Hack Attack Read online

  Early on the morning of 8 August 2006, Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested on suspicion of intercepting voicemail messages from the royal household. A few weeks later, the police contacted Gordon Taylor to tell him his voicemail had been hacked. Taylor told Mark Lewis and it was then, like a boy picking up a stone and starting an avalanche, that Lewis decided to sue.

  3. 8 July 2009 to 14 July 2009

  At half past four in the afternoon on Wednesday 8 July 2009, we posted my news story on the Guardian website, headed ‘Murdoch papers paid £1 million to gag phone-hacking victims’. It said:

  Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers has paid out more than £1 million to settle legal cases that threatened to reveal evidence of his journalists’ repeated involvement in the use of criminal methods to get stories.

  The payments secured secrecy over out-of-court settlements in three cases that threatened to expose evidence of Murdoch journalists using private investigators who illegally hacked into the mobile phone messages of numerous public figures as well as gaining unlawful access to confidential personal data, including tax records, social security files, bank statements and itemised phone bills. Cabinet ministers, MPs, actors and sports stars were all targets of the private investigators.

  Today, the Guardian reveals details of the suppressed evidence, which may open the door to hundreds more legal actions by victims of News Group, the Murdoch company that publishes the News of the World and the Sun, as well as provoking police inquiries into reporters who were involved and the senior executives responsible for them. The evidence also poses difficult questions for:

  • Conservative leader David Cameron’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, who was deputy editor and then editor of the News of the World when, the suppressed evidence shows, journalists for whom he was responsible were engaging in hundreds of apparently illegal acts;

  • Murdoch executives who, albeit in good faith, misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public;

  • The Metropolitan Police, which did not alert all those whose phones were targeted, and the Crown Prosecution Service, which did not pursue all possible charges against News Group personnel;

  • The Press Complaints Commission, which claimed to have conducted an investigation but failed to uncover any evidence of illegal activity.

  The story traced the course of the legal action by Gordon Taylor and his two associates and went on to quote the unnamed police sources who had suggested to me that there were thousands of victims of phone-hacking, adding that these sources ‘suggest that MPs from all three parties and Cabinet ministers, including former deputy prime minister John Prescott and former Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell were among the targets’.

  As the story was posted on the website, the Guardian news desk asked a reporter, Caroline Davies, to call John Prescott, to get a reaction quote. Ten minutes later, she came back, flushed with success after tracking down the famously blunt and plain-speaking politician. She started to reel off a jumble of comments, capturing Prescott’s tendency to produce multiple half-formed sentences without finishing any of them. The deputy editor, Paul Johnson, asked her to slow down, go back to the beginning of her notes and just to tell him exactly what Prescott had told her. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I told him the gist of the story, and he said “FOOKIN HELL!”’

  A few hours later, we published a second story on the website, headed ‘Trail of hacking and deceit under nose of Tory PR chief’, which delivered more detail without referring to the paperwork on which it was based. It explained that in a short period of Mulcaire activity during the spring of 2006, those who had been targeted included not only John Prescott and Tessa Jowell but also the rock star George Michael; the actor Gwyneth Paltrow; the former Conservative MP who had become mayor of London, Boris Johnson; and the radical Scottish politician, Tommy Sheridan. The story went on to publish more of the detail of Steve Whittamore’s blagging for the News of the World, naming public figures whose information he had stolen and the organisations whose security had been penetrated by his network.

  The story had been damped down a little by the Guardian’s legal department. For fear of UK libel law, which makes it dangerous to criticise people who can afford aggressive lawyers, I had had to steer clear of any direct suggestion that Andy Coulson knew about the illegal activity. A few days before we published, I had submitted a detailed question to him about the Gordon Taylor settlement, and his secretary at Conservative HQ had replied to say that ‘it didn’t ring any bells with him’. For the same reason, I had had to suggest that Murdoch’s executives might have been acting ‘in good faith’ when they misled a parliamentary select committee, the Press Complaints Commission and the public. Personally, I believed that they had been deliberately lying. If they really had been acting in good faith, surely they would have gone back to the select committee and everybody else a year before, when they were passed the new evidence in the Gordon Taylor case, and they would have announced that, although the details of the legal action were confidential, they now realised that their whole ‘rogue reporter’ story was untrue. But they hadn’t done that.

