On 5 July 2011, the headline in the Guardian read: ‘Missing Milly Dowler’s voicemail was hacked by News of the World’. The report, by Nick Davies and Amelia Hill, revealed that when the thirteen-year-old Milly, later found murdered, had gone missing in 2002, the News of the World had hacked – gained illicit access to – her phone messages. The story, accompanied by further revelations of the reluctance of the police to investigate the hacking, led to a firestorm which would have dramatic and lasting ramifications for the entire media and for crime reporting in particular.
One of the first effects of the story was the closure of the News of the World by its owner, Rupert Murdoch. Two weeks later, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson and the assistant commissioner, John Yates, resigned over their own roles in the saga. In the wake of the revulsion felt across the political spectrum about the hacking, the prime minister David Cameron announced that he was appointing Lord Justice Leveson, the man who had successfully prosecuted Rosemary West, to head an inquiry that would examine ‘the culture, practices and ethics of the press in its relations with the public, with the police, with politicians and, as to the police and politicians, the conduct of each’. For the media in general and crime reporters in particular, the world now became ‘BL’ and ‘AL’ – Before Leveson and After Leveson.
Much of the response to the initial Guardian revelations about hacking, from both the police and the rest of the media, was dismissive. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who had responsibility for setting policing priorities for the capital, described the early stories as ‘codswallop’ that ‘looks like a politically motivated put-up job by the Labour Party’. As a damage-limitation exercise, the management standards committee of News International, which owned the News of the World and the Sun, handed over to the police millions of emails which revealed the contacts and sources of many of their journalists. In one of the subsequent trials of journalists charged with hacking, a defence counsel, Nigel Rumfitt QC, told jurors that the police had been ‘spoonfed’ evidence ‘by a mighty multinational desperate to save its own skin’. He described News International as ‘a copper’s nark – a grass, and like all grasses gives a mixture of inaccurate and misleading information to the police’.
Meanwhile, the police launched three inquiries in quick succession: Operation Weeting, into phone hacking; Operation Elveden, into allegations of paying money to police officers and other public officials for leaks and tip-offs; and Operation Tuleta, into computer hacking. Between 2011 and 2015, a total of sixty-seven journalists were arrested. Operation Weeting led to the arrest of twenty-nine journalists of whom nine were convicted or pleaded guilty. Under Operation Elveden, thirty were arrested, twenty-nine charged and only one convicted. Under Tuleta, one journalist pleaded guilty and was cautioned.
Two former editors of the News of the World, Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, appeared in the dock of the Old Bailey. After an eight-month trial, in July 2014, Coulson, who had been the Prime Minister’s communications director, was convicted of conspiring to intercept voicemails and jailed for eighteen months. Brooks was found not guilty. In separate cases, the paper’s former chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck and former news editors Greg Miskiw and Ian Edmonson, all pleaded guilty; the former two were jailed for six months and the latter eight months. Many of the subsequent cases, in particular those resulting from Operation Elveden, resulted in acquittals for the journalists concerned and considerable bitterness about the prosecution process, aimed at the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
In April 2015, many of the Elveden prosecutions were abandoned by the CPS before they even came to trial. The former News of the World crime correspondent Lucy Panton, who won her appeal against conviction for conspiracy to commit public misconduct by paying a prison officer, was one of those against whom further charges were dropped. She had been on bail for more than nineteen months before being charged and described the experience as a ‘hellish ordeal’.
There was widespread condemnation of the prosecutions. Michelle Stanistreet, the general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, described Operation Elveden as ‘a £20-million fiasco. What was so damaging for the journalists was that they were forced to breach the most basic tenet of the profession – that you always protect your source.’ Indeed, the NUJ’s code of conduct states clearly that a journalist ‘protects the identity of sources who supply information in confidence and material gathered in the course of her/his work’. She blamed Rupert Murdoch ‘and his henchmen and women’ for handing over reporters’ emails and contacts to the police and concluded that ‘we must never have a situation where journalists are abused in this way. If they have no guarantee they can do their jobs safely and can protect their sources and journalistic material, we will not have a functioning free press.’
In May 2015, Anthony France, the crime correspondent of the Sun, was found guilty over payments to a public official and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence. France was convicted because he had, over a period of more than three years, given £22,000 to a PC Timothy Edwards who worked at Heathrow airport as part of the counter-terrorism unit. Sentencing him, Judge Timothy Pontius described him as of ‘hitherto unblemished character’ and ‘essentially a decent man of solid integrity’. He was also sentenced to complete 200 hours of unpaid work and ordered to pay costs of just under £35,000, on the understanding that News UK would foot the bill. France, who told the court he had inherited Edwards as a contact, was widely regarded as very unlucky to be convicted.
