Murdoch's World (28 page)

Hunt's department stopped accepting public comment on BSkyB Friday, July 8, and announced that its decision would come shortly. The juxtaposition of the BSkyB deal with the roiling scandal could not have been worse. Cameron's idea of an inquiry after criminal prosecutions—potentially hundreds of them—presupposed a delay of years, long after any verdict on BSkyB.

Even some of Cameron's fellow Conservatives stood up to object and directed their ire at the person they previously viewed as an untouchable power. “Rupert Murdoch is clearly a very, very talented
businessman. He's possibly even a genius, but his organization has grown too powerful and it has abused that power,”
Tory MP Zac Goldsmith said on the floor of the House of Commons. “It has systematically corrupted the police and, in my view, it has gelded this Parliament, to our shame.”

Rupert Murdoch had put out a statement late on July 6 in his own name that was meant to show his concern. He called the actions of
News of the World
“deplorable and unacceptable,” but delivered
a dissonant vote of support for Brooks. The message was meant to soothe public opinion but only served to inflame it. Many MPs had already called for Brooks's resignation and pressed for a hold on the BSkyB deal.

“These were not the actions of a ‘rogue' individual or a ‘rogue' reporter, but part of a wider, systematic pattern of abuses,” said Labour leader Ed Miliband. “The public see a major news organization in this country where no one appears prepared to take responsibility for what happens. Nobody is denying that Milly Dowler's phone was hacked and nobody is denying that it happened on the watch of the current chief executive of News International, who was editor of the newspaper at the time.” He concluded by asking Cameron to join him in calling for Brooks's resignation. Miliband also invoked Cameron's decision to hire Brooks's former deputy Andrew Coulson, who was now under police scrutiny.

“Is it not the case that if the public are to have confidence in him, he must do the thing that is most difficult and accept that he made a catastrophic judgment in bringing Andy Coulson into the heart of his Downing Street machine?”

After a few cautious days, Miliband declared Labour's independence from the Murdochs and News Corp. The scandal had inverted the formula of accommodation and courtship, as those politicians who recently had scurried for face time with Rupert and James Murdoch and their wives and executives now competed to denounce them most roundly.

But amid the deluge of scandal, News Corp lobbyist Fred Michel still labored behind the scenes—far behind the scenes—to maintain a sense of shared purpose between the government and the corporation. On the day after the
Guardian
piece, July 5, Michel wrote to Cameron's chief spokeswoman, Gabby Bertin, thanking her for her supportive messages to Brooks.
Both Bertin and Michel ended their texts with multiple Xs—for kisses.

Michel texted Cameron's communications director, Craig Oliver:
“Hey buddy. Are you guys still on for dinner tomorrow?” Oliver wrote back: “Looking forward to tonight. Is location discreet?” News International executive Will Lewis would join the dinner, first set for Pimlico. But everything about the appointment kept shifting amid the bedlam. The spot was moved to an intimate French restaurant in the upscale neighborhood of Mayfair, not far from Whitehall. The time moved, too. Lewis backed out, leaving just Michel and Oliver.

Bertin texted Michel during dinner. “Another hard core day,” she wrote the lobbyist. He replied swiftly (ellipses his):

“Yes . . . mon dieu . . . incredible,” he wrote. “Am with Craig now. DC [David Cameron] was very good at PMQ [Prime Minister's Questions]. We need to get through this. You ok? Xx”

On July 7 Michel thanked Oliver for dinner. He didn't hear back.

By that point, opinion had turned against the BSkyB bid. Only a day remained for the public commenting period; more than 130,000 people took advantage of the chance to besiege Hunt's department with emails and messages objecting to News Corp's plans. Michel and his patrons were running out of cards to play.

“They've used their power, in ways we know about and ways that we don't know about,” former
Independent
editor in chief Simon Kelner told me at the time. “What we've seen this week is not just the first cracks of the edifice, but you've seen the edifice possibly begin to tumble.”

“Politicians have suddenly become a lot braver,” Kelner added. “One of the least edifying elements in this phone hacking scandal has been
the number of Labour politicians who have spent all their time sucking up to Murdoch. Now they're in opposition, they are denouncing him.”

Reliably conservative papers, the
Telegraph
and the
Daily Mail
, had started to take the story seriously.
The
Telegraph
reported that the tabloid had hacked the phones of British soldiers and terror victims as well. The story would not stop.

At Wapping, it was beginning to feel like the end of the world. The
News of the World
tabloid had been a presence on the British scene for 168 years. Before Murdoch entered the scene, the paper had paid a call girl more than £20,000 for a salacious story that fatally wounded the government of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Under Murdoch six years later, the paper didn't just tell her story. It serialized her memoir in eight parts over two months.

