The Pugin Room in the Houses of Parliament is a small chamber where tea and other refreshments are served in a comfortable setting overlooking the Thames. Named for the architect who designed the elaborate Gothic Revival interiors of the parliamentary complex, it is wood-paneled and ornate, with small, low tables that can’t quite hide a worn red carpet. The quiet conversations are occasionally interrupted by the clanging of a bell that notifies members of an upcoming vote.
In these surroundings I recently sat with John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister to Tony Blair and currently (as Baron Prescott of Kingston-upon-Hull) a member of the House of Lords. In 2006 one of Britain’s tabloid newspapers, the Daily Mirror, revealed that Prescott had been carrying on with a secretary in his office. The *Daily Mirror’*s competitors, eager to catch up, were scrambling for additional details. One of them, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, allegedly hacked the voice-mail messages left on the telephone of Prescott’s chief of staff, Joan Hammell. Prescott had been aware at the time of something amiss—messages known to have been left had somehow been deleted—but he put it down to a technical glitch. Only later, as the dimensions of Britain’s widening phone-hacking scandal began to emerge, was he able to piece a larger story together and then locate his own part of the story inside it.
After years of virtually ignoring evidence of phone hacking that it held in its possession, on April 5 Scotland Yard arrested the former assistant news editor of the News of the World, Ian Edmondson, and the paper’s chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, in connection with a new investigation. Three days later, after deftly stonewalling parliamentary inquiries and paying more than $2 million in settlements to keep the matter under wraps, Murdoch’s News Corp. offered an “unreserved apology and an admission of liability” to Joan Hammell and seven other victims of phone hacking. The seven are British actress Sienna Miller and her stepmother, Kelly Hoppen; a British member of Parliament, Tessa Jowell, and her husband, David Mills; a former Sky Sports commentator, Andy Gray; the soccer agent Sky Andrew; and Nicola Phillips, a London-based publicist. All of these seven have filed lawsuits. The following day the company sent letters to nine more plaintiffs. Seven additional lawsuits have yet to be officially filed but appear imminent. News Corp. says it plans to offer a settlement to those with “justifiable claims” of phone hacking. “Every day there were more damaging disclosures, death by a thousand cuts,” one News Corp. executive close to the phone-hacking case recently told me, explaining the company’s decision to apologize.
On April 14, the police arrested a third reporter from the News of the World, James Weatherup. The next day, many of the players on the victims’ side of the story gathered in London’s Royal Courts of Justice to learn how the presiding judge planned to deal with their lawsuits. The judge identified four test cases that could proceed later this year—the suits brought by Miller, Hoppen, Gray, and Andrew.
The phone-hacking scandal is the story of a breathtaking moral logjam, a cautionary tale about what can happen when the boundaries between powerful entities blur—when the police and the politicians and the media are jockeying for self-preservation, even as they are aligned in a common interest not to run afoul of one another. It is also what happens when one group, in this case News Corp., Murdoch’s media conglomerate, holds the goods on all the others.
Acting Alone?
Phone hacking is illegal in Britain, but that is a technicality. By all accounts, it was a practice that was indulged in by many reporters at many newspapers. “It started as a playground trick,” Paul McMullan, a former editor at the News of the World, told me. “It was so easy that everybody did it, and there was absolutely no reason not to.” No reason, that is, until there was a very good reason—when the practice suddenly went too far. In 2005, senior aides to the royal family noticed that voice-mail messages they had never listened to were showing up as saved messages in their in-boxes. At the same time, the News of the World was running stories about the princes that could have been known only to a small circle of intimates. One article quoted verbatim from a voice-mail message left by Prince William for his brother, in which William imitated Harry’s girlfriend, Chelsy Davy. Tipped off by the Palace, Scotland Yard launched an investigation.
In 2006 a reporter at the News of the World, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator who worked for the newspaper, Glenn Mulcaire, were found guilty of illegally listening in on the voice-mail messages of the royal household. The two men received short prison terms. The editor of the newspaper, Andy Coulson, resigned from his position, though he stated that he had no personal knowledge of phone hacking being done by anyone in his newsroom. Coulson described the phone hacking of the princes as the work of a “rogue reporter.” He was backed up by other executives at News Corp., which owns Fox Entertainment, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and several of the biggest newspapers in Britain, including the News of the World.
