Book review: Hack Attack: How the Truth Caught Up with Rupert Murdoch, by Nick Davies
It did not seem a big story when in 2006 a journalist and a private investigator were arrested for the illegal phone hacking of three Buckingham Palace staff. The News of the World dismissed the journalist as a rogue.
by Nick Davies
Chatto & Windus
It did not seem a big story when in 2006 a journalist and a private investigator were arrested for the illegal phone hacking of three Buckingham Palace staff. The News of the World dismissed the journalist as a rogue. However, Nick Davies of The Guardian suspected the hacking had editorial consent and started on the track which would lead to the humiliation of Rupert Murdoch before a parliamentary commission and closure of News of the World.
Hack Attack is an account of Davies' tenacious investigation with its false tracks, mistakes, strokes of luck and Murdoch counterattacks. For a long time many agreed with London mayor Boris Johnson that the accusations were "codswallop". For years police and politicians had been too chummy with Murdoch's newspapers or too afraid to really scrutinise their methods; even the Press Complaints Commission came out on Murdoch's side.
But some journalists, lawyers and celebrities such as Sienna Miller joined Davies' campaign - and attitudes changed dramatically with the disclosure in 2011 that News of the World had hacked the phones of the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, 13, as well as the phones of relatives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
This led to Murdoch, his son James and other executives appearing before a parliamentary commission. The defence was that they had known nothing. But the commission decided that News of the World and other Murdoch papers such as The Sun had employed private investigators systematically to hack phones and also emails for information which boosted sales even if it ruined lives.
Davies describes what he believes was going on in the Murdoch empire: News of the World journalists were not only hacking outsiders and rival papers but also each other, Scotland Yard and political parties.