03 Dec 10 | Uncategorized
If it sometimes seems that the News of the World phone-hacking scandal is running out of steam, it’s not. The affair may not always be present in the headlines (most papers avoid reporting it) but it is most certainly present in the courts.
Merely counting the cases is a challenge — because they take different forms, because of court orders, because claimants are coy — but legal sources suggest that the total is now a remarkable 23, of which 20 involve people who believe they were or may have been hacking victims. The list looks like this.
First, there are eight people who have initiated legal proceedings against the News of the World.
1. Nicola Phillips, former assistant to Max Clifford.
2. Sky Andrew, football agent.
3. Steve Coogan, actor and comedian.
4. Andy Gray, football commentator.
5. George Galloway, politician.
6. Mick McGuire, former official of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
7. “High-profile individual” number 1
8. “High-profile individual” number 2
Next is a group of at least eight people who have prepared or are preparing cases against the News of the World. All have established that their names or numbers were in documents seized by police from convicted hacker Glen Mulcaire. The television personality Chris Tarrant is one, another is described as a leading sportsman, and four of the others, though unnamed, are said to be high-profile individuals.
In addition, four people who know or believe that they were victims have joined forces to seek a judicial review of alleged failures by the Metropolitan Police (a) to warn individuals they had been hacked and (b) to investigate the affair properly. These four are:
1. Lord Prescott, politician.
2. Chris Bryant MP.
3. Brian Paddick, former senior police officer.
4. Brendan Montague, journalist.
And besides all these, three further legal cases relate to the scandal in different ways.
1. At the current trial of Tommy and Gail Sheridan in Glasgow on charges of perjury — which they deny — Sheridan has alleged that his phone was hacked by the News of the World. Sheridan has documents which show that Mulcaire had his mobile phone details and PIN codes.
2. A solicitor, Mark Lewis, is suing the Metropolitan Police for libel in a case relating to statements about the total number of hacking victims. In a linked action brought by Lewis, the Press Complaints Commission has apologised and settled.
3. Proceedings of some kind are apparently under way in a case of alleged hacking by a News of the World journalist first reported in the New York Times in September. The Press Complaints Commission has said the case is sub judice.
Finally, though this one may never reach the stage of legal proceedings, the Crown Prosecution Service is considering a new file of material on hacking gathered in a recent re-investigation by the Metropolitan Police.
This formidable catalogue wave of legal activity represents many months if not years of litigation, particularly for the News of the World. It also threatens considerable embarrassment for the paper, for the Metropolitan Police and for Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s media adviser. And for the newspaper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which have already had to settle several cases, there is also the potential for costs running into millions of pounds.
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26 Oct 10 | Uncategorized
This article appears in Media Guardian
The gathered clan laughed nervously when Lord Saatchi, their host, declared that Britons now spent more on Sky TV subscriptions than they did on bread. When the other man on the stage smiled, the audience relaxed. To understand Rupert Murdoch‘s grip on British public life it is instructive to see the body language when the elite comes together. I counted at least five Conservative cabinet ministers among the great and good in the ornate surroundings of Lancaster House for the inaugural Margaret Thatcher lecture on Thursday.
The timing was equally pertinent. Murdoch’s speech, entitled Free Markets and Free Minds, came the day after the Comprehensive Spending Review that sought not just to tackle the budget deficit but to complete Thatcher’s unfinished business of reducing the size of the state and unleashing the private sector.
Concerns over Thatcher’s health could not mask a celebratory mood among News Corporation executives who, in just a matter of days, have seen the BBC’s budget cut by 16% and Ofcom denuded of staff.
Murdoch, even now, continues to portray himself as the rebel with a cause. “I am something of a parvenu,” he said. At each step of the way, he had taken on vested interests – whether trade unions at Wapping or other “institutions hungry for power at the expense of ordinary citizens”. He argued that technological change was leading to a new “democracy … from the bottom up”. A free society, he said, “required an independent press: turbulent, inquiring, bustling and free. That’s why our journalism is hard-driving and questioning of authority. And so are our journalists.”
Such a laudable commitment to free expression sits uneasily with his company’s dealings in countries with dubious civil liberties records, notably China, where his business interests invariably trump journalistic inquiry.
Murdoch suggested that traditional mediated journalism remained the only serious constraint on elites. “It would certainly serve the interests of the powerful if professional journalists were muted – or replaced as navigators in our society by bloggers and bloviators.” Bloggers could play a “social” role but this had little to do with uncovering facts. In saying this, Murdoch was doing more than justifying the Times’ and Sunday Times’ internet paywall. He appeared to be echoing the views of the New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell, and others who argue that social media and blogs are not speaking truth to power in the way their advocates proclaim.
When tackling the most controversial areas, Murdoch moved from unequivocal statement to hints. The words “Andy” and “Coulson” came immediately to mind when he stated: “Often I have cause to celebrate editorial endeavour. Occasionally I have cause for regret. Let me be clear: we will vigorously pursue the truth – and we will not tolerate wrongdoing.” One News Corp executive suggested afterwards that this was the closest Murdoch had come, and would come, to apologising for the phone-hacking affair.
