UK’s phonehacking scandal isn’t over

Corporate governance is vital to restoring the public’s confidence in institutions that appear to have failed to notice a glaring scandal

It is a curiously unsatisfactory end to a protracted saga: Is this how the United Kingdom phone-hacking scandal finishes — with a lengthy statement from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)? Four-and-a-half years after a storm erupted over allegations that the phone messages of a murdered girl had been intercepted by a tabloid newspaper, the CPS has announced there is no “realistic prospect of a conviction” in two longrunning investigations related to the hacking of voicemails.

The decision follows a review of evidence collected in two police operations, Weeting and Golding. It concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring corporate charges against Rupert Murdoch’s company, News UK (formerly News International), or criminal cases against 10 individuals at Mirror Group Newspapers.

Its latest statement, while not unexpected, leaves victims of hacking in the dark about important aspects of the scandal.

No one doubts that a culture of intrusion, symbolised by industrial-scale hacking of voicemails, was rife in some newsrooms. Mirror Group Newspapers is appealing against £1.2 million (Dh6.7 million) damages awarded to eight victims of phone hacking in May this year. The CPS decision means that while some victims know they were targeted by Mirror titles, they are unlikely to find out how it came about.

Only one senior figure at the now-defunct News of the World, the former editor (and later No 10 spin doctor) Andy Coulson, has been convicted in relation to phone hacking. His former boss at the News of the World, Rebekah Brooks, was cleared of all charges in June last year, along with her husband and three other defendants. A private detective, Glenn Mulcaire, and four individuals who had held lowerranking positions at the paper pleaded guilty.

All of this leaves unanswered questions: How did the practice of phone hacking take root in newsrooms? And why did no one blow the whistle on it? Even when the NoW’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, and Mulcaire were convicted in 2007 for intercepting voicemails, it didn’t set alarm bells ringing.

Corporate governance isn’t a subject that exercises the public, but it’s vital to restoring confidence in institutions that appear to have failed to notice a scandal that was staring them in the face. When two police officers from Operation Weeting showed me evidence in 2011 that my voicemails had been hacked by the NoW, it had been in their possession for almost five years.

Part of the problem, for victims of hacking, is that the scandal has had so many twists and turns. It’s hard to recall now that it all seemed relatively straightforward in the summer of 2011, when the Guardian revealed suspicions about the NoW’s behaviour after the disappearance of 13-year-old Millie Dowler in 2002. Millie was later found murdered and the suggestion on the Guardian’s front page on July 4, 2011, that someone acting for the tabloid had hacked into her voicemails caused a sensation.

Everything seemed to happen very fast at first. The then leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, called on Brooks, by then chief executive of News International, to consider her position. A pressure group, Hacked Off, was created with the specific aim of demanding a public inquiry. Murdoch panicked and announced the closure of the NoW. Prime Minister David Cameron appointed a judge, Lord Justice Leveson, to chair an inquiry.

Public memory

The inquiry opened in November 2011. Leveson’s report, a 2,000-page doorstopper, was published a year later. Yet, more than three years later, most of the press is still regulating itself without independent scrutiny, Brooks has got her job back and the scandal is fading from public memory.

This is not the outcome victims expected. Phone hacking was a symptom of a malignant culture in some sections of the British press; no one believes it is still going on, but the corporate structures that apparently failed to detect illegal practices have barely been challenged. It’s an unsatisfactory outcome on many levels, but the CPS statement has created a headache for Cameron.

When he had set up the Leveson inquiry, Cameron created a mechanism for a second part that would be held at a later date. Part two is supposed to examine “the extent of unlawful or improper conduct” within News International and other media organisations; it is also tasked with examining the role of the police in investigating allegations of phone hacking. It would have to wait, Cameron said, until police investigations and any criminal trials had been completed.

The CPS announcement signals that that process is finally drawing to an end. Cameron should now honour his commitment to victims and tell us when he expects part two of the Leveson inquiry to get under way.

Joan Smith is a columnist, novelist and human rights activist. She is the author of What Will Survive, Moralities, Misogynies and her latest book is The Public Woman.

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