The Murdoch Phone Hacking | Phone Hacking Today: Nick Davies Interview | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. And this is British Scandal. MUSIC

Today we're finishing up our series on the phone hacking scandal, which we've been following through the fate of two people, Andy Coulson and Rebecca Brooks. It was a story of truly bizarre details, Matt. So many incredible details. People having cocaine for breakfast. Ross Kemp having a suit of armour. Custard pie gate. Charlie Brooks getting put on trial essentially for hiding a conker from the police. But then, of course, there's the serious side.

Hacking the phones of Mili Daula, the 7-7 bombing victims and families of soldiers killed in Iraq. There's no low that is too low. So it's now about 10 years after the closure of the News of the World. What impact did this scandal have and what does it mean today?

One man who knows better than most is Nick Davies. In over 100 articles for The Guardian, Nick exposed the phone hacking and criminal activity at News of the World. It was his reporting that ultimately led to the Leveson inquiry. He's also author of Hack Attack, How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch. And he gives us his account of the scandal next.

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Well, Nick, let's start at the beginning when you got your first tip off and started investigating. Did you know you were getting such a big story? I think that from very early on, I understood that although the crime that's involved here, listening to people's voicemails, is really rather small, the story was big because it was about power.

You see, from the outset, I knew that the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard were sitting on a vast reservoir of evidence which exposed all this criminal behaviour in Rupert Murdoch's newspaper. And they had chosen to do almost nothing about that. Why? Because Rupert Murdoch has so much power.

And of course, because I live in the UK, I'm aware of the background fact that Rupert Murdoch has power over our supposedly democratic government. Well, you mentioned Rupert Murdoch's power, Nick, and that of the police. You were going up against people with genuine power. Did you ever fear for yourself? The threat that Rupert Murdoch's power represents to people who challenge him isn't a physical threat. He's not going to send people to do your kneecaps.

It's a reputational threat that he will use his journalists to try to uncover something damaging or humiliating. And of course, if they find anything, they'll season it with falsehood to make it even more powerful. And then they'll just relentlessly carry on.

attacking someone with that whatever it is that they found in their private life. It's a strange thing, actually, that ordinary people in the street aren't frightened of Rupert Murdoch. They can see he's just a greedy, power-hungry man.

But people in the power elite all around the world are frightened of him because every MP, every corporate executive, every trade union leader has seen others from their world having their private lives exposed, their sex lives in particular, and being humiliated, having their careers ruined, their marriages destroyed, their reputations destroyed. That's the power he's got. That's the fear that he generates.

And you were not afraid of that? Did you not think at any time, God, is there anything in my past he might expose to shut me up? Well, luckily, I've always lived the life of a monk. No. So no. So from early on. So I did a lot of work on this story, putting it together because I was freelance, right, working from my home. And once I got it to a state where there was something worth publishing, I went to see the then Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger.

And I told him about this story that was obviously going to cause trouble with a lot of powerful people, including Murdoch's empire. And we did have a little chat about the fact that we might find ourselves having our private lives being exposed.

And I mean, further down the track, as we began to create real pressure on Murdoch's people, there were Murdoch reporters trying to contact ex-girlfriends of mine. I used to run a masterclass teaching the techniques of investigative reporting. They were contacting women who'd been to those classes to see if I'd slept with them.

which is kind of weird because what if I had? Why would that be some kind of mortal sin? As it was, I hadn't. But they were there sniffing around, using their usual tactics, trying to find something to create embarrassment and humiliation, to punish somebody who's challenging them. You had over 100 articles in The Guardian. Did you imagine it would be a story that would take up so much of your time and so much of your life?

No, I think generally the pattern is that you publish your big story and a lot of people run around shouting and you publish some follow ups and within a few weeks you probably move on. In this case, what happened was that the Murdoch crew in the UK publicly attacked us and accused us of deliberately misleading the British people.

Furthermore, Scotland Yard attacked us and told the British people that our story was basically all wrong.