The official line is that no senior figure knew about the practice at the News of the World. Coulson, who is now director of communications in Downing Street, resigned as the editor when the paper’s former royal editor, Clive Goodman, was jailed in January 2007. Intriguingly, a senior Murdoch executive told me after the speech: “If Coulson hadn’t quit, he would have been fired”. If that is the case, why do they continue to insist publicly that Coulson had done nothing wrong and had fallen on his sword only to protect the reputation of the company?
The other unspoken drama in the room was Murdoch’s bid to take full control of BSkyB and the campaign of resistance by an alliance of newspaper editors and the BBC, who are urging Vince Cable to block the deal.
Murdoch said the energy of the iconoclastic and unconventional should not be curbed, adding: “When the upstart is too successful, somehow the old interests surface, and restrictions on growth are proposed or imposed. That’s an issue for my company.”
The assembled ministers will have taken note. Just as the Labour government kowtowed at every turn, so the coalition – and Cable in particular – will be scrutinised closely by News Corp to ensure that it does the decent thing.
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.
05 Sep 10 | Uncategorized
Why are people queueing up to sue News International in the phone hacking scandal? Because, so far, the company has always paid such people large sums of money to shut up and go away. Why is the company doing that? I think you can work that out for yourself.
A much more testing question is, why did Scotland Yard, with the blessing of the Director of Public Prosecutions, fail to investigate the phone hacking matter properly? And why were police so reluctant to tell those people who might have a case against the company that they were probably the victims of hacking?
As the New York Times reminds us today, and as the Commons media select committee set out very clearly last February, detectives had leads that even Clouseau could not have missed.
There was the contract phone-hacker Glenn Mulcaire signed with the News of the World, undertaking to investigate a senior figure in the football world. Then there was the News of the World email containing transcripts of dozens of voicemail intercepts involving that same figure. That’s quite a start, but there was more.
Police had the name of the person who wrote the email: News of the World journalist Ross Hindley. And the first name of the person for whom the transcripts were made: Neville. The paper employed only one person called Neville: its chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck.
You are a detective, charged with investigating crime. What do you do with this information, bearing in mind that you know the hacking in question is very likely to be illegal?
If you are Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police, apparently, you file it under “Too much bother.” Neither Thurlbeck nor Hindley nor the victim nor Mulcaire nor anyone else, so far as we know, was ever asked a single question by police about these matters. Their phone records, computers and document files were never examined. Nothing.
When Yates appeared before the Commons select committee (to which I was an adviser), he offered the following excuses: the law on hacking is complicated and was almost untested in court; the police have limited resources and have to go for the easiest convictions; the evidence was old; there was no way of showing that the Neville in question was Thurlbeck; if approached, Thurlbeck was “99.9 per cent certain” to say “no comment”.
Ask yourself: do you recognise this kind of policing in modern Britain? Is this timidity and caution characteristic of the Met in the 21st century?
Yates himself is famous for the unrelenting exhaustiveness of his inquiry into cash for peerages. Thousands of documents sequestered, key figures (including Tony Blair) interviewed to within an inch of their lives, months of press frenzy and… no charges.
Here is something else to consider. As the New York Times rightly points out, the most sensational news angle in this whole affair is that the voicemails of Princes William and Harry were accessed by the News of the World. Had that been known at the time that the scandal broke in 2006, it is fair to assume that the public would have been far more outraged by the offences than they were.
This was a national newspaper systematically and illegally eavesdropping on the Queen’s grandsons. These were the sons of Princess Diana, whom the press are supposed to treat with a measure of respect and restraint as atonement for the harassment of their mother.
And the security implications are quite something: a terrorist tapping those phones might learn information about the princes’ movements which could be useful in preparing an assassination attempt.
All the ingredients are there for a class-A public furore. If, at the time the scandal first broke, the targeting of the princes had been made public, the public would have demanded the most thorough investigation possible, with the entire News International organisation up to Rupert Murdoch placed under the microscope. The News of the World itself would have been shamed as never before.
But somehow that did not happen. This most damaging information about the News of the World did not come out. Prosecutors chose not to name the princes among the five hacking victims listed in the charges against Mulcaire and NotW royal editor Clive Goodman. The court and the public did not hear that William and Harry had been bugged.
In fact the Metropolitan Police did not reveal that the princes’ phones had been tapped until they were forced to by the Commons committee last year. Why not?
As the New York Times points out, the relationship between the Metropolitan Police and News International is now a matter of public concern. Would any other organisation or corporation whose staff were under suspicion have received such gentle treatment at the hands of detectives and prosecutors?
Yates questioned the prime minister himself over cash for peerages, causing fury in Downing Street, but when it came to the News of the World his officers tiptoed around as if in the presence of a sleeping baby.
There are calls for the Met to reopen the investigation, but that will not be enough. The last time they were asked to do that they completed their reinvestigation in a matter of hours and announced that everything was just fine. No, if we want to know what happened the case must be reviewed and re-investigated by another force, and the Independent Police Complaints Commission should start organising that now.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University.
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