rupert murdoch
Murdoch Empire Hacked Politicians for Commercial Gain and Hid Evidence, New Report Suggests
Rupert Murdoch's company used criminal methods to hack MPs’ phones for "political and commercial espionage" and deleted nearly 31 million emails as civil and criminal suits threatened to expose their behaviour, a new report suggests.
The claims, which have featured in numerous court actions against the publishers of the now defunct News of the World and The Sun, have been pulled together for the first time in June's edition of Prospect magazine.
Journalist Nick Davies, who first broke the phone-hacking allegations in 2009, sorted through thousands of pages of evidence, according to Prospect, to "piece together a narrative of how the company employed numerous private investigators to hack private individuals, and also MPs – including Cabinet ministers".
The allegations against Rupert Murdoch's company feature in the June edition of Prospect magazine. Photo: Prospect magazine
Phone-hacking has cost the Murdoch organisation an estimated £1 billion to date, and the ongoing court cases have exposed a cache of new evidence – including documents, invoices, call logs and emails – which weren't available when the story broke.
More than 1,600 cases have been settled by the company, Prospect noted.
Davies, Prospect said, has found evidence that the Murdoch company was using criminal means to target politicians of every rank – including the Attorney General, Business Secretary and Chancellor – and that "some" of the hacking appears to have been done for commercial or political "aims rather than trying to get stories".
Further claims in the Prospect articles include:
Rupert Murdoch's company used criminal methods to hack MPs’ phones for "political and commercial espionage" and deleted nearly 31 million emails as civil and criminal suits threatened to expose their behaviour, a new report suggests.
The claims, which have featured in numerous court actions against the publishers of the now defunct News of the World and The Sun, have been pulled together for the first time in June's edition of Prospect magazine.
Journalist Nick Davies, who first broke the phone-hacking allegations in 2009, sorted through thousands of pages of evidence, according to Prospect, to "piece together a narrative of how the company employed numerous private investigators to hack private individuals, and also MPs – including Cabinet ministers".
The allegations against Rupert Murdoch's company feature in the June edition of Prospect magazine. Photo: Prospect magazine
Phone-hacking has cost the Murdoch organisation an estimated £1 billion to date, and the ongoing court cases have exposed a cache of new evidence – including documents, invoices, call logs and emails – which weren't available when the story broke.
More than 1,600 cases have been settled by the company, Prospect noted.
Davies, Prospect said, has found evidence that the Murdoch company was using criminal means to target politicians of every rank – including the Attorney General, Business Secretary and Chancellor – and that "some" of the hacking appears to have been done for commercial or political "aims rather than trying to get stories".
Further claims in the Prospect articles include:
- Sixteen Liberal Democrat MPs, then in the Conservative Coalition Government, received more than 1,500 suspicious calls.
- There were also hundreds of suspect calls to MPs from other parties opposed to Murdoch business interests. Claimants argue this was "political and commercial espionage".
- Gordon Brown, while Chancellor and Prime Minister, was allegedly targeted 24 times from the Wapping "hub” – a central phone number located where Murdoch’s newspapers were based.
- There were suspicious calls to Dominic Grieve, then Attorney General, at a time when the Director of Public Prosecution was considering possible prosecutions against journalists, and when there was the threat of contempt proceedings against newspapers.
- Five members of the House of Commons’ Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, perceived to be hostile to Murdoch’s commercial interests, received hundreds of “inexplicable” calls. The Murdoch company claims that there may be innocent explanations, but settled a number of claims, Prospect noted.
- John Whittingdale, then DCMS Committee chair, was contacted by the NewsCorp lobbyist Fred Michel by phone call or text no fewer than 431 times during a 22-month period while his committee investigated phone-hacking.
- One MP who was hacked told the High Court that the pattern of behaviour was a “cynical and outrageous attempt to subvert the legitimate process of parliamentary scrutiny”.
- After a threat of legal action by the actor Sienna Miller in autumn 2010, the Murdoch company began email deletions which saw some 30.7 million Sun and News of the World emails wiped, along with those from top executives. The claimants say that this was a deliberate attempt to destroy incriminating material. The company says there may be an innocent explanation.