Now, that was a stupid mistake by these people who are far too aggressive for their own good, because it meant that apart from the normal journalistic business of wanting to follow up on your story, they were forcing us to dig deeper in order to defend our own credibility as a news organisation. So they put us in this position where we couldn't walk away. We had to keep fighting.

This story all started because of a story about a prince's knee. Did you ever think that the full truth about phone hacking was always going to come out? It's difficult to know. I think one of the things that happens with a story like this is that there's a lot of activity off the record in private.

So I had really quite a lot of journalists who'd worked at the News of the World contacting me saying, this is what was happening. In addition, I had people from the world of private investigators speaking to me and helping me. I had serving police officers speaking to me and helping me. Now, what that means is,

With all those sources, you know what the truth is. The difficulty is that when you're up against liars and the Murdoch Empire were telling lies, Scotland Yard in the most senior levels were being hugely misleading with what they were saying. It isn't enough to know what the truth is. You have to be able to prove it.

But I think the fact that so many people were helping behind the scenes always meant that it was possible and maybe even likely that we would be able to prove the truth and push back against those lies. As you just said, it was so far reaching. How do you think this culture where law breaking was accepted came to happen at UK tabloids?

So the Murdoch company, tabloid newspapers in general, don't exist primarily to tell readers what's happening in the world. They exist to make profit. And there is what you could call a commercial imperative, a huge pressure from high up in any of the corporate owners to

to make profit. Therefore, that's handed down to the editor of these newspapers. You have to sell more copies because if we sell more copies, we get more income from readers. And furthermore, we get more income from people advertising.

And that converts itself, that pressure, that demand for profit into a kind of ruthlessness. And the message to the reporters is you get out there and you do whatever you have to do. Get the story. Don't you come back into this office and tell us you haven't been able to get hold of the document or you haven't been able to persuade the person to talk to. You get out and do it.

And there's therefore this constant feeling of ruthlessness around those newsrooms. And so they people are people you see some of the people who go and work for those tabloid newspapers are good, decent, honest people. But they find themselves under pressure to become bullies or liars or bribers or cheats or even criminals in order to satisfy this pressure for profit. I know you refer to the term monstering. Can you can you unpack that a little?

From time to time, the tabloid press will target a particular individual. That may be for political reasons or it may simply be because it sells newspapers. And they will attack that person's character, expose and invent things about their private lives.

And the reporters themselves call this 'monstering'. And it's because it is a monstrous thing to do to somebody. It's like, I mean, it's almost like a horror film. If you put yourself in the position of the individual,

Every single day, there's something else vicious about you on the front page of tabloid newspapers. It might be true. It might be false. It doesn't matter. They're going to keep on coming after you. It's extremely cruel and utterly terrifying for the person on the receiving end of the monstrine. Raheem Sterling is an interesting example. The tabloids thought it would help them to sell copies of their newspaper if they turned him into a hate figure.

The fact that he is a black guy feeds into a certain inherent racism amongst some of its readers. And they were very, very happy to kick him and keep kicking him and to monster him. And then he becomes the hero of the Euros and they have to pretend they've never done it, that they always knew he was a good guy. It is horrible what they do to people.

And they don't just hack phones. They have a variety of techniques that they use. What are the other things that we refer to as the dark arts were reporters and papers doing? So these newspapers use the idea of the dark arts to cover a whole range of criminal techniques.

So apart from hacking into people's voicemail, they were also getting into people's email. They also had specialist private investigators who would phone up an organisation that was holding confidential data and trick them into disclosing it. So that might be the taxman, your bank, credit card company,

And they were very, very clever about doing that, posing as members of the staff within that company to get access to your private data. There were also some examples of burglary being committed. Not very many, but some, sometimes by private investigators acting for news organisations.

There was one occasion when there was a bar near Fleet Street where a lot of serving detectives used to get together in the evening and get amazingly drunk with crime reporters and other journalists. And there was one evening there where the cops told the reporters that they had heard that the adolescent son of a very senior figure in criminal justice was growing marijuana in the garden of their family home.

