Hacking trial: mainstream Press

Hacking trial: the mainstream Press

£100m case puts Cameron in the dock

Print coverage of the aftermath of the trial was mostly concerned with cost and Cameron's judgment

What the commentators had to say

Tim Rayment

The hacking scandal has been used as the pretext for a culture war against the tabloid press. Innocent victims of phone hacking have effectively been used as human shields by those who think that “popular” is a dirty word.
The Leveson inquiry set up by David Cameron after the closure of the News of the World in 2011 was not about phone hacking. It was a probe into the entire “culture, practices and ethics” of the press, a show trial in which the tabloids were found guilty before it began. The tabloid-bashing lobby Hacked Off set the tone from the start via celebrities such as Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan, and wrote the key demands for state-backed regulation...
For three years the Metropolitan police has looked like the armed wing of the anti-tabloid tendency. More than 60 journalists have been arrested, often in door-breaking dawn raids as if they were armed robbers...
This is about far more than individual crimes. It is a battle for the soul of British journalism, and anybody who believes in the hard-won historic principle of press freedom should take a stand against the tabloid-hating illiberal liberals.
Their mantra is: “We believe in a free press, but . . . ” And their buts are getting bigger. In practice they support freedom of expression for those who conform to their orthodoxies, forgetting George Orwell’s point that “if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.
Press freedom is an indivisible right, not a gift to be handed down from on high only to those deemed “deserving”. Like it or not, a free press does not have to conform to anybody else’s tastes. The press must be free to publish and be damned.
That does not mean giving journalists carte blanche to break the law. The hacking of crime victims’ phones was indefensible. But many great journalistic stories have involved reporters breaking the rules...
The debate about hacking and regulation has been based on the myth that the British press is too free and must be tamed. In truth the UK press was not free enough.
- Red Tops and Red Faces: Tim Rayment,
writing in the Sunday Times

Peter Oborne

The phone hacking affair has displayed the Prime Minister at his worst – a shallow, amoral, conniving careerist, determined to secure high office at any cost. Nevertheless, in Westminster yesterday, the general opinion seemed to be that David Cameron had got away with it...
In the summer of 2007, David Cameron was running scared... So Mr Cameron hired as his senior aide a well-known Fleet Street figure, the former News of the World editor Andy Coulson... Mr Coulson was famous for his journalistic brilliance and cool, clear judgment. However, his reputation was under a cloud. A few months earlier, he had suddenly resigned after his royal correspondent was imprisoned for phone hacking.
The future Prime Minister was repeatedly warned about the consequences of doing so...
Essential evidence came from the outstanding Guardian journalist Nick Davies, who has done so much to bring the phone-hacking scandal to light. Using traditional journalistic techniques, he carried out an investigation that resulted in very troubling revelations. It portrayed Andy Coulson’s News of the World as essentially a large, private intelligence service, using some of the same highly intrusive techniques as MI5, not all of them legal. There really was no excuse at all for David Cameron to be unaware of what had been going on.
- Prime Minister and his gang haven't learnt their lesson:
Peter Oborne, writing in the Daily Telegraph

Stephen Glover

On Tuesday evening, Harriet Harman, had the cheek to criticise Mr Cameron for having been so pally with Rupert Murdoch.
What hypocrisy! In so successfully schmoozing the media tycoon over many years, Mr Blair made Mr Cameron look like a bumbling amateur. And it’s not just Mr Blair. Gordon Brown enthusiastically took up the cause, as has Ed Miliband. That’s the same Mr Miliband who is now on his high horse, delivering supercilious lectures.
It’s not too much to say that the entire New Labour strategy was built on forging cordial relations with the Murdoch empire. The brains behind Mr Blair’s 1995 Australian jaunt was his spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, a former red-top hack who believed that Murdoch’s support was crucial to Labour.
At Prime Minister’s Question Time yesterday, he gave the impression of a man who wouldn’t share a bag of crisps with the media tycoon...
But the leader of the Opposition was not too grand to attend Rupert Murdoch’s summer party in London in 2011, where he arrived early and left late, and, with a glass of champagne in hand, had virtually to be prised away from Mr Murdoch. At that time, accusations of phone-hacking against the News of the World were already rampant.
- Dave's been a fool, but the way Blair and Miliband schmoozed Murdoch makes him seem a rank amateur: Stephen Glover, writing in the Daily Mail

Peter Preston

Hacking brought the children of his second wife, Anna, back to him, there to support their father in the teeth of crisis. Lachlan moved from estrangement to the end of a telephone. Father and son were talking again. Now, still champions of print, they share the same platforms and the same boardrooms...
James, free from Wapping, is rescuing his reputation. Elisabeth, a successful leader in her own right, waits on the British sidelines. Lachlan is poised. Better yet, for all of them, Wendi Deng, the third Mrs M, is divorced, settled, departed...She is no longer a factor; nor are the two children she bore Rupert. One swilling trauma of family angst is stilled. All the old familiar faces are welcome at Christmas. Even a "vindicated" Rebekah Brooks may be able to pop in for a mince pie and sherry via the back door...
The family, the Financial Times says, has its swagger back. But not yet, by a long chalk, its reputation.
The gates of Downing Street, front and back, are closed should Murdoch want to come calling. His endorsement for May 2015 is resolutely not sought by any party: rather, shunned, like some toxic leak.
- Once humbled, but now risen, the Murdochs march ahead: Peter Preston, writing in the Observer