But the “rogue reporter” story wasn’t true. Phone hacking was common practice at the News of the World, and News Corp.’s stance finally crumbled amid a raft of lawsuits, a serious police investigation, and a steady stream of departures from the paper. Besides the victims already mentioned, the alleged targets of the News of the World apparently included the actor Hugh Grant, the comedian Steve Coogan, the model Elle Macpherson, the soccer stars John Terry and David Beckham, and even (the British press has suggested) Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Nobody knows exactly how many people were targets altogether—a conservative estimate would be 2,000, but the true figure could be double or triple that number. The scandal has touched some of the most prized executives at News Corp., such as Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive for its U.K. newspapers, and Les Hinton, the chief executive of Dow Jones & Co., who used to have Brooks’s job. Rupert Murdoch, 80, now must deal with allegations that some of his editors encouraged criminal activity and then repeatedly lied about it—sometimes under oath—to cover it up. The possible ramifications extend to British politicians of all stripes, who have for decades done what they could to curry favor with Murdoch, and to Scotland Yard, which has its own cozy relationships with the tabloids and is widely suspected of having tried to keep a lid on the revelations.
In the Pugin Room, Prescott is happily reliving the story of his unsatisfactory interactions with Scotland Yard. Prescott is something of a court jester and street brawler. When a protesting farmer appeared at one of his campaign rallies in 2001 and threw an egg at him, Prescott threw a punch back. A former ship’s steward and trade-union activist, he revels in his northern accent and his outspoken and brusque persona.
Prescott’s barrel chest puffs out as he sips his tea. He leans back, his legs splayed. For nearly two years, ever since The Guardian published a story revealing that his name had appeared on a list of public figures in handwritten notes belonging to Glenn Mulcaire, Prescott and his lawyers had been asking the police if they had any evidence of his voice mails being intercepted. He had received multiple letters in response, and gave me photocopies of them all.
When I look through the pages, I see that early letters informed him that the police had not uncovered “any evidence to suggest his phone had been tampered with.” The police wrote that they had referred the matter to the mobile-phone companies, which would “take appropriate action,” if warranted.
Prescott persisted, and continued to be told that there was no evidence to indicate that Goodman and Mulcaire had attempted to intercept any of his voice messages. And yet, in some of those same letters, the police told Prescott that in Mulcaire’s files they had found two invoices from News International Supply Company, a subsidiary of News Corp., to Mulcaire’s private-investigation company, for more than $400 each, with references such as “STORY: OTHER PRESCOTT ASSIST-TXT.” Scotland Yard added, “We do not know what this means or what it is referring to.”
When I look up at Prescott, he nods back. “So I said, ‘Why don’t you bloody open them up and see, and then we’ll know whether it is tapped. That’s what investigation is about!’ They still refused to do an investigation.”
“Coulson Had to Know”
Sean Hoare has a smooth and relaxed voice over the phone. He speaks slowly, almost with a drawl, and it seems as if he might chuckle at any moment. He sounds young. It’s hard to square his voice with the man who greets me at the train station in the working-class town of Watford, outside London. Hoare’s face is covered with broken blood vessels, and he walks stiffly, with a limp. He apologizes multiple times for the inadequacy of the restaurant we walk to for a coffee. Hoare is unemployed, though he takes occasional jobs around town. His days as a reporter have clearly taken their toll. “I was paid to drink and do drugs with rock stars,” he tells me, by way of explanation.
Hoare has agreed to talk to me about phone hacking at the News of the World, where he worked for more than 10 years. He is cagey on specifics, worried—as he needs to be—about the legal implications. What seems to offend Hoare more than anything is the fact that the practice of phone hacking, and digging into people’s private lives in general, was so widely encouraged by the paper’s top brass—and yet, when Goodman was found guilty of hacking into phones, he was abandoned by his former colleagues.
Hoare had worked closely with Andy Coulson for a long time. He described an enormously competitive tabloid culture: “Your brief, above all else, was to deliver.” The advantage of phone hacking, Hoare said, was that it provided verification of rumors. Once a journalist had confirmed a story through phone hacking, he could take the tidbit to the celebrity’s publicist and begin trading. “You’d say, I’ve got this detail. I don’t want to fuck over your client, but what do you have for me?” Then the publicist would offer an alternative story, and Hoare would back off, all the while knowing he had the initial piece of information if he ever needed it. “It’s not really about journalism,” he said. “It’s negotiation. It’s basically like Wall Street with words.”
The News of the World is no stranger to criticism of its methods. For instance, it employs “the Fake Sheikh,” who conducts sting operations on politicians and businessmen. In 2001 he recorded Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, making disparaging comments about certain members of the British government and appearing to use her royal status in order to gain clients for her public-relations firm. To prevent publication of her comments, she agreed to an interview with the News of the World about her views on pregnancy and the possibility of undergoing I.V.F. treatments. The paper published the story under the headline MY EDWARD’S NOT GAY, nodding to continued gossip about the prince’s sexuality. Last year, the Fake Sheikh taped Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, offering access to her former husband, Prince Andrew, for more than $700,000.