And so at 11 o'clock at night, drunken reporters and cops set off to break into the family home of this senior criminal justice figure in order to see whether there was marijuana in there. I mean, this was an amazingly stupid thing to do, heavily fueled by alcohol. And what happened was that while they were on their way, a more senior officer who wasn't so drunk heard what they were planning to do and called them and persuaded them to stop it.

But so burglary was in there as one of the tactics. The public have been aware of stuff like this for many, many years, but it was only when Millie Dowler's phone was hacked that public opinions seemed to really switch. And then there was this mass outrage, not just at phone hacking, but at the general techniques of tabloid newspapers. Do you think without Millie Dowler's phone being hacked, the public outrage wouldn't have come and these things would still be happening? I don't know, because we had them on the run by then. So that was in...

In the July of 2011 that we did the story about Milidaulo's phone, well, six months earlier in January, the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, who was working as the Prime Minister David Cameron's right-hand man, he was forced to resign because what we'd come up with.

And then over the following months, there were three or four new police inquiries set up at Scotland Yard. And these were straight inquiries that were going to get to the bottom of things. So I think that the Milly Dowler story was, in fact, the trigger that released the scandal. But without that, I think that those police inquiries or our continuing work would probably have found another route. The dam was breaking by then.

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Let's talk a bit about the scandal at its height. You mentioned there Cameron's right-hand man, Coulson. We've followed Rebecca Brooks and Andy Coulson closely in this series. What can you tell us about Rebecca as a character? Rebecca Brooks is, in the terms of a tabloid newspaper, a genius. Actually, the word they use is operator. She's an operator because she's clever and brave, indeed bold,

She is extraordinarily manipulative. And it's something that reporters don't very often talk about is that actually, if you're going to be a reporter, you do need to manipulate people to persuade them to cooperate with you. And she takes that to new heights.

So she's extremely good with men. She'll rest her fingers on the man's forearm and stand a little bit too close and look a little bit too long into their eyes and create a kind of intimacy. I remember talking to a man who'd worked with Murdoch for years, who was about 40 years older than Rebecca. And he said to me, I don't know that when she's been talking to me, I just can't help thinking if things had turned out another way, maybe, maybe we could have been together.

So she's very good at doing that with men. But what's unusual is she's also extremely good with women at creating an intimacy. And so there may be a gathering and she'll say to a particular come outside. I need to tell you something. I don't want anybody else to hear. Or she's a great giver of gifts. She'll follow up the next day and the man or woman will receive some special gift. And so lots and lots of people began to feel that they were Rebecca's special friend.

And for a tabloid reporter, for any reporter, that's a very powerful move to be able to make. And she's extraordinarily good at it. So she was friends with Tony Blair. Very close. And yet she was also close to his great personal or political enemy, Gordon Brown. And then she was very close to his greatest political enemy, David Cameron. And in the meantime, in the background, she could see Boris Johnson coming and lined him up as a special friend.

So she is indeed an operator. Andy Coulson's appointment by David Cameron shocked a lot of people at the time because it felt as if, though, some scandal or other was inevitable. Do you think David Cameron was rigorous enough in checking with Andy Coulson about whether a scandal would break? I don't think you're quite right. I don't think that at the time it was obvious that a scandal was going to break around Andy Coulson. What was obvious when Cameron appointed him

was that it looked like this was Cameron desperately trying to create a channel of communication to Rupert Murdoch. So this was yet another depressing example of the way in which the supposedly democratic government in the UK is in fact over and over again compromising its behaviour in order to placate this Australian with an American passport. And because Cameron and his people wanted

to serve as a channel to Murdoch.

They really didn't dig too deep in trying to check him out. If they had dug a little deeper, they would have found the warning signs, because by that time he had had to resign from the news of the world because he had presided over a scandal. And although the small part of only a small part of the scandal had emerged in public, nevertheless, there was enough there to send warning signals. And I just don't think they looked for the for the material that could have given them those warnings. They wanted him too badly.

There are so many key players in this scandal and we've talked about how they all operate and interlink. But what does this story say about Rupert Murdoch? Well, the most obvious thing it says about Murdoch is that he has this extraordinary power.

