Hacking’s victims fight back
Fresh revelations suggest that the scandalous behaviour at London-based Murdoch newspapers was wider and deeper than previously believed.
In June 2010 Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloid, the News of the World, reported that Liberal Democrat MP Chris Huhne was engaged in an extramarital affair. It was a run-of-the-mill but potentially damaging story of a secret romance that would have battled to meet any public-interest test.
Why Huhne, some readers might have wondered, and why then? What was newsworthy about the private behaviour of a newly appointed minister in the Conservative-led coalition government — a man “not famous enough,” according to the reporter involved, for the story to run when it had first been unearthed a year earlier? No evidence was put forward that the affair was affecting Huhne’s performance as an MP. He hadn’t misused public funds or abused his parliamentary position. None of the people directly involved had gone public.
The key to this mystery lies six months earlier, in January, when Huhne called for a judicial inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World. A Guardian report had recently exposed how the Murdoch paper had hired four private investigators who then used illegal methods to seek out embarrassing information about celebrities and other public figures.
The News of the World’s editor at the time of the hacking was Andy Coulson, who was now working for soon-to-be-prime-minister David Cameron. “Very damaging for Andy,” wrote Fred Michel, a lobbyist for Murdoch’s News Group, to the paper’s latest editor, Colin Myler. “We need to get Chris Huhne.” “Totally,” replied Myler.
How they “got” him was by publishing the story of his affair. In essence, the Murdoch press’s response to an accusation of hacking was to hack the accuser and eventually unearth his affair. “To do this,” wrote journalist Nick Davies earlier this month in the highly regarded British magazine Prospect, “the paper hired three private investigators who specialised in using unlawful methods to get access to confidential information and paid £2600 to a former police officer, Derek Webb, who ran undercover surveillance on Huhne for a total of eleven days that June.”
What made Huhne’s misdeeds more newsworthy than other MPs’ peccadilloes was that he was seen as an enemy, and therefore deserving of public humiliation.
A decade after the News of the World revealed his affair, Huhne came into receipt of information about how the paper had pried into his private life and decided to sue. He was successful, and in December last year, in a confidential settlement, he accepted a six-figure sum from News.
The story of the News of the World’s attack on Huhne is part of a blizzard of new information and allegations about News’s hacking, surveillance and cover-ups revealed by Davies in Prospect this month.
It was Davies who wrote the 2010 Guardian story that prompted Huhne’s call for an inquiry. The article, and Huhne’s response, posed an obvious threat to News’s interests by showing that the hacking was much more widespread than had been thought.
Four years earlier, News of the World reporter Clive Goodman and private detective Glenn........
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