17 Jan 2011 | Uncategorized
The phone hacking scandal has entered a new phase and a number of very powerful people, up to and including David Cameron and Rupert Murdoch, should now be very worried. Glenn Mulcaire’s reported confirmation that a senior News of the World news editor, Ian Edmonson, commissioned him to hack phones elevates a nagging problem into a national political crisis.
The problem is most acute at the Murdoch press, which must now defend itself against the charge that its staff hacked phones with the blessing of management. It also has to explain why it has insisted for four years that the management didn’t even know. The senior executives who need to justify positions which they have previously adopted in public but which now look very dubious indeed include Les Hinton, now the CEO of Murdoch’s US press empire, Rebekah Brookes, chief executive of News International, Colin Myler, editor of the News of the World, and Tom Crone, News International’s legal affairs boss.
Of course Andy Coulson, the prime minister’s press adviser, is also in what we might call a delicate position, which means the David Cameron himself is tainted. Why did Cameron appoint this man, trust him and stand by him? It now looks like a gross and stubborn misjudgement by a man who is supposed to get things right.
Rupert and James Murdoch are in the same position. What did they know? Did they tolerate this? Are they responsible for creating the conditions in which it happened? Why were they not more energetic in pursuing the problem to its source, once it was exposed? Remember that James Murdoch is currently pressing to buy the big slice of BSkyB he doesn’t own. Is he fit to do that?
The Metropolitan Police Service, the largest and most important police force in the country, is dreadfully compromised. They said that this stopped with one man at the News of the World and refused to follow any further leads. For reasons unknown, they tiptoed around the paper’s newsroom. Senior detectives should now have to account for that. The Director of Public Prosecutions, too, has failed to cover himself in glory, having repeatedly endorsed the Met’s stance.
The mobile phone industry also needs to be challenged. How was Mulcaire able to get phone numbers and PINs so systematically? It beggars belief that he picked them up one at a time. Who helped him?
And finally, the rest of the national press is on the brink of disgrace. With few exceptions they have deliberately ignored and belittled a scandal which, if they cared about honest journalism, they would have investigated with passionate vigour. Why, for example, did the Daily Mail not report this story properly? Paul Dacre should have to answer that.
Forget the idea of a paltry evidence review by the Director of Public Prosecutions. As the New York Times implied months ago, this affair makes Britain look like Berlusconi’s Italy. Let’s demand a full public inquiry or a Royal Commission to open the doors and let the stink out.
Brian Cathcart teaches journalism at Kingston University London. Follown him on Twitter @BrianCathcart
10 Dec 2010 | Uncategorized
So the CPS will not press new charges in the News of the World phone hacking case. We shouldn’t be surprised. They won’t be surprised at News International either.
The Metropolitan Police was never the right body to reinvestigate a case it has already made a mess of once. What motivation did it have? Had the CPS found grounds for a prosecution, after all, it would have been the same as saying that the Met got it all wrong first time.
For the sake of credibility alone, the Independent Police Complaints Commission or HM Inspector of Constabulary should have managed the reinvestigation. We know, in fact, that the Inspectorate wanted to, but the pass was sold. So establishing why no one stepped in is just another in the pile of seriously worrying questions associated with this affair.
Of course the scandal of tabloid phone hacking is not over. The 23 legal actions that are either current or in the pipeline will see to that. And it is instructive, if you are in any doubt about the moral questions involved, that many of these cases are being held up because convicted hacker and former News of the World employee Glen Mulcaire is challenging a High Court order telling him he must reveal the names of the people at the paper who gave him his orders.
Think that through: the issue is not whether he was given the orders but whether he has to say who gave them. His argument, to cap it all, is that by revealing the names he might incriminate himself. The News of the World and its former employee are that far from the moral high ground.
We will have to wait until the new year, I understand, to hear the result.
So far it has been worth at least £2m to News International to settle cases in this affair and prevent the facts coming out. That includes a settlement with Gordon Taylor and two of his associates. It also includes Max Clifford, who landed a seven-figure deal with News International at the just the moment he dropped his case against them. It includes, too, the pay-offs made to convicted hackers Clive Goodman and Glen Mulcaire.
Most of those now engaged in legal proceedings know, or have strong grounds to believe, that they were hacked. They have the indignation of crime victims and of people whose privacy has been violated. Nor, in most cases, are they nobodies — Andy Gray, Steve Coogan, Chris Tarrant…
They also know that News International is paying these large sums in the effort to hush up the affair. It is a perfect legal storm.
And beyond the pending cases, dozens and even hundreds more could follow. The Met is under very strong legal pressure — from Lord Prescott among others — to reveal the identities of more of those named in the papers it seized from Mulcaire’s office and home. For some reason it has been very reluctant indeed to do so — potential victims of crime they may be, but they don’t seem to have a right to know it, in the Met’s eyes. Again, the courts will be the judge of that.
No, it’s not over, by a long shot.
Read more Brian Cathcart on Metgate here and here
12 Sep 2010 | 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.
