13 Oct 10 | Uncategorized
Andy Coulson must be scared. Not of the Guardian, which to date has failed to root him out of his job in Downing Street. And not of David Cameron, who shows no inclination to sack him. No, Coulson must be scared that his old boss Rupert Murdoch will pull the rug out from underneath him.
Murdoch wants, very much, to buy the whole of BSkyB so that he can move a big step closer to monopoly control of the British media market, and Coulson, almost accidentally, is getting in the way.
Any day now, Murdoch could pick up the phone in New York and ask Cameron (instruct him?) to ditch his most senior media adviser. No doubt News Corp would offer the former News of the World editor a nice job in compensation, but it would be the end of Coulson’s promising career as the smarter, slicker version of Alastair Campbell.
He is an embarrassment to the old man because the never-ending scandal of phone hacking keeps reminding us just how depraved and sinister the Murdoch empire can be. And this is happening at a moment when Murdoch wants us all to think of him as an inspiring business genius, a victim of Establishment snobbery and the man who just gives viewers what they want.
Murdoch employees illegally hacked the voicemails of the future king of this country, as well as dozens or more likely hundreds of other people very prominent in our public life. Reported targets include Cabinet ministers, a celebrity agent, a top sports official, a supermodel and at least one senior police officer — not to mention, perhaps most chillingly, ordinary members of the public who are victims of crime.
And as the revelations tumble out and the lawsuits against Murdoch’s company stack up, something even more significant is happening. People are talking more and more about his extraordinary power, and the fear he can spread.
That was the most potent message to come out of Peter Oborne’s Dispatches programme on the scandal last week. There were complaints afterwards that the key new witness casting doubt on Coulson’s I-knew-nothing defence was anonymous, but they missed the point: as Oborne made clear, the systematic need for anonymity provided eloquent proof of how frightened people are. Grassing on the Murdoch empire looks uncomfortably similar to grassing on the IRA.
Tom Watson MP, in a remarkable speech about phone-hacking to the Commons last month, sent the same message: “The barons of the media, with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators; they are untouchable. They laugh at the law; they sneer at parliament. They have the power to hurt us, and they do, with gusto and precision, with joy and criminality. Prime ministers quail before them, and that is how they like it.”
And have a look at the story of Michael Wolff, who had the nerve to write a critical biography of Murdoch. We probably wouldn’t have read that if it were not for phone-hacking.
Right now, when Murdoch has all his other ducks in a row for the total takeover of BSkyB — the Tories owe him for his papers’ election support; Ofcom is being neutered; the BBC is being kicked from pillar to post — he emphatically does not want to be making headlines as the monstrous bogey man of British public life.
So one day soon he may decide that Coulson, in principle a terrific Murdoch asset at the heart of British government, is in fact a liability. He may calculate that if Coulson went, the heat would go out of the phone-hacking scandal and those nasty headlines about ruthless, bully-boy News International would fade away.
And if that day comes, does anyone doubt that one phone call to Number 10 would settle the matter?
12 Sep 10 | Uncategorized
When Paul McMullan, the former News of the World journalist, spoke to the Guardian the other day he did something slightly odd. He was describing how routine it was for staff at the paper to use dubious methods — and he mentioned David Beckham, twice.
First he was explaining that Andy Coulson, the former editor now working in Downing Street, must have been aware of these methods, but would not have been told about every single instance. By way of example, McMullan said: “It wasn’t of significance for me to say I just rang up David Beckham and listened to his messages.”
And a little later, illustrating the activities of the paper’s specialist phone-hacker, Glenn Mulcaire, he said: “He was hacking masses of phones. We reckoned David Beckham had 13 different SIM cards, and Glenn could hack every one of them.”
In a way it is hardly surprising that Beckham’s name should come up in this affair, given how much he was and is in the news. But then again it hasn’t come up in this context before, at least not prominently. Why would McMullan pluck his name out of the air like that? Could he be telling us something?
Along with Elle Macpherson, Prince William and Gordon Taylor (definite), and John Prescott, Vanessa Feltz and Jemima Khan (possibles), not to mention at least 85 others, could the golden boy of football, one of the most famous people on the globe, have been among the hackers’ many victims?
It’s surely enough to prompt another look at the sensational scandal of summer 2004, when the Rebecca Loos revelations scraped the gloss off the Beckhams’ marriage. Now, which paper was it that broke that story? Why, the News of the World.
And who was the reporter? None other than Neville Thurlbeck, who shared so many bylines with royal editor and convicted hacker Clive Goodman, and who seems likely to have been the intended recipient of the famous “for Neville” email full of hacked messages (though he says he never saw it).
Thurlbeck’s Rebecca Loos expose did not, on the face of it, involve voicemail messages in the style of Mulcaire and Goodman’s stream of illegal stories in 2005-6. Indeed it happened before Mulcaire had even developed his technique of accessing voicemails, if the evidence given in court in 2007 is correct.
But it did involve mobile telephones.
A Sunday Times narrative of the case, written in July 2004, runs like this:
“…all this while Neville Thurlbeck had been beavering away at the News of the World, gathering details of the affair, doing ‘bog-standard, old-fashioned hack work’ — knocking on doors, nurturing contacts.
“At the end of March, Thurlbeck made a breakthrough, obtaining solid proof that Loos and Beckham had been in a sexual relationship: a SIM card containing salacious text messages that Beckham had been continuing to send Rebecca.
“He also established, significantly, that the mobile phone being used to transmit these messages was, without doubt, Beckham’s…
“Thurlbeck says he cannot identify his sources, only that they were either extremely close to Rebecca, or extremely close to Beckham, or both.
“On Friday, April 2, Thurlbeck called on Rebecca at her parents’ home to tell her the News of the World would be running a story on Sunday about her affair with Beckham and that it would include intimate details of their ‘text sex’.”
So, was Thurlbeck merely engaged, as he recalled for the Sunday Times, in “bog-standard, old-fashioned hack work”?
Well that is what he said, but bear this in mind. The judge in the Mosley privacy trial remarked of Thurlbeck that “his ‘best recollection’ is so erratic and changeable that it would not be safe to place unqualified reliance on his evidence…”
Now look again at at Paul McMullan’s words about Mulcaire: “This was just commonplace. He was hacking masses of phones. We reckoned David Beckham had 13 different SIM cards, and Glenn could hack every one of them.”
McMullan was talking about an even earlier time, in 2001 or before. What he implies, though, is that even back then Beckham was a priority target for dubious methods. That certainly won’t have changed after McMullan left the paper.
If somebody ever gets around to investigating this affair properly, they should ask a question or two about David Beckham. And in the meantime, Beckham himself might consult his lawyers, on the basis that Murdoch is giving away cash in these cases.
Oh, and in case you are wondering, when the News of the World broke Loos/Beckham story, its editor was Andy Coulson.
