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.
Perhaps there will not be the flood of cases some are expecting. One tabloid hack, who wished to remain anonymous for the usual reasons, said that those who believed the Met had deliberately suppressed evidence because it was in the pocket of News International, did not understand how hard it would be to win cases. His reckoning was that the police had categorised those targeted by Mulcaire into three lists. On the first list were those whose phones had been illegally hacked: Boris Johnson, a senior executive at the BBC, and the individuals named in the Goodman court case. On a second list were 40-50 people whose numbers were in Mulcaire’s possession, but whose phones he had not tapped unlawfully. (Or rather, the police had no evidence that he had tapped them). Tessa Jowell and Sir Ian Blair, the former Met commissioner, are believed to have been on this list. On the final list were about 400-500 people who were possible targets, but Mulcaire had not even obtained their phone numbers.
My colleague thought that it would be “very difficult, without dates, times, places, to pin access to voicemails on anyone other than the intended recipient. Phone companies don’t keep their records long enough to go back the years people are talking about.”
That is as maybe, but politically the difficulties in bringing a large number of prosecutions or civil actions may not matter. Murdoch has had a dubious relationship with successive British governments – to put it mildly. They provide him with business favours: he provides them with propaganda. Murdoch is now demanding that Jeremy Hunt do him the favour of not applying the usual competition rules to his takeover BSkyB. If celebrities’ lawyers can pin down one more scandal, it may be clear to the public that the coalition is not just involved in a corrupt relationship with a standard business organisation, but with a business organisation that has been involved in a criminal conspiracy.
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