Launching a campaign for a public inquiry into hacking

04 Jul 11 | Uncategorized

If anyone still believed that the phone hacking scandal was “just” about celebrities, the allegation that the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s voicemails must lay the idea to rest.

No matter how ordinary and vulnerable you were, no matter how tragic your circumstances — in this case it was a missing, murdered Surrey schoolgirl — on this evidence you were a potential target for the Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid.

And if anyone besides News International and its friends and allies had any doubt that we needed a public inquiry to get to the bottom of this affair, surely this will have convinced them. In this instance alone we not only need to know the facts of what happened — of who did it, who ordered it and who knew about it — but we must also find out why it has taken until now for this to become public.

For the Guardian is saying that the key evidence was in the bin bags of material seized from private investigator Glenn Mulcaire in August 2006. In other words, the police have had this material for five whole years. Either they knew about it and ignored it — which would suggest either stupidity or corruption of a kind that is hard even to contemplate — or they have only just found it. That would be less astonishing, but not much less worrying.

And if the police conduct is a matter for public concern, what of the company, which covered up this scandal for years, telling us that only one reporter was involved and that it had investigated itself thoroughly — and which is even now as grudging as it can be with information and evidence?

But the case for a public inquiry has become urgent for other reasons than these, because in recent weeks there has been every sign that without one the scandal will be killed off by the year’s end. The civil litigants — the victims of hacking who have sued — are settling, one by one. Often they have no choice because the courts would punish them for holding out. And the criminal prosecutions — if they come — may well be much more peremptory affairs than many expected.

Lawyers following these cases warn that every person charged may plead guilty, just as Mulcaire and royal reporter Clive Goodman did back in 2007. That would mean there would be no trials, just short agreed narratives and brief sentencing hearings. Nothing about the wider issues would come out.

So if you have any interest in knowing the truth about the hacking scandal — and the Dowler allegations demonstrate vividly that we all have such an interest, no matter how innocent and ordinary we may be — then your only hope is a public inquiry.

Here I will declare an interest of my own. For the past few weeks I have been working with others, notably the Media Standards Trust, to set up a public campaign, called Hacked Off, to demand an inquiry.

We are not quite ready, I confess — it will be launched on Wednesday and until then the website http://hackinginquiry.org is only a holding page. We will have a manifesto, a petition, dozens of distinguished supporters and soon a programme of public events, but what we will need most of all is your support. Please go to the site on Wednesday or soon afterwards.

The vested interests here are tremendously powerful and winning this inquiry, even after these latest allegations, is not like to be easy.

Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. He tweets at @BrianCathcart

Still doing deals

25 Jun 09 | Uncategorized

The charge sheet is long and yet the dock is empty. One of the most extraordinary aspects of Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war has been the ability of those responsible to evade any form of reckoning. For that they have many people to thank, including incurious journalists and pliant judges. But most of all, Tony Blair is in debt to his New Labour friends for their efforts to get him off the hook — recent days, Peter Mandelson and Gordon Brown.

At each step of the way, Blair and his allies have outmanoeuvred their opponents. The death of Dr David Kelly in 2003 provided ministers, and particularly Alastair Campbell, with some of their worst moments. The emails, the hubris and the deceit would have done for many a world leader. Instead, thanks to some artful bullying by Campbell and the brilliant recommendation by Mandelson (drawing on his experience as Northern Ireland Secretary) to appoint Lord Hutton, it was the BBC and not the government that took the flak.

That was that, declared a smiling Blair. The government had been exonerated. A year later, faced with the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the prime minister then called upon Lord Butler of Brockwell. He made sure the terms of reference were as narrow as possible. Unlike the theatrical testimony before Hutton, Butler’s team met in private. As the only journalist called to appear before them, I took a close interest in the way they carried out their investigation. Their manner was Establishment-polite, but their questioning was refreshingly direct. One of the most impressive members of the team was a certain Sir John Chilcot. They asked me to elaborate on a number of revelations in my book, Blair’s Wars. They then asked me straight out if I believed Blair had lied. I replied that I did not suspect he had gone out of his way to tell falsehoods, but that, knowing the intelligence did not stack up to justify war, he willed the facts to fit. I considered my answer to be quite clever at the time. I now wish I had been a little less clever and a lot smarter.

Butler’s conclusions were coruscating but couched in mandarin-speak. Of the so-called dodgy dossier, he said it went to the outer limits of the intelligence available. He recorded surprise that, in spite of the ‘generally negative’ results of the UN inspectors, the quality of British intelligence was not reassessed. We found out only afterwards that Downing Street had prevailed on Butler to water down the most important passages.

What mattered was the press conference that accompanied the launch. Butler had the prime minister’s fate in his fingers. He decided beforehand that he would not give an opinion as to whether Blair should resign. Remarkably, nobody thought of asking him. Instead Butler said he did not hold any single individual responsible for the failures in intelligence. Within seconds, the Downing Street spin operation went into overdrive, thanking the eminent privy councillors for their work, insisting that their recommendations would be given all due weight, but celebrating the fact that they had been let off the hook once again. Butler would later regret his timidity.
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