by Les Hinton
Two days later, Rupert and his son James appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. Rupert was contrite, telling them: ‘This is the most humble day of my life.’ He also said: ‘I worked with Mr Hinton for 52 years and I would trust him with my life.’ Soon after that, a man in the audience pushed into his face a paper plate covered with shaving foam, and his wife Wendi became the hero of the moment when she took a fierce swing at the attacker.
With the headlines, accusations, and wild rumours showing no sign of abating, Kath decided we should get away from it all and took me out of town to a lonely country inn in the Connecticut woods. Rupert called, still sounding shaken and full of concern. ‘I’m fine, honestly,’ I told him. ‘Please don’t worry about me. Rebekah is in a much tougher spot than me — take care of her.’ Kath, seeing me white and tense on the phone, put a piece of paper in front of me. On it, she had written: ‘Remember, you don’t work for him any more.’ She produced that same piece of paper often in the following weeks.
John Nallen, News Corp’s deputy finance chief, called. ‘I need to ask a favour,’ he said. ‘Can we please pull from the settlement our agreement to provide you with an office?’
The company was worried because a New York website had discovered I was to be provided with an office for a year, where I could work with my assistant, Marianne Krafinski. It didn’t make much difference to me, but I wondered at how badly shot everyone’s nerves were if they were worried about the potential image problem of giving me a transitional office. The real issue was Marianne. She had been with me for 26 years, travelling wherever I was posted. She needed to stay employed by the company for another 18 months to qualify for a full pension. ‘Just promise me Marianne keeps a job,’ I told Nallen. He promised, and she did.
Kath had banned me from reading newspapers or watching the news — ‘I’ll let you know what you need to know.’ For several weeks she censored everything, but periodically gave me a carefully vetted good-news package.
I was allowed to read an editorial in The Wall Street Journal headlined ‘News and its Critics’ which said: ‘In nearly four years at the Journal, Mr Hinton managed the paper’s return to profitability amid a terrible business climate. He did so not solely by cost-cutting but by investing in journalists when other publications were laying off hundreds. On ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had … Mr Hinton was at the helm when we again became America’s largest daily.’
The Journal’s special committee, appointed to guard the newspaper against management interference, said in a statement: ‘No journalist at Dow Jones has even whispered to us before or since Mr Hinton’s resignation that he pressured him or her or condoned or promoted journalistic misconduct.’
Michael Gross, a star writer at New York magazine when I ran it two decades before, set himself apart from the ‘surge of schadenfreude’ felt by some at my departure. ‘I felt sad,’ he wrote, and told the story of my refusal to fire him in the face of a demand by Calvin Klein bosses who so hated his profile of Klein that they pulled their advertising from the magazine.
Kath also showed me, surprisingly, an interview with Nick Davies. Davies was The Guardian’s chief anti-Murdoch obsessive, which is a hotly contested title on that newspaper. Davies is a man driven by cranky ideas about media and capitalism that are about as coherent as an anarchist’s rant just after he’s hurled a brick through a McDonald’s window. Still, he spent years unearthing the hacking story and the cat-and-mouse doggedness of his work deserves to be acknowledged.
Davies said in an interview in American Ad Age: ‘There were some people who were clearly going to have to resign before the Milly Dowler story, but it went beyond that — Les Hinton, for example, in New York. There was no pressure on him to resign, but somehow there was this kind of contagion of panic.’
The New Yorker was driven to rhyme. In a protest against the ‘sexist’ attention paid to Rebekah Brooks’ curly red mane, it wrote a poem to my hair, ‘Every Follicle, Diabolical’:
Les Hinton’s hair
Will not behave
It grows and flows
A silver wave
Les Hinton’s hair
Will not comply
With orders that
Come from on high
Les Hinton’s hair
Has its own mind
It only acts
When it’s inclined
It’s shiny, ruthless
Debonair
It’s everything
Les Hinton’s hair.
Ben Greenman
The New Yorker © Conde Nast
I framed that one.