  What was more, News International had put out a lie before we published the story. When I had called them a few days earlier, I had been wary of telling them too much. I was worried that they might try to pre-empt me by putting out some twisted version of the story – a ‘spoiler’ calculated to make mine look old and unpublishable, without disclosing too much of the truth. So, I had asked – with calculated naivety – if they knew anything about any of their titles paying damages for hacking the mobile phones of possibly three people in the footballing world. That night, a friendly source had called me to say I had caused some kind of collective anxiety attack at News International’s headquarters: ‘They are all chasing around blaming each other for having given you the story.’

  The following morning, the News International press officer called back to say that she had spoken to the managing editors and the lawyers for all four titles: ‘No one has any knowledge about this … This particular case means nothing to anyone here, and I’ve talked to all of the people who would be involved.’ That certainly was a lie, although the press officer did not know it, calculated on the assumption that we didn’t know enough to run a story.

  By contrast, Clive Goodman, on whose head News International had shovelled so much blame, chose to be strangely silent. When I called him, he said: ‘I’m not even going to say “No comment” as a comment.’

  * * *

  The story went off like dynamite, though there was obviously something wrong with the detonator. Certainly, there was an explosion. John Prescott worked his way through broadcast studios, roaring his indignation like a bull in pain. Several other Labour MPs started chasing Andy Coulson’s tail like dogs on a fox, pointing out that it raised questions about David Cameron’s judgement in hiring him. And a handful of public figures surfaced to explain how vile it was to have their privacy invaded. But the explosion went off at half strength. It soon became clear that there was a shortage of people who were interested in getting into a fight with Rupert Murdoch.

  The rest of Fleet Street did their best to ignore the story. That was no surprise. They had multiple motives for concealing the truth from their readers – because they themselves had a history of playing the same illegal games as the News of the World and/or they supported the Conservatives and didn’t want to give oxygen to the Andy Coulson angle and/or they were owned by Rupert Murdoch. I heard later from an executive at The Times that the editor, James Harding, had been ‘puce with rage’ at the idea that he had to follow up on this Guardian rubbish. The political correspondent of Murdoch’s Sky News channel solemnly warned his viewers that ‘this is very much being ramped up politically’.

  In an attempt to get the story covered elsewhere, the Guardian press office had asked me to brief two broadcast journalists from Channel 4 News and the BBC. That Wednesday morning, before we posted the story, I had met
them in a café at Victoria Station. The Channel 4 man brought a crew and shot an interview, which they used prominently that evening. The BBC man went off to consult his bosses, who then suffered some kind of nervous collapse and refused to run anything until Channel 4 did and, even then, opted to run it low down in the bulletins.

  In the political world, the Labour government might have decided to leap on the vulnerability of Andy Coulson and challenge David Cameron to explain what steps he had taken to ensure that Coulson was clean before he hired him; complain that he had hired Coulson with his eyes shut simply so that he could have Murdoch’s man in his private office; move to set up some kind of inquiry. The government did no such thing. Instead, the prime minister, Gordon Brown, said merely that it raised serious questions; and a Home Office minister, David Hanson, told the House of Commons that these were serious allegations and he would find out more and report back to them. For his part, the Conservative leader, David Cameron, professed to be indifferent: his office briefed reporters that he was ‘very relaxed’ about the affair. (The briefings from his office, of course, were given by people who were working for Andy Coulson.)