The fullest account of the events that led to the Leveson Inquiry and the arrests of journalists can be found in Nick Davies’s book Hack Attack. Davies suggests that illegal hacking was regarded within News International as justifiable provided it didn’t ‘go Main Street’. The hacking of the parents of Madeleine McCann, the three-year-old who disappeared in Portugal in 2007, and of Milly Dowler was ‘Main Street’. He also suggested that no action was initially taken over the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone because, as one officer put it, the press were ‘untouchable and all-powerful’. The original suggestion in the Guardian, that messages on Milly Dowler’s phone had been deleted, thus giving her parents and the police false hope that she was still alive, turned out not to be the case.
The Leveson Inquiry, held in the Royal Courts of Justice and televised live, took oral evidence from 337 witnesses, including eleven chief constables and twenty-five journalists, digested nearly 300 statements, cost £5.4 million and produced a 2,000-page report on its findings and recommendations. With evidence given by journalists, police officers and victims of press malpractice, such as the Dowler family and the parents of Madeleine McCann, it threw open a window on the dark arts of investigations and the effect they had on their subjects. The Home Affairs Select Committee calculated that at least 12,800 people had had their phones hacked but the true figure will never be known.
Lord Justice Leveson published the first part of his inquiry on 29 November 2012. It examined, amongst many other aspects of reporting, ‘public concern that the police had become too close to the press in general, and News International (NI) in particular, with the result that the investigation of phone hacking had not been conducted with the rigour that it deserved and calls for re-consideration of the allegations were ignored.’ The NI influence at the Yard was major: ten out of forty-five press officers had come from there.
High on the list of Leveson’s recommendations – and perhaps the most controversial suggestion – was that an independent regulatory body, backed by law, be set up with the power to investigate serious ethical breaches and to sanction newspapers. This was vigorously opposed by most newspapers who argued that it would give the state too much power and they duly set up their own body, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) in 2014 with the backing of all the national press with the exception of the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer and the Financial Times. The report explored the various ways in which the press behaved and portrayed itself.
Leveson considered ‘the arguably over-cosy relationship between the police and the press’ and he pointed to five potential features cited in a summary by the high-profile counsel for the inquiry, Robert Jay QC: inappropriate hospitality; off-the-record briefings; leaks; press attribution of ‘police sources’; and the press turning up at incidents because they had been tipped off by a police officer.
Jay suggested that the frequently used expression ‘police sources’ was ‘a term which is redolent of impropriety, or at the very least carries with it the possibility of inappropriate behaviour, either because the police officer has indulged in gossip or leaks, or because the term is in truth a cipher or fig-leaf for an invented story because the source does not in fact exist’. He also suggested that the presence of the media at ‘incidents or newsworthy occasions, because they have been tipped off by a police officer . . . is indicative of an unhealthy relationship’.
On the issue of hospitality offered by journalists to the police, the former Met Police Commissioner, Lord Condon, was quoted as suggesting that ‘hospitality can be the start of a grooming process which leads to inappropriate and unethical behaviour’. Evidence was given of police officers being entertained at expensive restaurants and given bottles of champagne ‘which did nothing to enhance the reputation in the public mind of the MPS or the officers involved’. Leveson noted in passing that the Chief Constable of Avon and Somerset, Colin Port, had cited the so-called ‘blush test’ and had said in evidence, ‘I trust and rely upon the discretion of my staff. They make life-and-death decisions day in and day out, and if I can’t trust them to decide that a cup of coffee or a glass or wine or a pint of beer at the appropriate time is not appropriate, then I’ve lost the plot.’
As far as senior officers dealing with the media were concerned, Leveson found that ‘the distinction between endeavouring to improve the standing of the Service on the one hand, and working in the pursuit of self-interest on the other, may be a fine one.’ And as regards high-profile arrests and the British equivalent of the American ‘perp walk’ – when an arrested person is filmed or photographed by the media – Leveson concluded that ‘the professionalism required of police officers must be sufficiently robust to instill the mindset that such leaks about forthcoming arrests or the involvement of the famous in the criminal justice system are not in the public interest . . .’ He also urged that, except in exceptional circumstances, the names or identifying details of people arrested or suspected of a crime should not be released to the press. His suggestions were soon to be cheerfully ignored as high-profile figures in the entertainment industry – many of them completely innocent – were arrested during investigations into historic cases of sexual abuse.