The News of the World can be a cutthroat environment. Hoare recounted the story of a former colleague, Matt Driscoll, who was dismissed by the newspaper and then sued it, citing the bullying behavior of Coulson and other editors. In November 2009, the court found in favor of Driscoll, and the News of the World was required to pay him about $1.3 million.
Hoare left the paper in 2005, in part because of his drug and alcohol problems. He is an easy witness to discredit, and people I speak to at News Corp. don’t hesitate to try to do so. But it’s not hard to see why Hoare was such a good journalist in his day. He speaks softly enough that I have to lean halfway over the table to hear him. He often sounds as if he walked off the set of a Guy Ritchie movie. He asks as many questions as I do. About Coulson, he says, “Either Andy was a dreadful editor or a liar. You cannot run a newspaper and not know where things come from.” Phone hacking at the News of the World, Hoare goes on, “was encouraged as long as you didn’t get caught. Andy was aware that the practice was going on.”
Paul McMullan told me that phone hacking “was so common that I reckon a quarter of the British population was doing it. Coulson had to know.” McMullan explained that phone hacking was in fact a step down from what he used to do when mobile phones became popular and ran on analog technology. “You could go and legally buy a scanner and sit outside Hugh Grant’s house and listen to his calls as they happened,” McMullan said. “I remember transcribing Prince Charles’s conversations with Camilla just by scanning mobile phones. And Diana talking to her lovers. This goes back a long time.” When the mobile carriers switched to digital technology, scanning became much more expensive, so reporters settled for hacking into people’s mobile-phone messages.
Hugh Grant recently wrote an article, “The Bugger, Bugged,” for the April 11 issue of the New Statesman, guest-edited by his former girlfriend Jemima Khan, in which he interviewed McMullan. Grant wrote that just before Christmas, when his car had broken down on a country road, a white van pulled over, not to help him, but to snap pictures. The man at the wheel of the van was McMullan, who now runs a pub in the seaside town of Dover. McMullan still keeps a camera in the glove compartment, so that he can practice his old craft on a freelance basis when the opportunity arises, as it did with Grant. In the end McMullan offered Grant a ride, and on the way McMullan told the actor that he had been a victim of phone hacking.
When Khan asked Grant to write an article on the subject for the magazine, he returned to McMullan’s bar and secretly taped the conversation. With regard to phone hacking, McMullan told Grant that Andy Coulson “knew all about it and regularly ordered it.” Because he didn’t know he was being taped, he was generous with his accusations. He said Rebekah Brooks, too, knew that the practice was common, and that because she rode horses regularly with David Cameron, he also must have known. McMullan added that “20 per cent of the Met [Metropolitan Police] has taken backhanders from tabloid hacks. So why would they want to open up that can of worms?”
Quiet Settlements
During the investigation into Mulcaire and Goodman, in 2006, Scotland Yard seized a trove of computer records, audiotapes, handwritten notes, and paperwork of various kinds. The records yielded 4,332 names or partial names of people in whom the two men had an interest, along with 2,978 mobile-phone numbers, 30 tapes that appeared to contain recordings of voice-mail messages, and 91 PIN codes to access voice-mail boxes. The number of victims was potentially enormous, in other words, and the raw material for a thorough investigation was essentially sitting on the table.
But Scotland Yard notified only five people (beyond the princes and the royal household) that their voice mails may have been intercepted, then let the matter rest. Those five appeared in Mulcaire’s indictment: Liberal Democrat member of Parliament Simon Hughes; Elle Macpherson; soccer agent Sky Andrew; Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association; and Max Clifford, a powerful British publicist, who has made a career of brokering stories between celebrities and tabloids. In May 2007 the Press Complaints Commission, a self-regulatory body overseeing the newspaper industry, published a report on phone hacking in which it said that it had found no evidence of wrongdoing other than the episodes that had already come out.
Two of the people notified by Scotland Yard—Gordon Taylor and Max Clifford—sued the News of the World. In an effort to prevent additional names from coming to light, the paper settled with Taylor in 2008 for more than $1 million.
