The now finished News of the World is in hot water for illegally intercepting the phone calls of dozens of bold-faced names.
Some 50 detectives, many of them accustomed to murder and rape cases, are currently working on one of the biggest scandals ever to hit British journalism. The paper was accused of illegally intercepting voicemails from various celebrities and public figures.
Now, scores of stars, including the actress Sienna Miller and the interior designer Kelly Hoppen, are on the warpath. Along the way, it is costing the jobs and reputations of several of Britain’s most high-flying journalists.
For its part, News International has been desperate to draw a line under the affair, earmarking a reported £20 million compensation fund for the ever-growing number of litigants.
At some stage before 2005, Clive Goodman, then in his late forties, had teamed up with a private investigator named Glenn Mulcaire. Mulcaire was being paid tens of thousands of pounds by the News of the World to listen to the voicemail messages of various British royals, their aides, and a handful of other big names. Mulcaire also appears to have accessed a number of Prince William’s text messages to Kate Middleton, even discovering her private nickname for him: Big Willie.
That, at least, was the initial story.
Phone-hacking may sound high-tech, but in reality was very simple. It chiefly relied on the little-known fact that most people don’t bother to change the default settings on a mobile phone. This meant that anyone who knew the default personal ID numbers could access the voicemail messages.
Looking back, it seems inevitable that Goodman was going to get caught. That's what finally happened when Goodman ran his little filler piece on Prince William’s injured knee.
The line that was peddled by News International was that Goodman was a lone "rogue reporter" acting without any authority from the newsroom executives.
But many veteran journalists were skeptical at how such a hands-on editor as Coulson would not have wanted to know precisely what Mulcaire was being paid for. Nevertheless, within a few months, Coulson had bounced back to become the Conservative Party’s press chief.
And that, after a number of fruitless inquiries by the police and the Press Complaints Commission, should have seen the story safely dead and buried—except it refused to die. The reaction on Fleet Street, as Britain’s newspapers are still collectively known, has been interesting. Although the left-leaning Guardian newspaper, a longtime critic of Rupert Murdoch, had railed against phone-hacking right from the start, there has also been a slight feeling that it was all part of the rough and tumble of tabloid life.
Since the start of 2011, the scandal seems to have been growing like the Hydra, and for every story that’s been knocked down, another two have sprouted in its place. Andy Coulson, who had helped David Cameron become prime minister, had the ignominy of being forced out of his job for a second time, declaring that "when the spokesman needs a spokesman, it’s time to move on."
The hacking of celebrities voicemail was disgraceful to say the least but since then there have been reports that push the News of the World and News International to deeper depths of depravity. The hacking of the Soham Murders victims were hacked.
Victims families for the 7/7 bombings had their voicemails hacked and just how far were News International willing to go to try to rescue its flagging readership. Well this remains to be seen as does the full extent I am positive we have not heard the last of this and the after effects will rumble on for an age.
There are now murmurings of dissent in parliament with all three political parties ready to shut down the BskyB bid and rumours of News International selling all of its British titles to try to save face albeit far to late.
So whos been arrested so far? The head of news Ian Edmondson, chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, and former news editor James Weatherup & Rebekha Brooks. There has been two Met offials quit over this and calls for David Cameron to quit as well.
In a very odd twist the original whistleblower Sean Hoar has been found dead in his Watford apartment and the police are treating this as “unexplained” so either this was a poltergeist attack, spontaneous human combustion or some other paranormal event - or the police do not want to admit he was murdered as suicide or natural causes are explainable.
News International hopes that most claims will be settled for less than £100,000 each, though the final bill could easily run into the tens of millions.
The problem for News International, however, is that the ramifications of the scandal now go way beyond mere phone-hacking. The competence of Rupert Murdoch’s son and heir apparent, James Murdoch, is being called into question. And on a much broader front, the scandal may also jeopardize BSkyB’s proposed merger with News International’s parent company News Corporation.
But as the commentator Peter Preston pithily said of News International’s compensation fund and its mea culpa: "Will it work? Embraced as a strategy two years ago, it would certainly have avoided much grief... Most fiascos, as journalists know, come at the crass coverup stage. But now a huge squad of Scotland Yard diggers, their integrity at stake, are turning over stones with a will... Now assorted Commons committees have News International’s top decision-makers in their sights. So a great deal hangs on those sacks of gold."