Phone hacking: A scandal that has diminished Britain
David Cameron’s friendship with Rebekah Brooks and employment of Andy Coulson puts him at the heart of the phone hacking story.
The Telegraph | from July 15, 2011
The chief executive of a newspaper company resigns after allegations that her colleagues have hacked into the phone accounts of murder victims and their families; a Prime Minister moralises noisily in Parliament, trying to distract attention from the fact that he has been spending family holidays with this disgraced CEO, and that he appointed as his director of communications a man who employed those phone hackers; meanwhile, the country’s most senior police officer is forced to admit that he, too, engaged someone implicated in the scandal – a ruthless and abrasive tabloid journalist from the same newspaper company – as his personal adviser.
This is the United Kingdom we are talking about, not one of those southern European countries whose corruption Britons have traditionally found so amusing. It will be a long time before we can make any more jokes at the expense of Italy or Greece. After the revelations of the past week, the whole world has learned the shameful truth about modern Britain: that its leading politicians and policemen have been lining up to have their palms greased and images burnished by executives of a media empire guilty of deeply criminal – and morally repugnant – invasions of personal privacy.
Rebekah Brooks, the former News of the World editor who stood down as chief executive of News International [on Friday], has at least belatedly recognised the role she played in nurturing this culture. David Cameron, in contrast, has thrown Andy Coulson to the wolves rather than explain precisely why he admitted to his inner circle a man who, when he was editor of the same paper, presided over reporters who hacked the Royal family’s mobile phones.
The Prime Minister has also done his best – unsuccessfully – to deflect attention from the fact that he spent Christmas with Mrs Brooks and her husband, and that Mr Coulson visited Chequers as recently as March. In addition, he is planning a long-term diversionary strategy that could impose state regulation on all newspapers, including those that, unlike the News International titles, did not shower him in hospitality. Such a move will no doubt delight Gordon Brown, whose claim that Mrs Brooks had invaded his privacy – delivered with theatrical fury to the House of Commons on Wednesday – was undermined by the fact that he had subsequently attended her wedding and invited her to a slumber party at Chequers.
In the middle of this chaos, Rupert Murdoch was forced to withdraw his bid for BSkyB. Mr Cameron duly attempted to take credit for this decision; but the truth is that it was his Government that allowed the bid to advance in the first place. Indeed, ministers gave every impression – in between mouthfuls of canapés at News International parties – of hoping that it would succeed.
Our senior policemen, too, were determined not to miss out on the hospitality of Murdoch employees. Between September 2006 and June 2009, Sir Paul Stephenson, now the Metropolitan Police Commissioner [who resigned earlier this week], had seven dinners with Neil Wallis, a former deputy editor of the News of the World at the time hacking is alleged to have gone on. They must have been agreeable occasions, for in October 2009 Mr Wallis was engaged as Sir Paul’s personal adviser – an appointment the Commissioner failed to acknowledge publicly until he was forced to this week. Mr Wallis also advised John Yates, the police officer previously in charge of the Met’s investigation into phone hacking. Even in Palermo, this would raise eyebrows.
This is commentary from Brit, a UK Kossack whose coverage on the story at Daily Kos has been stellar:
David had 26 meetings with NI over the last 16 months:
But the timing is important. David Cameron avoided Murdoch till 2007 when he recruited, thanks to Osbourne and Brooks (then Wade) David Coulson
In 2009 a month before James Murdoch his notorious McTaggart lecture laying into Ofcom and the BBC in tandem with the BSkyB bid.
1. . The then leader of the opposition spoke about making a ‘bonfire on the quangos’. First of the quangos he wanted to incinerate? Ofcom
2. I spoke to a couple of Tory advisors in June 2010 (along with a well known NI journalist but Chatham House rules applied). They confirmed that they wanted to see the BBC vastly reduced in size – exactly the main thrust of JM’s lecture.
3. On taking up office at Number 10, Cameron reduced the BBC’s budget by 16% by funding the World Service through the license fee, rather than the Foreign Office.
4. Vince Cable supervised the quasi judicial takeover process of the BSkyB, but the Conservatives (unlike Labour) refused to refer it to the competition authority, and instead when down the much weaker plurality route.
It was also James Murdoch’s McTaggart lecture which caused the rift with Gordon Brown according to Isabel Oakeshott in the Sunday Times.
It was a stringent critique of the BBC and Ofcom, the media regulator. Brown hated every word.
Inside Downing Street, he pored over the text, line by line. “I can’t overstate how important that speech was,” said a former Labour strategist who was with Brown at the time. “It changed everything. He saw it as very rightwing and a direct attack on what we were doing. He felt the Murdochs didn’t share any of our values.”
So within a year of James Murdoch’s speech, Cameron had given the Murdochs all they asked for. Then, two days after he was installed in No 10, Cameron invited Murdoch over to – in Rupert’s words – “Thank him for the help in the campaign.”
Please remember than in ALL these instances above the Tory Party were about to grant Murdoch a cross platform monopoly (let alone a Pay TV monopoly) which would have given Murdoch more power than any single media owner in any developed country (Italy included)