Rupert Murdoch seemed to have had no knowledge of the Taylor deal a year later, in the summer of 2009, when The Guardian reported on the settlement. “If that had happened, I would know about it,” Murdoch said when asked about the payment in an interview from the annual Allen & Co. conference, in Sun Valley, Idaho, with Bloomberg news service, the night the Guardian story went up on the Web. The Taylor payment had been personally approved by Murdoch’s son James, to whom Rupert had handed control of his company’s operations in Europe and Asia.
In the case of Clifford, the News of the World reached a settlement masked as a business arrangement, agreeing to pay him roughly $1.5 million, including legal fees, ostensibly in exchange for providing the paper with stories about his clients and others. Clifford had won a court order in February 2010 demanding that Mulcaire name people at the News of the World who had asked the investigator to target him, and that he reveal to whom he had provided Clifford’s voice-mail messages. Rebekah Brooks contacted Clifford and arranged to have lunch. “We got together and quickly resolved our differences,” he told me.
After revelations about the Taylor settlement, News of the World executives and the author of the Guardian story, Nick Davies, were called before a parliamentary inquiry. Les Hinton testified that “we went to extraordinary lengths” to investigate phone hacking. “There was never any evidence delivered to me that suggested that the conduct of Clive Goodman spread beyond him.” But in the course of his appearance, Davies produced evidence that implicated two other News of the World reporters, Neville Thurlbeck and Greg Miskiw, in phone hacking. That evidence included e-mails from a junior reporter at the News of the World delivering transcripts of what appeared to be Taylor’s hacked voice-mail messages to Thurlbeck. And Davies provided another document, a contract signed by Miskiw offering Mulcaire a bonus if he could nail down a story the News of the World was pursuing about Taylor’s personal life. Miskiw is widely remembered for a remark caught on tape, 10 years ago, in which he sought to explain the purpose of tabloid journalism to a young reporter: “That is what we do—we go out and destroy other people’s lives.”
The British press gave virtually no attention to Davies’s testimony. The theory at The Guardian is that the use of phone hacking had become so common that many newspapers were loath to point fingers. Indeed, in 2003 the Information Commissioner’s Office—the agency charged with enforcing data privacy and government transparency—had looked into the activities of another private investigator, Steve Whittamore, who worked for many British newspapers. Over a three-year period, the I.C.O. revealed, more than 300 journalists had hired Whittamore. The newspapers spanned Fleet Street and were not limited to the tabloids. The Daily Mail was the most frequent client. The News of the World ranked fifth. News Corp.’s Times of London and Sunday Times were also among Whittamore’s clients, as was the Guardian Media Group’s Observer. The report covered not just phone hacking but other “dark arts,” such as blagging (tricking organizations such as phone companies and banks into disclosing personal information), illegal searches of police and other government records, and using cell-phone numbers to get private addresses.
Operation Weeting
For a long time, The Guardian was the only newspaper that would cover the phone-hacking story seriously. Frustrated by the lack of attention in Britain, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger e-mailed New York Times executive editor Bill Keller and encouraged him to look into the phone-hacking story. In September 2010, more than a year after the Guardian revelations, The New York Times ran a lengthy story on the scandal which quoted Sean Hoare saying that Coulson actually encouraged phone hacking. Unnamed Scotland Yard detectives alleged that they had deliberately curtailed their investigation because of a close relationship with the News of the World. The Guardian followed up with another story and quoted Paul McMullan, who stated that Coulson surely knew what was going on.
By the fall of 2010, references to Coulson were more newsworthy than they would have been several months earlier, because Coulson was now the chief communications officer for the new prime minister, David Cameron. Under pressure, Scotland Yard reopened its investigation to look at “new” evidence—in other words, evidence other than the ample evidence it already had in its files—and it questioned Hoare and McMullan “under caution,” which meant that anything they said could be used to prosecute them. It was unusual to interview potential witnesses in a case as suspects, a tactic that was likely—perhaps intended—to intimidate others who might otherwise speak out. John Prescott, meanwhile, had been confirmed in his suspicions, and he formally applied for a full judicial review of Scotland Yard’s handling of the case.
In December, Scotland Yard announced that it had found no new evidence of crime in its latest inquiry, but civil lawsuits were beginning to unearth what the police had not. Lawyers for Sienna Miller claimed that one of the *News of the World’*s most senior journalists, news editor Ian Edmondson, had instructed investigator Glenn Mulcaire to listen to Miller’s voice mails, as well as those of her ex-boyfriend Jude Law and Law’s personal assistant. Other lawsuits uncovered more names of News of the World reporters in Mulcaire’s notes, exploding News Corp.’s “rogue reporter” defense.