One side-effect of the inquiry was to shine some shocking light on the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator who was killed with an axe to the head in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in south London in 1987. It has been suggested that Morgan was about to blow the whistle to the press about police corruption in the area. No one has ever been convicted of his murder, despite five police inquiries into his death and an unending and dogged campaign by his loyal brother, Alistair, to get to the truth. A new investigation was launched under Dave Cook, a dedicated and conscientious detective who finally gave the Morgan family hope that the truth of what had happened might finally emerge. Morgan’s former partner, Jonathan Rees, who worked extensively on assignments for the News of the World, and a former police officer, Sid Fillery, stood trial in connection with the murder at the Old Bailey in 2011 but the case against them collapsed.
What the Leveson Inquiry learned was that, in 2002, Dave Cook noticed two vans hanging round near his home and following him and his wife, another police officer called Jacqui Hames, who was a presenter of the BBC’s Crimewatch. Both vans had been leased to the News of the World. ‘The News of the World’s alleged justification for this surveillance was that it was suspected they were having an affair together, a position that lacked any credibility given that Ms Hames and Mr Cook had been married for some years and had two children.’ Here was an uncompromising detective trying to solve a shocking murder being hounded by the News of the World, one of whose freelancers had been charged with the very same murder.
Amongst some of the most intriguing and frank evidence was that from Richard Peppiatt, formerly of the Daily Star, who shone a light on the reporting of crime figures for his paper: ‘if there’s something that comes out saying crime has gone down, you then go look for the statistic which says knife crime has gone up 20 per cent but the rest of crime – well, we’ll just focus on knife crime. Because there is an overwhelming negativity and it runs throughout the tabloid press. You know, a story is simply not a story unless it’s knocking someone, or knocking an organisation or knocking an ethnic group, whatever it may be.’
On the issue of ‘sources’, Peppiatt said that ‘although unnamed sources are a valuable journalistic tool to protect sources, often in my experience of tabloids they are simply made up by the reporter to increase the word count and add a veneer of legitimacy to something that is speculation, at best.’
Running in tandem with the Leveson Inquiry was a separate report, entitled The Ethical Issues Arising From Relations Between the Police and the Media, which was commissioned in 2011 by the home secretary, Theresa May, and the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, in the wake of the initial revelations about phone hacking but before the Leveson Inquiry got underway. It was headed by Dame Elizabeth Filkin, the former parliamentary commissioner for standards, who seemed to take as her creed the wonderful poem by Wendy Cope, ‘How to Deal with the Press’, which recommends that you should never confide in a journalist.
Her report, published in 2012, suggested that officers watch out for ‘late-night carousing, long sessions, yet another bottle of wine at lunch – these are all long-standing media tactics to get you to spill the beans. Avoid.’ The report continued: ‘Mixing the media with alcohol is not banned but should be an uncommon event.’ She suggests that drinking with officers ‘may be seen as inappropriate hospitality’. She also advised the police to watch out for reporters ‘flirting’.
The Filkin Report received a warm welcome from the then newly appointed Commissioner of the Met, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe. ‘There should be no more secret conversations,’ he said at the time of its publication. ‘There should be no more improper contact and by that what I mean is between the police and the media – that which is of a selfish, rather than a public interest. Meetings will no longer be enhanced by hospitality and alcohol.’ Reporters were in no doubt as to the effects of the Filkin Report, the Leveson Inquiry and the arrests and prosecutions. Sean O’Neill, crime editor of The Times, said that the combination of the events had ‘created a culture of fear reinforced by a set of rules and regulations that have left sensible officers worried about the impact on their careers of having conversations with journalists’. The end result of the high-profile arrests, he said, was ‘a press that is all too willing to bash the police at every opportunity because it has now seen bully-boy policing up close’.
As a sign of the cooling relations between police and reporters, since the Leveson Inquiry the traditional CRA Christmas party, to which police officers were always invited, was cancelled as few of the officers now turned up. ‘On the eve of the publication of the Leveson report we went to the Barley Mow – one detective who was coming had a text saying “you are not to go”,’ said John Twomey, chairman of the CRA. ‘They thought that we would photograph senior police officers going into the pub and then publish it on the day that the Leveson report was published. No one would have done that. Hopefully, eventually, the police will come to a better understanding. You don’t want to go out and get slaughtered every lunch time with them or go to the Ritz and have a £500 bottle of Cristal but just normal social interaction – you’d have a couple of glasses of wine over lunch or a couple of beers before you go home and they had trust in reporters that they knew.’
As for the lasting effect on the police, here is the response of a senior serving detective in March 2015 whom I had asked to interview about media/police relations: ‘Much as I would like to, I cannot speak to journalists without a senior press officer present and they only give permission to comment factually on jobs. The world is a very different place. Sorry.’