It tells us that that power is based on fear. There's actually two different kinds of fear in there. There's a personal fear by those people in the power elite who really don't want their private lives exposed in a humiliating way. And so as individuals, they look for ways to placate him. And in addition, there's a kind of organisational fear. So the Labour Party, for example, at various periods in its life has found its daily life absolutely ruined, reduced to chaos.

by Murdoch's newspapers publishing stories which destabilised them day after day after day. There are governments that have found the same thing in the UK or Australia. Look at the way that Fox News has interfered with US politics. So he generates fear in these two ways, the personal and the organisational fear.

And I think it's important to understand that while he's doing that, his primary objective isn't political. What he's after is money. I mean, he is, I think it's fair to say, Rupert Murdoch is pathologically greedy. That's to say he's not just making enough money for himself and his family to have a good life.

He's addicted to it. He can't stop. Even now, in his late 80s, he's trying to earn more money. It's a wasted life, actually. He's ruined his own life by doing it. And then he's ruined the lives of, or spoiled, damaged the lives of millions of people who've suffered in all these different ways. It's important to recognise that the damage that Murdoch does...

isn't just to those individuals whose private lives are invaded and exposed. And that's a nasty kind of damage. But beyond that, his newspapers around the world have acted as cheerleaders. You could actually say as enforcers to persuade governments to adopt policies which have tended to be very damaging to the people in all those different countries.

So we have that bunch of policies which are now called neoliberalism, which have enormously increased levels of poverty. You take the UK. In the late 1970s in the UK, 7% of the children in the country lived below the poverty line, which was kind of scandalous.

Murdoch's crew and his newspapers helped Margaret Thatcher to get into power. And she implemented these policies of neoliberalism. And by the time that she and her successor, John Major, had finished, the number of children in this country who were living below the poverty line was no longer 7%. It was 30, 3-0. You think of the millions of people who've been dragged into poverty by

by those newspapers of Rupert Murdoch's insisting that governments around the world adopted those policies. And then it's been the same in the United States and in Australia and Canada and New Zealand.

It's terrifying when you look at it. Or then you could look at the way that his newspapers have relentlessly campaigned to deny climate change. His newspapers in Australia have been particularly destructive in this respect. They have done everything they could to persuade governments not to act on that. And then around the world, people suffer from floods and heat waves and weather related disasters.

The damage he's done is really difficult to quantify, but you could put it this way. If you tried to draw up a league table of human beings who've caused the most damage to our species since 1945, there are some horrible people to be put in there. You'd put Stalin and Pol Pot, the most vicious of dictators. But Rupert Murdoch definitely deserves a place in the top 10 of humans who've damaged us collectively.

since 1945. It's a horrible record. Aren't we slightly in danger of adding to Murdoch's mythology here?

People say it was the sun what won it. Tony Blair was always going to win in 1997. You talk about his influence on Thatcher and Reagan, but their political project was already set without Rupert Murdoch. Margaret Thatcher didn't need any convincing to close the coal mines or to cut taxes for certain groups in society. Isn't it more that Murdoch follows public opinion in order to sell papers to people whose opinion he's mirroring rather than leading?

I think you're right in a sense that nobody really has ever been able to establish the extent to which the Murdoch press are simply reflecting an exaggerating public opinion or actually steering it and creating it.

The important point is that because nobody can be quite sure what's happening, the politicians who are on the receiving end have to make the safest possible calculation about how to deal with it. So they assume that Murdoch's power is real. I think it is real, actually.

But you see, for their own preservation, in order to increase their own chances of getting elected, they make the decision to treat Murdoch as a very, very powerful man and to assume that his newspapers really can sway voters, because to assume the opposite would be too dangerous. It was surreal to see this all-powerful figure when he appeared in front of the select committee. And obviously he's older now, but he was...

Almost deliberately humble. In fact, they were the words he used, you know, this is the most humble day of my life. Is it possible or would someone be terribly naive to fall for that act that actually Rupert Murdoch didn't know everything that was going on, didn't know that phone hacking and all these terrible practices were happening? Is there any chance that actually he, you know, he wasn't involved, wasn't aware?