Just before Christmas, News Corp. suspended Ian Edmondson. On January 13, the Crown Prosecution Service said it would mount a “comprehensive review” of phone-hacking material held by Scotland Yard. On January 21, Andy Coulson resigned as David Cameron’s director of communications, saying that “continued coverage of events connected to my old job at the News of the World has made it difficult for me to give the 110 percent needed in this role.” He went on to observe, “When the spokesman needs a spokesman it’s time to move on.” Coulson stood by his position that he was not aware of any phone hacking that had occurred on his watch. Five days later, after News Corp. handed over a trove of e-mails, Scotland Yard announced a new investigation into phone hacking—Operation Weeting, it is called—run by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers of the Serious and Organised Crime Command, the division that usually deals with organized crime. There are now about 45 officers working on the case.
The Plaintiffs
It’s hard to find anyone among a certain stratum in London these days who doesn’t believe his or her phone was hacked by the News of the World. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s communications czar, told me he felt sure his phone had been hacked—he remembers arranging private meetings via cell phone, only to be surprised by a News of the World photographer when he arrived. So far, two dozen people have been willing to step forward and take on the newspaper in the courts. The names of all the litigants are not known, because many of the actions have been brought privately. Here are some of the plaintiffs:
Steve Coogan: British comedian and actor. In August 2005, the News of the World wrote that Courtney Love claimed she was pregnant with Coogan’s child. The story came out shortly after Coogan and his wife had divorced. Both Coogan and Love dismissed the story. Coogan is suing the paper and Glenn Mulcaire on the grounds that they intercepted his voice-mail messages and misused his private information.
Brian Paddick: A former deputy assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard (and the highest-ranking openly gay police officer), Paddick came to the conclusion that his phone had been hacked after the News of the World reported that he had bought his partner a watch while on vacation in Sydney, Australia. Paddick had told no one else of the purchase, but had called his bank from his cell phone to lift the limit on his credit card.
Nicola Phillips: A former assistant to Max Clifford, she claims that the newspaper accessed her voice mail in order to match a story that was being published in the Sunday Mirror and the Mail on Sunday, alleging that Ralph Fiennes had cheated on his girlfriend with a Romanian singer, Cornelia Crisan. Phillips was a friend of Ian Edmondson’s. When I talked to her in April, she told me that Edmondson called her when she first filed her court papers, in March of last year, to discourage her from moving forward. “I’m risking everything by taking this case, in terms of who I’m taking on, and that of course is a worry,” she said. “I’m small. I’m of no interest to anybody. I’m not a celebrity. I’m not famous. I’m still having to live day to day and having to go out and work to pay my bills. I’ve been up and down over this.” She added that she has been tempted to drop her case, “but then I can’t run away because I’ll bankrupt myself and be on for everybody’s legal costs.” If a plaintiff drops a legal case, British courts require the plaintiff to pay the defendant’s legal fees.
Leslie Ash: A British TV star, she is married to Lee Chapman, a former soccer star. When Ash went to the hospital for a cracked rib and contracted a potentially fatal hospital infection, she and her husband were hounded by paparazzi. She has seen evidence from the police that shows the names and phone numbers of her sons, who were 11 and 13 at the time of her hospitalization, in Mulcaire’s files. She believes that the News of the World was listening to messages her sons left her when she was in the hospital.
George Galloway: A former member of Parliament, he was informed of evidence last fall that Glenn Mulcaire had hacked his phone. He told the BBC that the News of the World had offered him “substantial sums of money” to settle his suit.
Paul Gascoigne: A former soccer star, Gascoigne alleges that the News of the World invaded his privacy, thereby hindering his drug and alcohol recovery.
Chris Tarrant: The host of Britain’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Tarrant decided to sue after he found out that Mulcaire had his cell-phone number and three others linked to him, including that of his estranged wife.
Kelly Hoppen: She is Sienna Miller’s stepmother and an interior designer. Earlier this year, her lawyers obtained evidence from her phone company, Vodafone, that on June 22, 2009, the day after the Mail on Sunday wrote that Hoppen was having a relationship with Guy Ritchie, her cell phone had been called by someone who hung up when Hoppen answered, and then called back to dial into her voice mail for about 25 seconds. Vodafone disclosed that the calls had been made from a cell phone registered to the News of the World in the name of feature writer Dan Evans. In High Court in February, lawyers for the News of the World said Evans had dialed the number in error.
