News International’s statement about phone hacking last week included the following: “It is now apparent that our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence and we acknowledge our actions were not sufficiently robust.” In other words, having insisted since 2007 that, following the conviction in that year of its royal editor, Clive Goodman, it thoroughly investigated what had gone wrong, it is now admitting that it wasn’t thorough at all.
Who conducted this investigation? In fact there are supposed to have been three investigations, and the first of these, we were told, was run by solicitors Burton Copeland, described by Tom Crone, the News International legal affairs chief, as “probably the leading firm in the country for white-collar fraud”. It began in 2006, as soon as the company became aware there was a problem.
“They were given absolutely free range to ask whatever they wanted to ask,” according to Crone. Their people “were in the office virtually every day or in contact with the office every day. My understanding of their remit was that they were brought in to go over everything and find out what had gone on . . .”
Colin Myler, who took over as editor of the News of the World after Goodman’s conviction, told MPs: “My recollection was that a very thorough investigation took place . . .” He also said: “It was completely hands-off, if you like, for transparency from the company’s point of view.” And he added that “the executives who were there at the time were very happy with that”.
Yet once he arrived, Myler apparently followed up with his own, second, investigation. Les Hinton, then CEO of News International and now the man who runs the Wall Street Journal, told MPs: “Colin had come in from New York, a very experienced editor with a clear remit to do two things: make sure that any previous misconduct was identified and acted upon and that the prospect of any future misconduct would be ruled out.” Hinton added: “I thought bringing him in — and I still think it — was a perfect way to create an independent, experienced judge of what had been going on . . .”
Myler himself said: “I conducted this inquiry with Daniel Cloke, our Director of Human Resources.” And he added that Cloke (who has since left to join Vodafone, a move not without irony) was “as impartial, if you like, as most people can be in that situation”.
Hinton claimed to have great confidence in this supposedly independent, impartial Myler-Cloke investigation. In March 2007 he was famously asked by MPs: “You carried out a full, rigorous internal inquiry, and you are absolutely convinced that Clive Goodman was the only person who knew what was going on?’ And he replied: “Yes, we have and I believe he was the only person, but that investigation, under the new editor, continues.”
Mr Myler gave much the same account to the Press Complaints Commission in 2009. The PCC noted: “Mr Myler said that the process of internal investigation had been rigorous . . .”
There was also a third internal inquiry, or so it seems. The PCC recorded Myler as saying that after he was appointed editor “an email search was conducted involving up to 2,500 separate email messages in order to discover whether other News of the World staff were aware of the Goodman/Mulcaire criminal activity. These e-mail searches were conducted by our IT department under the supervision of News International’s Director of Legal Affairs, the Director of Human Resources and an independent firm of solicitors.”
(Incidentally that number — “up to 2,500” — might seem a lot at first glance, but it’s obviously not. A large national newspaper must receive that many emails every few hours. A single journalist might easily have that number in his or her Inbox.)
So, three separate investigations: first Burton Copeland, then Myler-Cloke, then Crone-Cloke. And each of them was rigorous and thorough, or so MPs and the PCC were assured in 2007 and 2009, and so the company insisted, in public and on the record, until last week. These investigations were the company’s shield: it had really tried; it had done everything that could have been asked of it; it had behaved responsibly and honestly.
But now News International says: “Our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence and we acknowledge our actions were not sufficiently robust.”
So they weren’t rigorous and thorough after all. What the company has been saying to MPs, the PCC and the public for four years turns out, by its own admission, not to have been true. We have grounds to wonder what sort of investigations these were.
Who will take responsibility? Burton Copeland? Colin Myler? Daniel Cloke? Tom Crone? We have yet to hear anything on the subject from any of them.