I think there are two things. The first is that I think there is some truth in Murdoch's defence that he was too high up the tree to know what was happening on the ground. And we don't know precisely what Rebecca Brooks or anybody else told him as the scandal unfolded. The other point is that I was in the select committee room when Murdoch was giving his evidence and

And it was very striking how when he was pushed into an embarrassing corner, he would drum his fingers on the table and say, I really don't know. I really don't remember. Now, I think that was tactical amnesia because I got to know quite a lot of people who'd worked with him at a very senior level. And they said it was notorious that he was terribly difficult to brief for a meeting or a public hearing like that because he would wander away from the script.

So they understood that this appearance at the Select Committee was very important. They had done all they could to rehearse him and to get him to know what the right answer would be, the most helpful answer. But I think they said to him, look, if you think you're about to say something outrageous...

or if you can't tell the truth without getting us all into trouble, just forget. Just go drum your fingers on the table and say, I really can't remember. That's your safety net. Tactical amnesia is the phrase you use. I think Tom Watson used the phrase willful blindness. Does that also explain it? Was that he didn't know on purpose? He didn't want to know, therefore he had plausible deniability. It's possible that he had willful blindness. You know there was an occasion...

After the phone hacking scandal had broken, when the whole thing was a state of chaos, when Murdoch went to speak to his reporters in London to try and boost their morale, some of them in their sneaky way recorded him talking to them. And he said then in that meeting, oh, everybody always knew that newspapers were paying bribes to police officers.

Well, so there he acknowledged that in general terms, he understood that his reporters might be doing criminal things. And then, yeah, I think Tom Watson's right to say he doesn't want to know too much. So I think the same you see, which isn't generally recognised, could be true of Rebecca Brooks, that she was found not guilty at trial. And some people were rather outraged by that. But I think Rebecca Brooks is clever enough to...

cunning enough to adopt the position of saying, whatever it is you're doing, I don't want to know about it. So that she really may not have known precisely what was going on. This season, Instacart has your back to school. As in, they've got your back to school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back to school supplies, like backpacks, binders and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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Ultimately, your reporting led to the Leveson Inquiry. Can you just paint a bit of a picture for us? What was it like to be there? What was it like in the lead up? I was very proud of the Leveson Inquiry, excited by it, because the UK is a country with a terrible culture of official secrecy reinforced by the Official Secrets Act.

And compared to other democracies, we know far less of what goes on in the corridors of power. And there suddenly with the Leveson inquiry, you had the most powerful people in the country hauled in front of a microphone, live streamed onto the Internet, being told to explain exactly what had been going on in the corridors of power. And sometimes their email messages or text messages were being disclosed. And I thought that was really important that that should happen.

And then, of course, it's extremely frustrating and yet not surprising that nothing really changed, because if you if you go up and challenge power, as the Leveson inquiry did,

you run into that power, that people use their power to make sure they don't have to implement change. Do you think if this happened today, newspapers would have the resources to uncover it? If the equivalent of the phone hacking scandal came along now, there are two things that mean it might not emerge. The big thing is that the internet continues to do enormous damage to the business model of newspapers. And so they keep cutting back on their staff.

So since I retired in 2015, or was it 2016, five years ago, 2016, The Guardian has made redundant some 25% of its journalistic staff in two different phases. And that inevitably weakens their ability to do their job. There are very, very good people still working there, but they have far less time to do their work necessarily because of those cuts.

The other thing is that I don't know whether any news organisation, any of the major ones, has an appetite to get into that fight again. It is exhausting doing that kind of thing. And my sense is that, well, you can see, in fact, that The Guardian, as an example, is not keen on banging on that door anymore. So, you know, there's lots and lots of civil action still working their way through the courts where the Sun...