I had scores of phone calls and messages from friends and old colleagues all over the world. I read the messages over and over for comfort.
Hidden away in our woodland sanctuary, making tentative travel plans, I didn’t understand until later what an all-encompassing storm was loose. After a cautionary conversation with my US attorneys, I decided not to travel to London for a while to permit the hysteria to fade. It made me feel like a fugitive, even though I had done nothing wrong. But Kath was insistent: ‘Everyone has lost their heads over there. Don’t risk it.’ So she flew to London for a good friend’s wedding while I hid away in Manhattan.
There was a quiet lake in the grounds of our country hotel. It was just after dawn, lazy and cool before the heat of the day, and I sat there with mingling feelings of freedom, fear, and disbelief. Thirteen days had altered my life forever. I had long ago made my personal bargain with the restraints and rewards of working for a personality like Rupert. I never felt immune; I had seen the casualties pile up over the years. But I never thought it would end for me like this, as a castaway in a hurricane.
While I was free of the bonds, I had also grown accustomed to status and security and, for all its fierce pressures, the comfort of life inside a huge, raucous, relentless organisation. It may be overweening, but it was daring and inventive as well. It was an institution, and now I was de-institutionalised. I could sit there beside the water as long as I wished. There were no crises to calm, no faltering executive to rebuke, no struggling new editor to hearten, no clashing egos to soothe.
But what a mess it was. Kath was being tough and brave, but I knew she was distraught and angry, and that the kids were, too. Mal and Duncan were emailing anxiously from Australia too distant from events to sort the hysteria from the facts.
A few ducks were dabbling for food on the glassy, green surface of the lake. Among them was a blue-winged teal. Teal are glorious birds; small with white crescents beneath their rich-blue bills, speckled brown chests and brilliant flashes of blue when they spread their wings. Suddenly, a red-tailed hawk swept down and seized the teal in its talons. For a while, the duck struggled on the lake’s edge beneath its killer’s grip, but slowly succumbed, until it was still, and the hungry hawk began plucking away at its morning meal.
I have always felt there should be a metaphor in the sight of that beautiful, helpless creature and its feasting predator, but I couldn’t nail it. I guess it would have been something about how much luckier I was than the duck.
CHAPTER 27
Meltdown
The News of the World phone-hacking affair was about much more than the reckless behaviour of journalists who betrayed their trade and helped kill a newspaper. They wrecked their own lives, and those of many others, but their actions also set off a chain of events that eventually dwarfed their deceit, even their criminality, and boiled up into a monumental legal, political, and media hyper-drama. Unwittingly, they created a monster of unstoppable anger, grief, paranoia, and hysteria that gave old enemies, and new, an unexpected and unprecedented opportunity to attack Rupert Murdoch, his politics, and his newspapers.
The affair had been ebbing and rising since August 2006 when reporter Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, a football pla
yer turned private investigator, were arrested for phone-hacking. When the case went to court in November of that year, both pleaded guilty. Sentencing was deferred until January, when the judge, Mr Justice Gross, described their conduct as ‘reprehensible in the extreme’.
He gave each a short prison sentence. Goodman and Mulcaire had apparently hacked more than 600 times into the voicemails of senior employees in the household of Prince Charles and his sons, William and Harry. In addition, Mulcaire admitted to hacking into the phones of others, including the model Elle Macpherson and the publicist Max Clifford.
Mulcaire was a hacking aficionado. In their early years, mobile phones were sold with a common four-digit passcode. Unless new owners created their own unique passcode, listening into other people’s voice messages was easy — anyone could dial the number and enter the default code. Even when someone had created their own passcode, Mulcaire could usually discover it. He would call telephone companies masquerading as a forgetful customer; or he would use software, available on the internet, that made it possible to bypass some passcodes completely.