  There was some sign of action from the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport, to whom the Murdoch executives had given misleading evidence in 2007. I had called the committee chairman, the Conservative MP John Whittingdale, as we published our first story. He and several Labour members were now saying that the committee would recall the Murdoch witnesses. That night, on BBC’s Newsnight, Murdoch’s former editor at the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil, roundly declared that this was ‘one of the most significant media stories of modern times’.

  Murdoch himself surfaced briefly in New York, where a reporter from Bloomberg asked him for a quote about the Gordon Taylor settlement. Shrugging and shaking his head, he declared that his company couldn’t have settled the legal action as the Guardian claimed. If they had done, he would have known about it, he said. That raised the interesting possibility that James Murdoch had signed off on a £1 million settlement and decided not to tell his own father in case he went ballistic. There was no word at all from News International.

  * * *

  By the next morning, Thursday 9 July, there was a small storm raging, and the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, announced that he had asked his assistant commissioner, John Yates, to look into the whole matter.

  I was running on adrenalin. I had slept about four hours and was up at dawn, trying to write follow-up stories while simultaneously taking endless calls from foreign news media and BBC radio stations wanting to interview me, and a steady trickle of calls from lawyers and agents acting for public figures who suspected that they had been targeted by Mulcaire. There were also calls from potentially very useful new sources. Several journalists who had worked at the News of the World emerged cautiously from the shadows, talking on the strict condition that their identities never be disclosed for fear that their careers would be ended immediately, explaining in detail how Andy Coulson had commissioned crime and the paper had paid for it. Three people, including one just out of jail, got in touch to name other private investigators who had worked for the News of the World.

  By five o’clock in the afternoon, with my head buzzing, I had written a story for the next day’s paper, disclosing that the former England football striker, Alan Shearer, and the manager of Manchester United, Alex Ferguson, were among those whose messages had been intercepted from Gordon Taylor’s phone. It was not much of a tale, but it kept the affair alive. Just then, I was surprised to hear that the assistant commissioner, John Yates, was already prepared to make a statement. A small bony hand pinched my heart as it occurred to me that he might rubbish the whole story.

  I had never met John Yates nor had anything to do with him, but other journalists said he was intelligent and straight. So, in spite of my anxiety, I was reasonably confident when Yates stepped out in front of Scotland Yard to address a collection of journalists. Dressed in a dark suit, bristling with quiet authority, he explained that that morning the commissioner had asked him to ‘establish the facts’. ‘I was not involved in the original case,’ he said, ‘and clearly come at this with an independent mind.’ He proceeded to gently demolish our work.

  We had suggested there were thousands of victims. Yates said that those targeted by Goodman and Mulcaire ‘may have run into hundreds of people, but our inquiries showed that they only used the tactic against a far smaller number of individuals’. We had said a mass of victims had never been contacted by the police. Yates said: ‘Where there was clear evidence that people had potentially been the subject of tapping, they were all contacted by the police.’ We had said John Prescott was targeted. Yates said police ‘had not uncovered any evidence to suggest that John Prescott’s phone had been tapped’. This was worrying. I had no way of proving he was wrong. I had good sources – but they were all anonymous and off the record. I had paperwork – but I had promised not to use it. We were wide open to attack.

  There was something else that was more worrying. Why was Yates saying this? If he was wrong – if, in fact, what the Guardian had published was correct – then this smelled very rotten, as if he thought it was all right to cover up the failures of the original inquiry and/or to do a favour for Murdoch’s newspapers. But supposing he was right! Supposing the two sources somehow had misunderstood the number of hacking victims. Supposing Glenn Mulcaire had ‘targeted’ John Prescott by having him followed, not by hacking his phone or doing anything illegal. Supposing there was something wrong with that paperwork: it really wouldn’t be difficult to forge the contents of an email … Rusbridger and I had gone in very deep. If Yates was right, if our story was rubbish, we were in a lot of trouble.