Sienna Miller: Miller was one of the first to file a suit, and her case has driven many of the most important revelations. The 29-year-old’s relationship with actor Jude Law was intense tabloid fodder. They had met on the set of Alfie, in 2003, and become engaged. Then, in 2005, Law admitted he was having an affair with his children’s nanny. The two split up. When they re-united, the tabloids speculated furiously that they had become engaged again, reporting that Law had bought Miller a grand piano for Christmas, with a diamond ring worth more than $200,000 hidden under the lid.
Miller sued News International last fall and has been tight-lipped ever since. (Jude Law, for his part, recently won an order for disclosure against the Metropolitan Police.) Miller did give an interview recently to The Guardian to promote her role in the play Flare Path, in London’s West End. “I don’t think I’m going to be in too many Murdoch papers from now on,” she said in the interview. “I’ve bought my freedom, in a way.”
“Out of the Woodwork”
John Prescott is recalling his meeting with Sue Akers, of the Serious and Organised Crime Command, in mid-February. For two years he had been running into a wall with Scotland Yard.
One school of thought about the behavior of the police throughout the phone-hacking affair is that they engaged in a more or less benign cover-up—something akin to triage. The messages of Prince William and Prince Harry were intercepted at a time when Scotland Yard was busy with counterterrorism in the wake of the London bombings in July 2005. The police, according to this interpretation, limited the initial investigation and then moved on.
A second school of thought, widely subscribed to in London’s newsrooms and among lawyers involved in the case, sees a far more nefarious dynamic at play. It is that the police sat on evidence because they were eager to stay in the good graces of Murdoch’s tabloids, and also because key police officials had their own dirty laundry to hide. Both Andy Hayman, who took charge of the initial inquiry, and John Yates, who was responsible for the later inquiry, in 2009, have been targeted by the tabloids for alleged indiscretions. More broadly, tabloid newspapers and police departments routinely rely on one another: the tabloids want good stories, and the police want good coverage. Rebekah Brooks, testifying before a parliamentary inquiry in 2003, admitted that the News of the World had paid the police for information, which is illegal. (She has since backtracked from this admission.) After leaving the police force, Andy Hayman went to work for Murdoch’s Times as a columnist.
When Sue Akers sat down with Prescott, she had some news for him. “We met in this room, over there, with a cup of tea like this,” Prescott says, gesturing to a table across the room. “And then she told me that they have discovered that my chief of staff, Joan Hammell, had her phone tapped into 45 times with messages from me.” He pauses. “Now, what is significant in all these things is that the date they did the tapping was the date that I was exposed as having an affair, and what they wanted was more information about the affair.”
Prescott relates the story matter-of-factly. The date was April 26, 2006. On that day the Daily Mirror published its story about John Prescott’s affair with his appointments secretary, Tracey Temple. “Then it was all the press who wanted me. ‘Oh, Prescott, let’s get him,’” he growled. “So they want a story, any story, any information to get ahead because the story had broken somewhere else. Anyway, I was surprised how it broke and I rang Joan.” He pauses. “I admitted it right away, by the way. I never go into such a ducking and diving. There’s no point once the press are on it. You might as well put your hands up”—he puts his hands up—“and say, ‘That’s it.’ So I rung Joan. When I tried to get her, she often said to me, ‘You never left me a message.’ But I left her messages to ring, and she never got them.” It is Prescott’s suspicion that those messages had been intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire or someone else working for the News of the World, and deleted.
When I ask Prescott why he thinks it took so long for the police to get in touch with him and provide specific information about his case, he doesn’t hesitate. “Murdoch left it to this woman called Rebekah Wade, who I can’t bloody stomach.”
Rebekah Wade—now Rebekah Brooks—at the time was the editor of Murdoch’s Sun newspaper and is today chief executive of News International. She once famously spent a night in jail after her first husband, British soap-opera star Ross Kemp, of EastEnders, called the police, saying she had struck him during a domestic dispute. Brooks has become a central figure in the phone-hacking scandal because of her steadfast loyalty to the Murdochs and her perceived influence in British society and politics. At her wedding in 2009, to her second husband, Charlie Brooks, a racehorse trainer, David Cameron and Gordon Brown were both guests.
As Prescott tells it, Rebekah Brooks was used to manipulating the press, the police, and politicians, and so must have thought News Corp. could control the phone-hacking story. Certain aspects of it would have made her especially nervous. The investigator Mulcaire had a habit of writing the name of any reporter he was working with in the top left corner of his notes. Mulcaire’s notes mention four first names that appear to be those of reporters and editors at the News of the World: Clive Goodman, Ian Edmondson, Greg Miskiw, and Neville Thurlbeck. There was great incentive at News Corp. to keep the story bottled up. Perhaps the police could help with containment? That possibility aside, the first line of defense had been the “rogue reporter” story. A second defensive maneuver consisted of the settlement payouts. Eventually an editor, Edmondson, had to be fingered.