As the court case later showed, Mulcaire and Goodman’s scheme began to fall apart in November 2005. The paper had run two gossip items by Goodman — one revealed that Prince William had seen a doctor about a knee injury; the other that a television reporter covering the Royal Family had loaned the prince broadcasting equipment. While William was wondering how the News of the World could have obtained this information, a couple of his courtiers noticed their voicemails were displaying as old messages before they had listened to them.
The police were called in, and due to the importance of the complainants, Scotland Yard assigned its counterterrorism squad to the case. It’s possible these elite officers thought the task an unhelpful distraction from their main job. London was on high alert after four jihadist terrorists had murdered 52 people in July that year, followed two weeks later with a further attempted attack.
Nine months later, Goodman and Mulcaire were arrested. Many people — myself included — assumed that, after so long, these two arrests were the culmination of a painstaking investigation. Goodman’s desk had been searched; papers had been removed, and Goodman and Mulcaire interviewed at length. No one else had been arrested, or charged. It appeared that they had acted alone.
When Goodman and Mulcaire went to prison, the police closed the case and returned all their resources to the main task of tackling terrorism. I thought the curtain had been drawn on an embarrassing and painful episode for the News of the World.
I fired Goodman, and gave him a year’s salary, telling him in my letter of dismissal that the payment was for his ‘many unblemished, and frequently distinguished, years of service … and in recognition of the pressures on your family.’ This was true, but I was also over-generous. I soon wished I hadn’t done it.
At the same time, Andy Coulson resigned. He was close to tears as we sat in my office. I hadn’t asked him to go — in fact, I thought there was no need. He had told me he knew nothing about phone-hacking, and I believed him. I believed him for years.
By 2007, Coulson had been editor of the News of the World for four years. He was a demanding boss, but mostly popular. I considered him a gifted newspaperman, and still do. I was proud to have recognised his talent and advanced his career. Colin Myler, a former Daily Mirror editor-in-chief who was then based in America as deputy editor at the New York Post, agreed to come home and take Coulson’s place.
In an effort to repair the damage, I called Prince Charles’ principal private secretary, Sir Michael Peat, a silky Old Etonian. Coulson had already publicly apologised on behalf of the paper, as reported in The Guardian the day after the guilty pleas of Goodman and Mulcaire. I apologised to Peat on behalf of the company, and offered £100,000 to any charities nominated by Princes William and Harry. It was a token gesture given the scale of intrusion, but Peat was gracious in accepting both the offer and the spirit in which it was made. Unfortunately, by 2011, with Peat no longer at the palace, both the apology and donation appeared to have been forgotten at News International and Clarence House. The Times gave great display to a story about Prince William complaining to James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks that he had never received an apology. Murdoch, the newspaper said, was ‘shocked’ at the news. I wished someone had checked with me.
In the summer of 2007, Prince Charles was guest of honour at the annual Police Bravery Awards, an event The Sun sponsored in support of the Police Federation. Rebekah Brooks and I greeted him in the lobby of the Dorchester Hotel in Park Lane, seating him at our table. He was impressed with the evening and suggested that The Sun stage a similar event for the military. We did, and The Sun’s Military Awards became an annual event. I thought we had made peace with the palace, and steadied the ship at the News of the World. But the real trouble hadn’t even started.
Shortly after receiving my note firing him, Clive Goodman had sent an angry letter dated 2 March 2007 to Daniel Cloke, the human resources director, accusing the company of unfair dismissal. He also claimed that News of the World editors knew about phone-hacking, and alleged ‘other members of staff were carrying out the same illegal procedures’. Goodman said his case would be supported by copies of his email exchanges with several executives over a 16-month period.
I asked Cloke and Jon Chapman, the company’s legal director, to join with Colin Myler, the new editor, to investigate Goodman’s claims. None of these three men had any conceivable reason to hide wrongdoing. Chapman and Cloke had nothing to do with editorial operations, and Myler was new at the paper.
They interviewed everyone Goodman had named, and reviewed around 2500 emails, but came up with nothing to support the allegations. To reinforce the independence and thoroughness of the investigation, I asked Chapman to hire an outside law firm to conduct a further review.
