paper in Essex to hit his target. In 1988, aged only twenty, he was hired by the Sun to become part of the team that produced the gossip column, Bizarre. The column was brash and loud – just like its editor, Piers Morgan. It was obsessed with the private lives of rock stars, film stars, TV stars, anybody who could sprinkle glitter on the column’s gossip. Coulson was pitched into a world of A-list celebrities and Class A drugs.
There were some people working on Bizarre who disappeared headlong into a blur of non-stop partying. One of Coulson’s closest friends, Sean Hoare, who worked beside him on the column, used to start the day with what he called ‘a rock star’s breakfast’ – a Jack Daniel’s and a line of coke – and then he would carry on partying with whatever PR people or celebs would find him a story to justify his expenses.
‘My job,’ Hoare used to say, ‘is to take drugs with rock stars.’
There was a tradition, known as the Friday Feeling, when Hoare or one of the other journalists would go off to the Sun cashier and draw out £300 and buy some charlie (it was an old News International tradition that some of the back-up staff would always have a nice supply) and then they’d get coked out of their heads and start the weekend.
Those who liked Coulson used to say he was calm at the core; he would always stay straight enough to file his copy. In spite of his youth, he seemed to have landed fully formed, with his light blue shirt and his dark blue suit, all neat and grown up. Others said he was cold, that no matter what was going on, Andy would always survive; behind that mask of mild-mannered competence, he was ruthless.
Hoare was furious with him one time when Hoare had brought in a story about a famous actress only to find that Coulson, first, refused to publish it; second, took the famous actress on holiday; third, was clearly being rewarded in her bed; fourth, and worst of all, told the famous actress how Hoare had managed to get the story in the first place, with the result that the source was exposed and lost forever. When Hoare discovered all this, he told Coulson direct and to his face that he was a complete cunt. Coulson replied with a line which became a regular catchphrase as he worked his way upwards: ‘I’ll make it up to you, mate.’ As though it never mattered what you did, because you could always throw a favour in somebody’s direction and just move on. Within six years, he had replaced Piers Morgan as editor of the Bizarre column.
Four years later, in January 1998, Coulson climbed further up the tree and became associate editor of the Sun, working alongside the new deputy editor – a sharp, sassy, ambitious young woman called Rebekah. They already knew each other a bit. Now, the two of them bonded. People guessed they must be sleeping together, though nobody was sure. They made a team – they were both young and clever, they had both started with nothing and they both shared an intense ambition. And together they made it.
In May 2000, Rupert Murdoch moved Rebekah Brooks to the editor’s chair at the News of the World. She immediately recruited Coulson as her deputy. He worked hard for her, set up a new investigations department, handled the detail of stories for her and made sure the staff were happy. He had a good reputation in the newsroom. While Brooks was off in the clouds, making contacts among very important people, Coulson would turn up at the staff parties, and say hi to people in the newsroom. He rewarded himself with a Porsche Boxster with a top speed of 165 mph and a price tag of £35,000. But people began to notice that the more powerful he became, the more names he forgot. After a while, he was reduced to calling most of the men ‘mate’ and most of the women ‘sweetheart’.
Three years later, in January 2003, Rupert Murdoch gave Brooks the Sun to edit and made Coulson boss at the News of the World. His new position gave him power, and he was happy to use it against those who crossed him. For example, he didn’t like Roy Greenslade, the former editor of the Daily Mirror who had become a professor of journalism at City University, London. So he withdrew the funding for two student places which the News of the World had been sponsoring. The head of the City journalism department, Adrian Monck, had lunch with Coulson and sweet-talked him into restoring the funding. But, as he got up to leave, Coulson added: ‘One thing, mate. I want you to give me Roy’s head on a plate.’ Monck refused: City lost its funding.
It was not simply that he was himself capable of being cold. More important, he was required to be ruthless. From his proprietor and the board of News Corp 3,500 miles away in New York, through the chief executive of News International, Les Hinton, who sat in the same building in Wapping, east London, the unstated message to him and to Rebekah Brooks, editing the Sun in the same building, and to every other editor in every other part of the empire was constant and simple: ‘Get the story – no matter what.’
The previous month, March 2005, Coulson had been to the Hilton Hotel to pick up his big award, for Newspaper of the Year. Afterwards, when he was interviewed by the Press Gazette, he had shrugged off the sneering disdain of outsiders who seemed to think his kind of journalism was not really respectable.
‘I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,’ he said. ‘And this goes for everyone on the News of the World. The readers are the judges. That’s the most important thing. And I think we should be proud of what we do.’
* * *
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 pl
ayer 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.
* * *
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.