- Journalists or investigators who might have blown the whistle were rewarded with jobs, or cash payments, and required to sign NDAs (non-disclosure agreements).
- Police seized 125 items after arresting News International’s CEO, Rebekah Brooks, in July 2011. They were placed in a secure area under the supervision of two Murdoch executives, Simon Greenberg and Will Lewis, now publisher and CEO of the Washington Post. It was several weeks before detectives completed a detailed search of all the equipment, at which point they discovered that only 117 of the items were still there. Eight filing cabinets that they had seized from the offices of the Editor and the Managing Editor had been removed. They have not been recovered.
- Police found an under-floor safe in Brooks’ private dressing room which was “filled with hard drives and computers” with thousands of emails from key executives, editors and journalists.
- Of the 30.7 million missing emails, only 21.7 million were recovered, leaving more than a quarter of the archive – around 9 million emails – lost for ever.
Read more Byline Times stories about Rupert Murdoch:
Rishi to the Rescue: How the Prime Minister ‘Moved Heaven and Earth to Help the Conservative Press’
Rishi to the Rescue: How the Prime Minister ‘Moved Heaven and Earth to Help the Conservative Press’
An Abu Dhabi-backed consortium wants to buy the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, News International titles, and some journalists from the Telegraph itself, go mad. Conservative politicians also declare their opposition. Rishi Sunak rushes through legislation to prevent such a takeover from occurring. Deal over.
If ever there was proof of the power of the press to get what they want, this is it. That needs rephrasing: the power of the Conservative press to get what they want, when there is a Conservative Prime Minister only too happy to please, in this, General Election year.
It’s remarkable how Sunak moved heaven and earth to appease the proprietors of the Daily Mail and The Times and Sun titles.
Other interest groups can campaign for years for perfectly sound, bona fide, necessary, reform to reach the statute books. Often, to no avail – reasonable as the new measure is, vital as it is, they are kept waiting.
Yet, along come the big beasts of Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch, aided and abetted by some noisy Conservatives (some of them, anxious to curry favour with the influential newspapers), and the Government crumbles. Appallingly, senior figures in the Government were said to be in favour of the Abu Dhabi bid, believing it would cement relations and lead to further investment from that super-rich country. No, the Conservative media titans are against, so against the government shall be.
Rupert Murdoch, seen above in London in June 2023, was against the deal and wants the Spectator. Photo: PA Images / Alamy
No matter that Rothermere and Murdoch had their reasons for kiboshing the Abu Dhabi purchase. Rothermere harbours a desire to own the Telegraph, while Murdoch wants the Spectator, also part of the Telegraph stable. They did declare their interest to their readers, usually towards the end of news reports regarding the progress of the campaign.
They devoted plenty of space to the importance of upholding free speech and defending human rights. The giveaway as to their true motive was, surely, that claims by the consortium that Abu Dhabi was only a ‘passive’ investor were largely ignored. Likewise, the suggestion that this marriage could see the resurrection of a device implemented when another foreign newspaper takeover occurred was similarly brushed aside.
That was when Murdoch bought Times Newspapers and a separate, independent board was installed to act as an objective cut-off on key matters. This time around, with his eyes set on owning the Spectator, Murdoch was seemingly not prepared to countenance a repetition.
Read more: ‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
What’s also telling is that plenty of British assets have fallen into foreign hands, many of them to sovereign wealth funds, down the years without the raising of barely a squeak by the same media or MPs. It’s as if the much-touted phrase, Britain is ‘open for business’ has been taken literally to also mean ‘Britain is for sale’.
Assets to have gone overseas include:
There are numerous examples of all sorts of assets tracing their ultimate ownership abroad. Grocery, retail, hospitality, and fashion brands, many of them historically and iconically ‘British’, have been targeted by foreigners and their money men.
Occasionally there have been protests but they have usually died down. Cadbury’s going to the Americans was an especially emotive one. Royal Mail, no less, may soon join the National Lottery with Czech owners. The newspaper that reports at length on these deals, the Financial Times, is owned by the Japanese. The only sale that attracted a similar amount of column inches, was arguably that of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia, but, like the rest, it went through.