  Yates went on to say that the whole case had been the object of ‘the most careful investigation by very experienced detectives’ and that the Crown Prosecution Service had ‘carefully examined all the evidence’. Since no additional evidence had come to light, he could see no reason to reopen the inquiry. He finished by acknowledging the real concerns of people who feared their privacy had been breached. ‘I therefore need to ensure that we have been diligent, reasonable and sensible and taken all proper steps to ensure that, where we have evidence that people have been the subject of any form of phone-tapping, or that there is any suspicion that they might have been, that they have been informed.’

  Yates’s statement hurt us. And there was a little more pain, too, from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer QC, another man with a good reputation for straight dealing, who announced that he was ordering an urgent review of the material which police had given to his prosecutors in 2006 but then appeared to prejudge his own inquiry by adding: ‘I have no reason to consider that there was anything inappropriate in the prosecutions that were undertaken in this case.’ And something else to worry about: the select committee had decided not only to call back the Murdoch witnesses but also to call me to give a public account of the story on Tuesday of the following week.

  The newspapers who had done their best to ignore our story were now happy to report that there would be no new police investigation. Meanwhile, News International still said nothing. It was like we were beggars at their banquet. Who were we to gatecrash their cosy world? We would be ignored, or perhaps we would be punished. You could almost feel them watching, weighing it up: how much did we know, how much could we hurt them, how much could they safely deny? It took a bad mistake from me finally to give them a clear answer to their questions.

  * * *

  That Thursday night, as John Yates’s statement made its mark, I went live on BBC Newsnight with the celebrity PR agent Max Clifford, who had been identified as a hacking victim at the original trial of Goodman and Mulcaire; the former deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Brian Paddick; and John Prescott. The anchor, Gavin Esler, immediately asked me how damaging Yates’s statement was for the Guardian, but the conversation bounced harm
lessly around the subject – Clifford suggested he might now sue, Paddick said there should be some kind of independent police inquiry, Prescott worried out loud that Yates had taken so little time to come to his conclusion. Then, in the last minute, Esler turned back to me and asked me what else the Guardian might reveal. I babbled a bit about possibly naming executives who were involved but told him: ‘You have seen the best of what we’ve got.’ That was my mistake.

  For Murdoch’s people, calculating their next move, and looking at our stories with the eyes of experienced journalists, it was already obvious that we had quoted no evidence of any kind. We simply stated the facts, but we used no named sources, no quotes from documents. And if that really was the best of what we had, then they could see that we were not going to produce any sources or documents. In other words, we couldn’t prove a thing.

  By Friday morning, our political correspondents in the House of Commons were reporting that Murdoch journalists were briefing Conservative MPs that the Guardian could not back up its story. The House of Commons select committee had already told me and Rusbridger that we must appear before them on the following Tuesday, and now we were warned that several Murdoch-friendly MPs on the committee were ‘getting ready to barbecue you’. Then, on Friday evening, the tiger finally showed its claws.

  News International released a three-page statement which poured down scorn on the Guardian. In the last forty-eight hours, they said, they had conducted a thorough investigation, which augmented the original investigation they had conducted in 2006 when Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested. In addition, the original police investigation, which had included live monitoring of both men, had been ‘incredibly thorough’. Based on all this, they concluded that ‘there is not and never has been evidence’ that News of the World journalists had accessed anybody’s voicemails, or instructed anybody to access voicemails, or that there was systematic corporate illegality at News International. ‘It goes without saying that, had the police uncovered such evidence, charges would have been brought against other News of the World personnel. Not only have there been no such charges, but the police have not considered it necessary to arrest or question any other member of News of the World staff.’ Specifically, the statement continued, it was untrue that police had found evidence that ‘thousands’ of mobile phones had been hacked; untrue that police had found evidence of the involvement in hacking of other staff; untrue that there was evidence of their hacking the phones of John Prescott or any other victims named by the Guardian; untrue that their executives had sanctioned payment for hacking. ‘All of these irresponsible and unsubstantiated allegations against the News of the World and its journalists are false.’