Matthew d'Ancona

The Conservative leader became utterly dependent upon his adviser’s insights – not only because Billericay always has something to tell Bullingdon, but also because Coulson took to politics quickly and easily, and understood how to translate Cameron’s strategy into messages that would be picked up by the media. Inevitably, much has been made of his past in the Murdoch print stable and the mystique that held for Cameron – as if his comms director had only ever been on secondment from Wapping. But Coulson’s principal task was to get the Tory party on to our television screens.
Beyond his formal remit, Coulson became a confidant whom the Tory leader routinely referred to as “a genius”. Like many genial people, Cameron makes true friends slowly and very cautiously. Coulson was one of them...
Coulson knew that the game was up well before Cameron – a case study in what Margaret Heffernan calls “wilful blindness” in her marvellous book of the same name.
Now, General Hindsight – an elderly relative of Wilful Blindness – stomps through Westminster, honking, braying and stroking his damp moustache as if it had all been so obvious. Expect to hear a lot between now and the election about Cameron’s failed judgment and lack of ethical perspective. But the moral of the story, funnily enough, is not moral. It is psychological. Where friendship is concerned, we hear what we want, or often need, to hear, filtering out warnings even (as in this case) when they are issued by our friends themselves. As Cicero knew, no understanding of politics is complete without an understanding of friendship and its formidable power.
- Power of friendship is what did for Andy Coulson,
Matthew d'Ancona, who stood as a character witness
for Coulson at the mitigation hearing,
writing in the Sunday Telegraph

Joan Smith

The Press Complaints Commission, set up and run by the industry, failed to notice criminal conduct at the NoW on an industrial scale. Its successor, IPSO, is another fake regulator which fails to comply with the reasonable proposals set out by Lord Justice Leveson after a very thorough public inquiry.I believe passionately in a free press. I've been a journalist all my working life and I don't want state regulation, even though my phone was hacked by the NoW in 2004 when it became interested in my private life.
What I want - and the public wants it as well - is a system that offers effective redress for individuals who have been abused by the press. For that, we need robust self-regulation along the lines set out in the Leveson report, not the PCC under a different name. If we don't get it, there will be more cases of ordinary people, grieving families and victims of terrorism, whose lives will be made hell at a time of intense anxiety and grief.
- After Coulson, now is the time for robust self-regulation along Leveson lines: Joan Smith, executive director of Hacked Off, writing in the Independent

Tom Utley

I am not trying for one second to excuse the inexcusable News of the World when I make one point, as gently as I can: although the journalists’ motives may have been cheap and nasty, they were actually trying to find Milly, or at least to discover what had happened to her. They were emphatically not trying to murder her. Some other bastard did that.
So, yes, voicemail hacking is a creepy crime which deserves to be punished. But is it really so profoundly evil as to justify the police raids at dawn and the scores of millions of pounds that have been spent on tracking down the guilty and persecuting innocent suspects?
Which brings me to the question that should trouble every believer in democracy most: was hacking really so repellent as to make it necessary to end 300 years of Press freedom from politicians’ control?
Aren’t we in danger of throwing away something infinitely precious
- Phone hacking is despicable, but I fear I caused more hurt losing a reader's treasured photo:
Tom Utley, writing in the Daily Mail

Simon Heffer

Cameron knew perfectly well that during the time when Coulson edited the News of the World, the paper had become a criminal enterprise, hacking people’s phones, and that he had been forced to resign after one of his senior staff was jailed.
The day after Coulson’s astonishing appointment as Tory press spokesman in 2007, I wrote about Coulson’s claim that he had been unaware his staff had been paying more than £100,000 a year to a man to hack phones. I suggested this proved that either he was spectacularly incompetent, or spectacularly dishonest.
Neither was a qualification for a key job with the Tory party...
This shambles didn’t happen because of naivété or ignorance. It was the result of the PM’s innate arrogance, which makes him careless to the point of recklessness in so many judgments.
Indeed, Mr Cameron’s calamitous decision to appoint Coulson - in a shameless bid to cosy up to Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers - must be added to a long list of similar miscalculations and brazen gambles, the cumulative effect of which will taint Mr Cameron’s place in history
- The titanic arrogance that could sink Cameron:
Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Mail