The
News of the World
held onto its role as the leading red-top tabloid. It published just enough reporting about public events so readers knew what was happening in the world. By the 2000s the paper's reporters had so internalized the need to gain scoops that it thought nothing of paying off a cop to get an unlisted mobile number to convince someone with a tangential link to a celebrity or sports star or actor or singer or prince into giving an interview to the paper. The stories weren't quite fabricated but heavily produced by the reporters. Former investigative reporter Graham Johnson catalogues a tawdry line of such stories in his book
Hack
. In one case,
he picked up a woman who had become a prostitute patronizing upper-end hotels and decamped with her for the night, solely as a means of writing a story that would embarrass her father, a law lord. The plan went off-kilter when the escort took a shine to him and started to perform a sexual act upon him, one of the few lines that he was not supposed to cross, as it could be used to discredit the paper's reporting in court.

The paper's best-known reporter might well have been Mazher Mahmood, who claimed his reporting had led to the prosecution of more than 250 people. Mahmood often posed as an Arab sheik or some
other shadowy figure whose money corrupted prominent people, Sarah, the Duchess of York, and the Pakistani national cricket team among them. The fact that
his exposés largely created the scandals he revealed did not faze him: he described himself as “the king of the sting” in the subtitle to a memoir.

As indictments loomed, the Murdochs began the effort to draw a different line, to take a bold stance. The moment required a sacrifice.

NEWS CORP announced the decision with statements reflecting regretful necessity, promising a shift of strategy and outlook. “The
News of the World
is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself,” James Murdoch declared in a statement sent to News International employees and shared with government officials and the press.

“
News of the World
and News International failed to get to the bottom of repeated wrongdoing that occurred without conscience or legitimate purpose.” The younger Murdoch acknowledged that News International officials had “made statements to Parliament without being in full possession of the facts” and that he personally had not had “a complete picture” when he approved previous out-of-court settlements for Gordon Taylor and the two others. The company would continue full cooperation with police. It would rectify its shortcomings. “We are doing our utmost to fix them, atone for them, and make sure they never happen again.”

And
he announced the company would kill the paper. Its final edition, on July 10, would carry no ads. Any commercial proceedings would be given to charity.

“Goodbye, Cruel World,”
the
Telegraph
headlined its front-page story. Rebekah Brooks would stay as News International's CEO. But one of her signature titles would vanish.

“We should see this for what it is,” the actor and activist Hugh Grant told the BBC. He called it “a very cynical managerial maneuver” that led to layoffs of hundreds of people while protecting the job of the woman who was editor of
News of the World
even as Milly Dowler's mobile phone messages were being hacked.

Though News International issued the announcement in James's name, everyone spoke as though Rupert Murdoch made the decision himself, as indeed, he had.

“It was done for
a straightforward commercial reason: he wanted to make sure he buys BSkyB. He already controls it,” said former
Times of London
editor Simon Jenkins. “It was high politics at an almost total moment of national hysteria. He lanced a boil but not enough. None of the executives were sacked.”

The company had survived worse. Twenty-one years earlier, as Sky Television was losing about $2 billion a year,
News Corp was swimming in debt incurred by the $3 billion
TV Guide
acquisition. Murdoch kept rolling over various loans to keep the company afloat, relying on 146 lenders in all. In October 1990 he called bankers to London and said he wouldn't be able to pay off a $500 million loan, had another $2 billion coming due, and needed to borrow another $600 million. All of them would have to wait to be paid back. One held out: tiny Pittsburgh National Bank, owed only $10 million. A drop in the bucket, in the big picture, that could have kept the company under water for good. It took a personal call from Murdoch himself to the loan officer to persuade the bank from calling in the note. The $10 million—and the empire—was preserved.

With hacking,
the company's executives had to shift strategies as they kept losing ground to their critics.

At first, the aim was to protect
News of the World
at all cost by wooing allies and intimidating critics in Parliament and the press, and either holding off, scaring off, or paying off the victims. They did
the same to the people who hacked phones on the paper's behalf. But they couldn't save
News of the World
. The next goal was protecting the broadcasting deal to take over BSkyB and past that, Brooks's standing.

But the scandal kept advancing.

15

“THIS ONE”: REBEKAH BROOKS

UNDER OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES, REBEKAH BROOKS might well have been considered a victim of hacking. Her first marriage to the soap opera star Ross Kemp imploded in 2005, when she was editor of the
Sun
.
Brooks (then Rebekah Wade) was arrested at 4:00
AM
on suspicion of having assaulted Kemp but was not charged; she told reporters it was “a silly row that got out of hand.” Their spats inspired staffers for her old paper, the
News of the World
, to start hacking repeatedly into messages on their former boss's mobile phone, police later concluded.

Brooks and Kemp had favored Tony Blair's New Labour, and she had
befriended Blair, his wife, Cherie, and Gordon and Sarah Brown. The pair split after Kemp's confession of marital infidelity, and
Rebekah soon took up with Charlie Brooks, the young Tory leader David Cameron's Eton classmate. Rebekah and her new boyfriend rented homes on the grounds of Blenheim, the Churchill family's historic estate, and later moved to Chipping Norton, where they dined and
fraternized with the future prime minister and other leading Tory and media figures, including James and Elisabeth Murdoch and their respective spouses.