Prescott said, “They thought [the early settlements] would put it to bed, because News Corp. were so powerful. ‘We’ll forget this story—it’s yesterday’s news.’ That’s what they thought they could do. They had the police on their side. So this whole structure was working to this one bloody stupid story, which was the rogue reporter. They knew if it opened up it would go right down the line, so they tried to hold it. Then Murdoch discovered that whatever she had done wasn’t holding the line at all—if anything, it was, most of it, coming out from the civil inquiries, and then more people started coming out of the woodwork.” Eventually, Murdoch went to London to assess the situation for himself. “The story that she kept telling, I presume, was ‘Don’t worry—we’ve got it in hand.’”
Prescott needs no encouragement to think ill of Rebekah Brooks. He is convinced that she ingratiated herself with British politicians, then used her position to pit them against one another. “When I was trying to keep the balance between Brown and Blair, who didn’t always get on, Blair would complain that Brown had said something, and I would say, ‘Where did you find that out?’ ‘Well, Rebekah Wade told me.’ Then the other one would have dinner with Rebekah Wade and tell Brown about Blair.” He looks scornfully into the distance. “I said, ‘This bloody woman is playing the two of you off each other—will you bloody dump her, for Christ’s sake!’” (Rebekah Brooks declined to be interviewed for this story.)
A “Berlusconi Moment”
From the perspective of News Corp., the expanding attention to the phone-hacking scandal has transformed it from a local nuisance in London to something that represents a major headache for the entire company. By the fall of 2010, for the first time, top executives in New York were paying attention. As Murdoch saw it, media coverage of phone hacking was just an example of his competitors using their news pages to attack his commercial interests—intolerable when done by others. Specifically, he believed, they were trying to scuttle his company’s deal for the satellite broadcaster BSkyB by making News Corp. seem to be a criminal enterprise.
BSkyB is a public satellite-broadcasting company with more than 10 million subscribers. It offers broadband Internet and telephone service and distributes television programs and movies through its on-demand offerings. James Murdoch can be credited with its impressive growth. But some commentators have referred to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB as Britain’s “Berlusconi moment,” referring to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who in addition to serving as the country’s prime minister also controls three national television channels, a publishing house, an advertising-and-publicity agency, and two newspapers.
In June 2010, less than a month after David Cameron became prime minister, News Corp. announced its offer to purchase the portion of BSkyB that it did not already own—some 61 percent. Negotiations duly got under way. In October, an alliance of media companies opposed to News Corp.’s acquisition of BSkyB wrote to Vince Cable, the business secretary, saying the deal could have serious consequences for “media plurality” (that is, competitiveness) in Britain. The following month, Cable asked British and European regulators to investigate the merger.
Throughout January, there was a flurry of correspondence among News Corp., BSkyB, and Jeremy Hunt, the British member of Parliament in charge of reviewing the merger. Most of it had to do with Hunt’s requirement that News Corp. insulate Sky News from the rest of the company and limit News Corp.’s sizable market share in Britain. As he had before with The Times of London, The Sunday Times, and The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch proposed an “editorial independence” committee for Sky News—a patently unworkable scheme that has previously come to naught. On January 25, Hunt gave his view that the merger “may operate against the public interest in media plurality,” and said that he intended to refer the matter to the Competition Commission. But he gave News Corp. one more chance to amend its proposal. Rupert Murdoch flew to London to deal with the matter directly.
The British press gave considerable coverage to Murdoch’s arrival. It would be a busy week for him. On January 26, Ian Edmondson, the suspended News of the World editor, was formally dismissed from his job. The same day, Scotland Yard announced its new inquiry.
Over the past several months I’ve asked News Corp. executives what they think of the phone-hacking story and where it will end. They have done their best to shake their heads and look amused, if a bit beleaguered. I sat down with several of them in February in the company’s new London headquarters, not far from the famous Wapping compound that Murdoch secretly built in the 1980s so he could print his papers outside London and break the print unions. The headquarters, unlike the Wapping fortress, is light and airy. Across the courtyard, I could see James Murdoch’s office through the large windows around it. He was not in there. I noted that James had moved from the old office his life-size Darth Vader statue, a totem he has carried with him since his days running News Corp.’s Star TV in Asia, which competitors referred to as “the Death Star.”
The News Corp. executives told me that, from their perspective, there were three main elements of the phone-hacking story that needed to be dealt with. They believed they had two of them pretty well in hand.
