All power corrupts

During the phone hacking revelations in 2011, Glenn Mulcaire became the “most hated man in Britain”. This is how he styles himself in his new book, written with Joseph Cusack, whose cover announces: “I was Rupert Murdoch’s fall guy for the phone hacking scandal and got convicted of the same crime TWICE.” His moniker came about because it was widely claimed that, during the search for the missing teenager Milly Dowler in 2002, he had hacked her phone, thus generating activity on it that led her parents to believe she had recently used it and must be still alive. In fact, she had already been murdered — by the serial killer Levi Bellfield, it was later revealed.

An understandable reaction to the publication of this book would be to accuse Mulcaire of digging up a stale old story in a grubby attempt to clear his name. But this would be to ignore a number of significant things.

Firstly, the continuing omerta on phone hacking in most of the British press obscures (just as intended) the fact that the story is very much an ongoing one. Four current editors of British national newspapers are among dozens of current and former journalists from the Mail titles who are alleged to have employed private investigators to gather information by unlawful means. This has emerged from damages claims brought against the Daily Mail and General Trust by Prince Harry, Baroness Lawrence, Elton John and others, as revealed in court papers in May last year, in spite of the company’s sustained campaign of obstructing their publication. And, again as under-reported in Britain, the hacking saga is currently haunting the publisher of The Washington Post, Will Lewis, formerly an executive member of the Management and Standards Committee at News Corp. This is because of the persistent claim that in that role he helped to cover up extensive hacking in the Murdoch empire. Although he strongly denies the allegation, many of his staff are deeply concerned about the journalistic ethics of their new employer.

Second, Mulcaire is actually not that repentant about much of his activity. His main concern is to clear his name with regard to the Dowler family, claiming that much of the hacking was done by News of the World staff before he was commissioned to work on the case, and that he was brought in only so that he could be blamed later if anything went wrong — which of course it did, spectacularly. This is also the case that he makes in The News Machine, which former Independent on Sunday deputy editor James Hanning wrote in 2014 with considerable input from Mulcaire. All very convenient, I hear you say. However, not least because of what we know about Mulcaire’s undoubted expertise and clinical thoroughness — and not simply from his own glowing accounts of his skills — it does seem highly unlikely that he would have undertaken the crude hack that generated the “false hope” moment.

It is also surely significant that Mark Lewis, the Dowler family’s lawyer and a key player in the early days of the hacking scandal, is on record as endorsing Mulcaire’s account. Given the cast of repellent NotW employees, named and unnamed, that populate Shadowman, it would be entirely unsurprising if they’d behaved in the Dowler case in exactly the way that Mulcaire claims. There emerges from the book a terrible vista of casual cruelty to the victims of the paper’s stories and absolutely routinised and shameless wrongdoing in its offices. Mulcaire is honest enough to admit that he “got swept up in an institution that had gained such unaccountable power that it could no longer check itself”, but he himself still seems to manifest an evident distaste for “celebrities and people with over-grandiose ideas about themselves”. Snooping on such people comes across here largely as an acceptable means of earning a living in a corrupt environment, but very different from what he euphemistically calls his work in the “public interest”, in which he was “more than happy to bend the rules and bypass the red tape” for the purposes of “nailing down the wrong’uns”.

And who might these be? Well, for example, the people accused (often wrongly) of being paedophiles in the NotW’s notorious “For Sarah” campaign, which drove many actual offenders off the authorities’ radar and caused various innocent people to be hounded (Mulcaire assures us that he warned the paper of the possible consequences of its actions). Then there were the boys who killed James Bulger — Jon Venables and Robert Thompson — ferreting out whose post-trial whereabouts “became a blueprint for future operations” but also forced the authorities to spend a vast amount of public money ensuring that their lives, and those of their families, were not threatened by vigilantes. And also Mary Bell, whose whereabouts, and those of her daughter, were discovered by journalists in 1998, 18 years after she had been released from prison for killing two children in 1968. Although on release she had been granted anonymity (including a new name), using all the dark arts at his disposal, Mulcaire tracked her down to the south coast cafe where she worked and confronted her in person, threatening that: “I will expose you and your lifestyle, where you are and what you do, to the entire country through the national press”. His account of this encounter is purest tabloidese (“it hit me that I was close to evil”; “there I was, eating fish and chips with one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers”) but omits to add that his “public interest” journalism in this case drained the public purse of a great deal of money in order to protect the lives of Bell and her daughter.

Mulcaire’s reaction to the obviously ludicrous rumour that Venables was about to join the army (“Jon fucking Venables cannot join the army!” I screamed. “That can’t be right. Unless it is some sort of trendy, tree-hugging rehabilitation claptrap by those cretins at the MoD”) perfectly illustrates the relentlessly blokeish, populist tone of the book. Describing himself as “the little scally from the council estate” he is much given to anti-establishment tirades but seems to fail to realise until far too late the extent to which the Murdoch press is in fact one of the most powerful components of that establishment. And so the “outsider who was not pissing in the same pot as all those newsroom snakes in suits” (a favourite phrase) finds that at the first sign of trouble, the latter “closed ranks, shut me out and readily threw me under the bus at the earliest opportunity”. He became “expendable, a throwaway commodity to discard when no longer of value … The Dirty Digger and his empire cohorts viewed me as pudden-headed working-class cannon fodder: a fool who would lie down and roll over at the wag of his master’s finger”.

Well, they would, wouldn’t they? But there’s surely a deeper moral here somewhere.