And the Mirror Group titles in particular are being sued by people whose phones were hacked by them. And The Guardian is not covering it particularly heavily. Just occasionally at some peak moment, they'll do a story. And I wonder whether they would have the appetite to start that fight all over again if the opportunity presented itself. Something else has happened, hasn't it, since, which is that The Guardian gives away its journalism for free online.

And the Times owned by Rupert Murdoch has paywalled its journalism and therefore funds it better and therefore resources its journalists better. Do you think if The Guardian had followed Rupert Murdoch's line on charging for people to read stuff online as they do when they have to buy it in print, actually, Guardian's journalism would be in a healthier position?

That's a very complicated question. The Guardian's business model is actually thoroughly viable. They have something like a billion pounds in cash sitting, earning interest or other forms of income. And the idea is that you can use that surplus each year to subsidise the running costs of the newspaper and

And the paper itself, Russ Bridger introduced this idea of saying we'll have no paywall. We'll invite readers to pay. And that's proved to be remarkably successful. The real problems are external. I mean, there was an early phase of crisis where newspapers discovered that Facebook and Google were hogging online advertising. Between the two of them, they take something like 80% of the income from online advertising. That wasn't forecast yet.

And of course, the more recent thing is the pandemic that just hit all economic activity, including advertising.

The business model of the Guardian is potentially a good one, but these external forces keep coming in and inflicting great damage on it. And they're inflicting great damage on Murdoch's crew as well. But isn't there a potential flaw there in that if the customer isn't paying for the journalism that they consume and you're looking elsewhere for funding, you may have to compromise the product in order to satisfy the people that do fund it?

Yes, if you're going to start going out with your begging bowl and asking people to subsidise your journalism, you need to be extremely careful that that doesn't come with strings attached. You see, ultimately, the big thing that could happen in an ideal world is that governments around the world gang up and take over ownership of these huge internet beasts like Facebook and Google forever.

And having taken over ownership of them because they're too important to be left in the hands of profit seeking corporations, we could use the profit that they generate to establish a fund which would have to be independently operated, which could then give money to any news organisation which had a track record of publishing truth and correcting error.

And A, that would revive journalism around the developed world where the Internet has done so much damage to it. And B, it would help to push back on the tides of falsehood and misinformation which are flowing through social media, because it could be a tiny news organisation. It could be a very big one. But if the criteria is that simple, every time you publish something that turns out to be untrue, you correct it with equal prominence. OK, you've done that. Here's some money.

It could be really, really valuable, but it must be free, of course, from any kind of political influence or manipulation. I think it could be done, but it won't be done, in fact, because we don't have the power. Those corporations and multinational governments are still operating at this tiny national level. I actually think that five or 10 years ago, collectively, we jumped off the top of a very high building and we're kind of falling.

And you can't suddenly go upwards. I think our outlook's really bad. But maybe you don't wish we'd told that. What a bombshell to end on, Nick. Just a lovely up note there. We just want to say thank you because your writing has been an amazing companion for this series of British Scandal. So thank you for all your work. No, that's a pleasure.

Did you coin an expression there? Did you say when I said that rather depressing thing, that was quite a bum shell? No, I think it's a Midlands vowel. No, but it's a good word. If somebody says something surprising and depressing, it's a bum shell. Because it bums you out. Yeah, very good. Yeah. Sorry, I'd like to go back and retract my answer. Yes, I did, in fact, coin that. You coined it. And we're now copywriting it. Thank you, Nick. Thank you. That was great.

Another incredible insight from the inside. Nick Davies there, author of Hack Attack. That's an amazing read. Absolutely brilliant. Next week, we have a new story and it's your turn, Matt. Yes, we're going back to the 90s. It's the story of the man who brought down Bearings Bank, the original rogue trader, Nick Leeson. That's right, we're going full red braces. I can't wait for this one.

This is the fifth episode in our series, The Murdoch Phone Hacking. If you'd like to know more about this story, we especially recommend Nick Davies' book, Hack Attack. For further details, there's also Beyond Contempt by Peter Dukes and The News Machine by Glenn Mulcair and James Hanning. I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford. Our senior producer is Russell Finch. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Louis for Wondery.

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