At the start of the phone hacking scandal, I was sceptical that News International’s pursuers would get far. There is an omerta on Fleet Street. Reporters do not blab about their employers because they know they will lose their jobs and guess, probably correctly, that no other paper will hire them once they have a reputation for speaking out of turn. Who, I wondered, was going crack the story open?
Silly question, and I ought to have known the answer: the lawyers would, of course. Except in extraordinary circumstances, reporters can only take a story so far. Politicians caught up in a scandal who demand we produce a “smoking gun” are being very canny. Reporters cannot seize evidence. We cannot issue search warrants and compel witnesses to testify under oath. Everyone who remembers the Watergate scandal remembers Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting. Brilliant though it was, the Nixon administration was destroyed not by the Washington Post, but by Sam Ervin’s Senate committee, which had the powers parliamentary select committees ought to have to issue subpoenas and compel witnesses to talk or go to jail for contempt.
Lawyers for celebrities and politicians are now planning multiple actions against Rupert Murdoch and demanding that the Met supply them with the evidence they collected against News International but never submitted to a court.
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