The first was political. The resignation of Andy Coulson, they said, had slaked the Labour Party’s fervor for the cause. Indeed, they pointed out that, just two weeks after Coulson resigned, Labour M.P.’s received a widely publicized e-mail from a top Labour adviser (and former Times of London journalist) to stop stoking the phone-hacking debate: “We must guard against anything which appears to be attacking a particular newspaper group out of spite.”
The second element was the business fallout. When I met with them, the News Corp. executives seemed optimistic that the BSkyB deal would go through—and once it did, rivals would stop using phone hacking as a battering ram. In early March, the British government announced that it had indeed cleared the deal after News Corp. agreed to spin off Sky News.
The third element is the private civil lawsuits. These are proving more difficult to contain. The executives I spoke with felt that, once people realized there wasn’t much money to be made in chasing the News of the World for breaches of privacy, lawyers would have a difficult time signing up new clients. That may be wishful thinking. The police have identified 91 alleged victims of phone hacking in their latest investigation—a list that is likely to grow. Tom Watson, one of the British members of Parliament most critical of News Corp.’s handling of the episode, recently noted that solicitors are buying Google ads that pop up whenever you search for the phrase “phone hacking.” One lawyer suing the News of the World recently estimated that damages from the suits could result in settlements totaling between $150 million and $250 million. News Corp. is hoping it can settle the cases for less than $30 million.
Beyond Britain
Those who have decided to challenge the News of the World in court have an unexpected ally in the person of Max Mosley. The mild-mannered Mosley did not have his phone hacked, but he has been on the receiving end of the *News of the World’*s attentions. Mosley had been largely an unknown figure, outside of Formula One circles, where he served as the president of the governing body, until the News of the World, in 2008, plastered photos of him engaging in what the paper called a “SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS.” Mosley sued the News of the World for invasion of privacy. He admitted to engaging in consensual sadomasochism with the women, but denied that the episode had any Nazi overtones. He was particularly sensitive to any reference to Nazism, given that his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, had founded the British Fascist party and married his mother, Diana Mitford, at the home of Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.
Mosley won his suit, and the judge ordered the paper to pay him $120,000, the largest-ever award in a privacy case. News of the World also had to pay Mosley’s legal fees, which neared $900,000. Mosley has pursued the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg. He is seeking to require by law that British newspapers notify their subjects before printing a story about their private lives.
More pointedly, Mosley has agreed to use his own resources to fund phone-hacking lawsuits against News Corp.: “In a number of cases, I’ve said to people, ‘If you lose, I’ll stand behind you.’” Because of the way the British legal system operates, such backing is significant. As noted, unlike in the U.S., in Britain, if a party brings a suit and loses, that party is typically required to pay legal fees for the defendant. “In Britain, to bring a lawsuit, you either have to have no money at all or be eccentric,” Mosley says. He places himself in the latter category.
There will continue to be fallout, beyond the recent arrests and the admission of guilt by News Corp. It is likely that other current and former News of the World journalists will find themselves in legal jeopardy. If one of them switches sides and starts to talk, the repercussions could be significant. In the meantime, News Corp. has been covering Glenn Mulcaire’s legal fees.
The position of Rebekah Brooks inside News Corp. at the moment appears secure. In January, she took her top executive team to Babington House, a private club in Somerset, in part to discuss how to minimize the damage from the phone-hacking inquiry. It was there that they started hammering out the settlement strategy. In late March, she delivered her three-year plan for the U.K. newspapers to Murdoch himself, which executives at the company took as a sign that his support for her remains undiminished.
In March, James Murdoch was named deputy chief operating officer of the company, a position that brings him to News Corp.’s headquarters in New York. He may not shake the impression that he has mishandled this affair, or that his father had to fly in personally to sort it out. (“He’s an idiot,” Prescott told me. “The kids are never up to their fathers, are they?”) But James is in fact a good businessman, and such perceived weaknesses are hardly going to keep Rupert Murdoch from handing his company over to his children.
The phone-hacking scandal is in some ways a quintessentially British affair, the product of a small and inbred society in which the elites in every sector are connected with one another through ties of business, family, politics, money, and sex. The connections are hard to disentangle, and a tug on any thread is felt by all the others. But the lessons go beyond Britain. They would apply, for instance, to the United States, where many of the potential Republican nominees for president have been on the payroll of Murdoch’s Fox News. They apply to any society in which relationships between press and public servants cross a line of intimacy, and deciding where one’s loyalty lies takes more than a moment’s thought.
