Thegroundbreaking apologyto Prince Harry from Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN) has not closed an era of investigation and litigation into media corruption. It has opened it up. Far from ending one of the most sordid chapters in British media history, it is raising fundamental, troubling and as yet unresolved questions – and today I am making a criminal complaint to the Met and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) alleging that I am, along with many others, a victim of the obstruction of the course of justice by NGN.
This is not an allegation made lightly.It is informedby recentlyavailable evidence, and by thestatements of senior officersinvolved in the original investigations into unlawful newsgathering, who have now stated to me that they were misled.
One officer, who gave a statement to the court for Harry’s claim, has told me that they now believe there is “significant evidence” emails were deleted in a bid to pervert the course of justice. They said: “If we had known this in 2011, we would have investigated fully and taken a different course of action including considering arrests.” (NGN strenuously denies any allegations of evidence destruction.)
For some time, the public have known that over three decades, and across every continent, NGN, marching under the banner of a “free press”, invaded theprivate lives of thousands of innocent citizens. It now admits“unlawful activities”occurred not only at the defunct News of the World but at its flagship daily, the Sun, carried out by private investigators working for the paper between 1996 and 2011.
One private investigator, one of their hired hands, claimed to me in an interview that the use of unlawful methods by private investigators working for the Murdoch empire was endemic in the years before 2011. I do not believe I was wrong to have said in the House of Commons more than a decade ago that we were dealing with acriminal-media nexus.
NGN destroyed millions of emails in the face of a criminal investigation, about 9m of which were never recovered. What now appears clear from court documents revealing the background to those deletions is that the Murdoch team did not only assault people’s individual liberties, but designed an elaborate cover-up. The result was that anyone scrutinising its operations would never discover the complete picture. (NGN argues that the deletion of emails had “long been in the planning, for sound commercial, IT and practical reasons”,that it made the Met aware of the deletions and steps it had taken to preserve evidence and that it worked alongside the Met to reconstruct its electronic archives.)
What’s more, when this became known, Sir William Lewis (the former group general manager of NGN, and the current publisher of the Washington Post) attempted to incriminate Tom Watson and me, accusing us in statements made to the police in 2011 of theft and bribery. He falsely claimed a conspiracy by the two of us to suborn an unnamed employee who was, supposedly, handing us private documents. This was their pretext for shredding reams of evidence. As one of the investigating officers has said, they “falsely implicated Gordon Brown. If I had known this I would have made arrests for obstruction of justice.” (NGN states that its concerns were genuine at the time.)
The investigation into NGN was closed down in 2015 but as this statement by officers conducting the investigation now shows, the investigation into perverting the course of justice was closed on the basis of wrong information.The authoritiesconcluded that “there is no evidence to suggest the email deletion was undertaken in order to pervert the course of justice”. Evidence from the civil case suggests the cover-up did not end with the destruction of what could have been vital evidence, but continued with statements to the police.
The civil case, directly resulting in NGN’s belated admission of “incidents ofunlawful activities” carried out by private investigators working for the Sun, exposes not only three decades of lies but also its attempts to vilify some of those who claimed otherwise. In a series ofrevelatory articles, the investigative journalist Nick Davies revealed evidence that suggests NGN was not just using phone hacking and other means for the sensational coverage of private lives, but also spying on politicians whom they sought to influence. (This was denied by NGN.) This, he says, raises serious questions about whether such tactics may have been used during the supposedly secret negotiations that led to the formation of the 2010 coalition government.
It is now for the police to request from the courts the statements made by dozens of witnesses, including former employees and ex-police officers, some of whom have now spoken to me. But the most telling condemnation of its tactics comes in statements from the victims of abuse, those maimed in the July 2005 bombings, the couples whose relationships were torn apart for ever by the unfair intrusion into their daily lives, and the families whose privacy was invaded when they were grieving for their murdered children – the Dowlers, the McCanns, the Paynes.
Given the claims made in court documents about the deliberate deletion of emails and unlawful activities, the next steps are clear. Alongside the police, the director of public prosecutions, whose office appears to have been systematically misled, must now take up this serious challenge to the rule of law. Parliament, whose committees appear to have been misled, has a duty to reopen its investigations. The attorney general, who has just delivered an important and landmark speech on the importance of upholding the rule of law, has reason to ensure the extent of the lawlessness that has now been exposed is investigated as a criminal offence.
This issue is not of mere historical interest. The Murdoch empire has already brought what should be a free media into disrepute. It is all law-upholding publishers that should have the greatest interest in securing justice, and in helping us achieve the further inquiry we seek.
All of us benefit from showing that there is a difference between an honest media and one that corrupts the currency.
Gordon Brown was UK prime minister 2007 to 2010
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