Mary Dejevsky

You could argue – and I would – that Cameron has been unfairly maligned over Coulson. First, he has been blamed for his loyalty, and specifically for keeping him on when he became Prime Minister, despite many warnings about the skeletons that lay in the Coulson cupboard. But loyalty in my book is a virtue rather than a vice – we saw it again, to similarly detrimental effect, when Cameron stood by both Andrew Mitchell and Maria Miller for longer than was politically advisable.
In the case of Coulson, less noble reasons than loyalty have been cited – chief among them Cameron’s desire to square the tabloids and ingratiate himself with the Murdoch press. This may indeed have figured in his calculation.
But what the Prime Minister’s critics have universally failed to mention since Coulson’s departure is another reason why Cameron surely wanted to keep him: he was exceptionally good at his job.
How very good he was can be seen from the obstacles that Cameron has had to swerve to avoid since Coulson left. Accomplished media managers able to cope with the top level of politics are very hard to come by.
- Coulson affair has reinforced damaging misgivings about Cameron's leadership: Mary Dejevsky,
writing in the Independent

Tom Watson

When it was revealed that poor Milly Dowler's phone was hacked, what was Blair's first reaction? It wasn't to ring Mrs Dowler. It was to offer to advise the company on their PR strategy. Like many others in the Labour party, I am ashamed of him.
There are more questions to answer. The dedication and efficiency of the Operation Weeting team casts further doubt on the conduct of the people who led the previous inquiries. Only the second part of the Leveson inquiry might get to the facts. No police officer, for example, has been questioned at trial about the original investigation.
In the end this is a story about power. And Murdoch just got too powerful. He owned too much of Britain's media estate. He still does. But it's politicians that gave Murdoch his power. And I'm sorry to say, I don't see much changing. They're still queueing up to take a bow, albeit less obsequiously than before.
- Politicians gave Murdoch his power, now we must challenge it: Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East and member of the Commons culture, media and
sport select committee, writing in The Guardian

David Blunkett

For those of us who were both victims and witnesses, it has been hard to understand the lack of care and consideration shown in the rerunning of deeply sensitive events that even those of us in public life should not have to tolerate. As the judge pointed out, there was no public-interest justification, yet matters that would have remained private were it not for hacking were publicly paraded once again. I ask myself how others can be encouraged to come forward as witnesses.
These questions were raised last year in a very different trial concerning former employees of Nigella Lawson and Charles Saatchi. In that case, the judge, Robin Johnson, allowed a pre-trial hearing at the request of the defence. As a consequence, material was put into the public arena that was devastating to both Lawson and her estranged husband.
- Hacking trial has put our private lives in the spotlight again: David Blunkett, former Labour Home Secretary,
writing in The Guardian

Leading article:
Daily Mail

The interception of voicemail messages may not be the most serious crime, but it is a crime nonetheless – to be punished like others of similar gravity, under laws that existed long before the Leveson Inquiry...
But one glance at the expenditure of manpower and resources on the marathon trial that ended yesterday, and the police investigation leading up to it, shows the jaw-droppingly disproportionate scale of the authorities’ reaction...

Meanwhile, at least 12 more trials are in the pipeline, involving up to 40 accused. They are among 96 journalists arrested since 2011 – many in melodramatic dawn raids – while some have been on police bail for months, their careers in limbo, waiting to hear if they will be prosecuted...

Which brings us to the chilling role played by the Prime Minister in turning what should have been a routine crime investigation, confined mainly to one company, into a frenzied assault on the wider newspaper industry.
As Mr Justice Saunders reminded the jury this week, David Cameron’s pretext for launching the Leveson Inquiry – a Guardian report that journalists had deleted Milly Dowler’s voicemail messages – was without foundation.
All too clearly, however, his real motive was to divert attention from his own gross misjudgment in appointing Andy Coulson as his director of communications
- Heavy price we all have to pay for
anti-press hysteria,

Leading article:
Sunday Times

The acquittal of Rebekah Brooks... and four other defendants cannot be obscured by Mr Coulson’s conviction. Mrs Brooks insisted on her innocence from the start and said she was being subjected to a witch-hunt. The jury’s verdict goes a long way to bearing her out and gives the lie to those who believed phone hacking was endorsed at senior level by News International.
There were many who expressed surprise and disappointment at Mrs Brooks’s acquittal. But they did not sit through an eight-month trial in which the prosecution’s case against her was shown to be embarrassingly threadbare. There are serious questions about whether the case against her and the four other acquitted defendants should have proceeded at all.

That said, we have always argued that phone hacking did not require new press regulation but application of the criminal law. The criminal law has now been applied, although not necessarily with the outcome that those who seek to muzzle the press would have wanted...
In the meantime, thanks largely to Mr Cameron’s embarrassment over Mr Coulson, we have had the Leveson inquiry. Most newspapers have signed up to the new Independent Press Standards Organisation which, as recommended in the Leveson report, is “established and organised by the industry” and provides some of the toughest regulation in the world. The critics, of course, are not satisfied. It is safe to conclude they probably never will be.
- And this was worth £100m?
Sunday Times