The pattern is familiar: there’s a bid, there is some disquiet expressed by the employees, unions and stakeholders, then the offer is raised again and perhaps again until the owner’s expectations are met and it’s accepted and the fury, such as it is, falls away.
Fears about Chinese and Russian influence, together with uncertainty surrounding treatments for Covid, saw the government pass the National Security and Investment Act, or NSIA, of 2021, giving the Cabinet Office the ability to intervene and block a transaction on national security grounds. It covers 17 sectors, most of them to do with defence, tech, medicine, bioscience, data and AI.
The idea was to stop the asset and/or its intellectual property, the know-how, falling into enemy hands. At first sight, the figures are impressive – the Act is wheeled out regularly. There were more than 1,000 ‘mandatory notifications’ – the bidders in these sectors must inform the Government – in 2022, the latest and first year to be reported. But 95% of these were cleared unconditionally at the initial screening phase.
Only 5% were subject to in-depth scrutiny and most of these received conditional approval. However, five deals were stymied completely, of which four involved companies with Chinese ownership and one a Russian oligarch.
Another 14 were approved subject to conditions, and these mostly involved Chinese owners. The restrictions were imposed to safeguard national security, including a UK Government attendee at board meetings, external monitoring, commitments for the IP to remain in the UK, and guarantees to continue to supply specified UK contractors such as the Ministry of Defence or an emergency service.
The NSIA might well have been deployed in the Telegraph case. The sectors where it applies are broadly defined and doubtless, a skilled lawyer could have made a case for the paper’s inclusion.
It never reached that stage. Sunak leapt into action and brought forward a new piece of legislation, just to make sure the Abu Dhabi bid perished. Rothermere and Murdoch got their way. The irony is that they may only have made the path easier for another bidder, Sir Paul Marshall owner of Unherd and GB News. Marshall, born in Ealing, is definably British. How the media barons stop him remains to be seen.
Princess Diana ‘Phone Pest’ Story Links Both Rupert Murdoch and Piers Morgan to the ‘Criminal-Media Nexus’ of Police Corruption
A newly pleaded document submitted by Prince Harry’s legal team last month as part of his ongoing case against Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers for privacy intrusion sheds more light on what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the "criminal-media nexus” of journalists, private investigators and corrupt cops during the heyday of the tabloids.
In an amended claim over alleged unlawful information gathering in the case of HRH Duke of Sussex v News Group Newspapers, the claimants have lodged a notorious News of the World front page, dated 21 August 1994, carrying an exclusive story alleging that Princess Diana was a ‘phone pest’.
The story can only have come from police sources and so implicates both the then Editor of the now defunct News of the World, Piers Morgan, his then Chief Crime Reporter (now Editor of the Express) Gary Jones, and the proprietor Rupert Murdoch himself in the roaring trade between the tabloids and corrupt police officers.
At the centre of it all – and at the centre of many of the ongoing civil claims against both Murdoch’s newspapers, Mirror Group, and the Mail titles – is the role of the infamous detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the murder of its co-founder Daniel Morgan.
Police and Tabloid Corruption
Daniel Morgan was alleged to have been investigating police corruption when he was axed to death in a south London pub car park in March 1987.
His business partner, Jonathan Rees, was the prime suspect. Rees was arrested a few weeks later, along with one of the lead detectives on the initial murder inquiry, Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
At the inquest into Morgan's death in 1988, evidence emerged that Rees and Fillery had colluded in covering up the murder. By this point, Fillery had retired from the Metropolitan Police and taken Morgan’s place at the detective agency.
Southern Investigations was now on its way to becoming a one-stop-shop for the ‘dark arts’ of unlawful newsgathering for the tabloids.
Alastair Morgan, his partner Kirsteen Knight, and solicitor Raju Bhatt at the 2021 publication of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel report. Photo: Kirsty O'Connor/PA/Alamy
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Southern Investigations became the main hub for selling confidential personal and financial information to the press obtained by phone-tapping, burglary, covert surveillance, and computer hacking.
Its major purchaser was Alex Marunchak, News Editor of the News of the World.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in training up a raft of Fleet Street journalists in subterfuge and surveillance – the most notable of which was Mazher Mahmood, the Sunday tabloid’s famous ‘fake sheikh’.
