It’s 4 p.m. on a Thursday and I am talking with an MP on the House of Commons terrace. My mobile phone rings. It’s my colleague Keith Gladdis, the northern correspondent for the News of the World. I tell him I’ll call him back: I’m with a contact, working on a story — thousands of jobs have been lost because civil servants fixed a deal with a German company. There’s not much point, he tells me. ‘We’ve all been fired. They are closing the paper.’ I make my excuses and leave.
Papers normally fold after running out of money or readers. The News of the World had plenty of both: still profitable, still the largest Sunday sale on the planet. But we were sunk by appalling activities carried out in secret. In 12 years, I never laid eyes on Glenn Mulcaire, the ‘detective’ whose actions destroyed the paper. His very existence was known only to a handful of now-departed executives. Like my colleagues, I only learned how to hack a phone by reading about it in the Guardian.
I get a taxi from the House of Commons to Wapping with my team. The taxi driver makes a quip about whether we are going to hack his phone. ‘We’ve just lost our jobs, mate.’ That shuts him up. At our offices, the televisions show the cameras outside the wrong building: Fortress Wapping, from which we moved a year ago.
Our editor, Colin Myler, gathers the staff and tells us the decision was made in New York. He lays out the terms: we will be offered 90 days’ gardening leave then probably made redundant. Questions from the staff start. ‘Is it true Rebekah Brooks offered to resign?’ one colleague asks. ‘Tell her we accept.’
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