Chapman appointed Harbottle & Lewis, a well-established media law firm, and forwarded them the emails, including a batch that went beyond the dates specified by Goodman and had not been previously examined. The email review was led by the firm’s managing partner, Lawrence Abramson, who subsequently wrote to Chapman confirming he had found no evidence of criminal activity.
It would be eight years before it became clear that Abramson had made a terrible mistake: he had missed crucial emails, not seen by the News International team, that contained evidence of wrongdoing. These were the so-called, and now infamous, ‘toxic emails’ mentioned in court cases, criminal trials, and countless news stories. They referred to ‘lifting quotes from tele’ and ‘turning mobiles.’ In another, Goodman wrote about actions that could land ‘me, you, and the editor in jail’. In one exchange, Coulson gave Goodman permission to pay £1000 for a palace phone book containing the phone numbers of the Royal Family and their staff.
It was a disastrous mistake by Harbottle & Lewis, and one with serious and irreparable repercussions for their client, News International.
A paralegal helping Abramson had flagged the emails for his attention, warning him against sending his proposed letter to News International. ‘I cannot say that I agree there is no evidence,’ she wrote. But Abramson didn’t read her note, or the email attachments she had sent him — a failure that led him, in 2015, to appear before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal charged with unprofessional behaviour.
He offered a litany of excuses: it had been ‘probably the busiest week’ of his life; he needed to complete outstanding work before taking his children on holiday; he was ‘juggling, trying to keep everything in the air’; he flew to Athens to see his club, Liverpool, play in the Champions League Final, and in the chaos outside the ground, his ticket was snatched from his hand, requiring him to watch the game in a bar; his return flight that night was delayed; he didn’t get home until 10 o’clock the following morning; his secretary was away and the temporary one unfamiliar with his work; she mislabelled the paralegal’s vital message and so he overlooked it. Everything tha
t could go wrong for him apparently had. Even Liverpool lost 2-1 to A. C. Milan — I witnessed the defeat myself, in the stadium with my two youngest children, James and Jane.
Despite his excuses, the tribunal ruled that Abramson’s errors were ‘major in nature and caused consequences which were there for all to see’. For his ‘genuine, major but inadvertent oversight’, the tribunal ordered him to pay a fine of £20,000 and £15,000 in costs. The tribunal was forgiving: ‘his misconduct was a single episode in a previously unblemished career’.
I found it difficult to feel charitable, thinking of the consequences of his ‘busiest week’ and how different life might be, for me and many others, if he had read the emails instead of sending his lack-of-evidence note.
In 2007, it would be another four years before the truth was known. The Guardian, the BBC, and others would write extensively about the ‘smoking gun emails’. Tom Watson MP, a member of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee, claimed it was a ‘fantastical notion’ that executives hadn’t known about the emails, and said the company had misled Parliament. Chris Bryant, a Labour frontbencher, accused News International of ‘a massive cover-up’, claiming it was ‘inconceivable that the senior management of News International did not know about this. It is quite clear that Parliament has been lied to.’
When the truth was finally uncovered during the Abramson tribunal, it went almost entirely unreported. Labour’s fiery critics — MPs such as Tom Watson and Chris Bryant — had nothing to say. The truth must have been too inconvenient.
With the evidence to the contrary lost in Harbottle & Lewis’ files, we told Goodman in 2007 that his claims were without merit. He immediately pressed forward with a claim of wrongful dismissal.
Companies regularly settle wrongful dismissal claims to avoid bad publicity and the time they take up. Our initial intention was to fight it — I thought we had a strong case — but after looking at the details, our lawyers said we should agree a settlement. The company had apparently failed to follow statutory disciplinary and dismissal procedure — this made Goodman’s firing automatically unfair, and gave him the right to appeal at a public hearing. Mulcaire, in turn, claimed the amount of work he had done for the News of the World gave him the rights of a member of staff. Legal advice was we could lose both cases.
