How often is a prominent personality in a well-known company convicted of serious crime? It is rare, and when it does happen the company is usually deeply embarrassed and desperate to show it can’t happen again.
Mazher Mahmood has been the toast of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper operations for 20 years, a star reporter on intimate terms with the bosses. Now he has been jailed for 15 months for lying in the service of the company in an attempt to put an innocent young woman behind bars, and his entire career record of “Fake Sheikh” stings is in question.
Is News UK embarrassed? Will it change? That would be surprising, because criminal activity among Murdoch employees is nothing new, and the company has never previously felt the need to. Most infamously, there was phone hacking: Murdoch journalists did it on an industrial scale, but instead of tackling the criminality News UK (then News International) spent millions trying to cover it up – while attacking the Guardian for exposing it.
It took a tide of evidence to force an apology – who can forget the humblest day of Murdoch’s life? – and with it the departure of the two senior executives most exposed. But the parting was brief, for Rebekah Brooks was soon back in charge of the papers, and James Murdoch is running Sky again (over the objections of half the independent shareholders).
Besides hacking, we know Murdoch’s journalists bribed public officials, at least 30 of whom, including police officers, were sentenced for accepting the bribes, though only one Sun reporter was convicted. Typically, the executives blamed the footsoldiers in court, and the footsoldiers blamed the executives.
Then there are the private investigators. Glenn Mulcaire hacked phones on £100,000 a year. Steve Whittamore illegally plundered private data. Jonathan Rees (a long-term close associate of Mahmood) earned £150,000 a year for often illegal activities, and was actually re-hired after serving a jail term for plotting to plant cocaine on an innocent woman to ensure she lost a child custody case. There were others.
Of necessity, all this illegality (of which everyone occupying any senior position at the company has always denied any knowledge) has been accompanied by a culture of dishonesty. In 2010 the commons media select committee damned Murdoch executives for “collective amnesia”, and a month ago the privileges committee declared that an editor at the group, Colin Myler, and the legal affairs chief (yes, the legal affairs chief), Tom Crone, had lied to parliament.
Neither is still on the books of News UK, but the same cannot be said of Kelvin MacKenzie, the man behind the Sun’s most notorious outrage – the Hillsborough report headlined “The Truth”, which was packed with falsehoods.
Despite the independent panel report in 2012 and the inquests of last April, MacKenzie continues as a columnist and, if Private Eye is to be believed, operates from a large office on the same floor as Rebekah Brooks.
The Sun itself is currently running amok. From “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis” to “Queen backs Brexit” to this week’s “Harry: Heroes probes ‘a joke’”, the paper can’t make ‘em up fast enough.
It is an appalling record, and Sports Direct would be torn apart if it did anything comparable. Philip Green must dream of being so untouchable. So how does Murdoch manage it? We know how.
First, his papers never howl about the company’s wrongdoing as they do about others – and obligingly the rest of the national press never puts him in the pillory. Think back to when Amelia Hill and Nick Davies revealed that the News of the World had hacked the phone of the murdered teenager Milly Dowler. Even amid national outrage, most nationals refused to put the story on their front pages.
Second, he pulls political strings. Since Margaret Thatcher, prime ministers have been only too delighted to please him, and it’s only a month since Theresa May became the latest to meet him on the quiet. Has she called on Philip Green or Mike Ashley lately? Just imagine …
Murdoch, Brooks and their cohorts have worked hard to make all this feel normal for Britain, to convince everyone that there is nothing strange about a company so corrupt being at the heart of our media. So every time somebody says “that’s just the way it is” Murdoch can write himself another cheque.
Well, that can change. A public inquiry into criminality in the press and the role of the police has been authorised by parliament, and its terms of reference are written. It is called Leveson part two, and with Mahmood behind bars the time has come for Theresa May to let it start work or else try to persuade us that no such inquiry is necessary.
How she may make that case is difficult to imagine. But we know this: if she lets Murdoch and News UK off the hook, thousands more people will suffer from his company’s unscrupulous practices and all of our national debates will continue to be polluted by its lies. It will go on, and it will get worse.