One of the main sources of both this illicit information, and the techniques for gathering it, was a network of corrupt police officers in south-east London. The trade was so extensive the CID in the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’.
Rees and Fillery’s close relationship with organised crime, and the ‘firm within a firm’ of corrupt Met Police officers, saw them engaged in a roaring trade with News International. But, even if the amounts of money siphoned-off to Southern Investigations didn’t attract the attention of the company’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, the political dimensions of their dark arts surely would have.
When the then Culture Secretary David Mellor suggested in 1991 that the “popular press is drinking in the last chance saloon”, Southern Investigations set up the surveillance and bugging devices to expose him in an extramarital affair.
Rees and Fillery were also instrumental in the brokering of letters stolen from Paddy Ashdown’s solicitor, showing that the Liberal Democrat Leader had also once had an extramarital affair. The information was revealed just before the 1992 General Election.
In effect, Southern Investigations and Alex Marunchak were becoming masters of politically targeted kompromat – years before the Russian term was well-known. But where do Piers Morgan and Express Editor Gary Jones fit in? And what did Rupert Murdoch know?
The Phone Pest Story
The following is an edited extract from 'Who Killed Daniel Morgan?’, which I co-authored with Daniel Morgan's brother Alastair Morgan
Piers Morgan took over the Editorship of the News of the World at the age of 28 in February 1994, at the height of the tabloid frenzy around the break-up of the marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles.
Morgan's only journalistic experience to date was penning the ‘Bizarre’ celebrity column at The Sun. He appointed an even younger Rebekah Brooks to become Features Editor that spring.
Given his inexperience with reporting, Morgan relied heavily on the older guard at the newspaper, especially his then News Editor, Alex Marunchak, whom he described as having a “deadpan, half-Ukrainian, moustachioed visage”.
Marunchak’s police sources would soon land Morgan in trouble.
Piers Morgan, who went on to become Editor of the Mirror, after the High Court ruled there was "extensive" phone-hacking by Mirror Group Newspapers from 2006 to 2011. Photo: PA Images/Alamy
In his autobiography The Insider, Morgan explains how, in August 1994, Marunchak and Chief Crime Reporter Gary Jones walked into the Editor’s office in Wapping and explained: “Got rather a big one here, boss. Diana’s a phone pest.” Marunchak went on to elaborate: “The cops are investigating hundreds of calls she has made to a married art dealer called Oliver Hoare.”
Jones backed up his News Editor with “a read-out from the police report" which he then quoted verbatim.
Hoare had received hundreds of silent, anonymous phone calls and reported them to the police. With the help of British Telecom, the police had traced the calls to Kensington Palace, the home of Princess Diana.
When Hoare was informed of the source of the calls, he told police officers that he and his wife were friends of Charles and Diana and he had been – according to the police report – “consoling her and becoming quite close to her” after her separation from the then heir to the throne.
The News of the World called the antique dealer for comment. Hoare did not deny there had been a police investigation. Under the bylines of Gary Jones and Royal Reporter Clive Goodman, the News of the World splashed the story over the front and four inside pages.
The details in the exclusive could only have come from the police documents: the date of Hoare’s first complaint, the involvement of BT’s specialist Nuisance Calls Bureau, the special code BT was given to trace the calls, the activation of the code on 13 January 1994, transcripts of six silent calls, and then the tracing equipment which linked the calls to a private number used by Prince Charles.
All of this detailed information could only have been sourced from the police.
The next day, in a long interview in the Daily Mail, Princess Diana denied the story.
Piers Morgan began to worry that he had made a huge career blunder. There were calls for him to resign. Marunchak tried to reassure the News of the World Editor by telling him: “We’ve had the report read to us, she’s lying." But Morgan still feared that the document could be a forgery.
“I felt sick to the pit of my stomach,” Morgan recalled in The Insider. “I couldn’t eat or even drink a cup of tea, it was hellish.”
What Murdoch Knew
The only thing that finally put Morgan's mind at rest was a call from his proprietor, Rupert Murdoch.
“Hi Piers,” Murdoch said. “I can’t really talk for long but I just wanted you to know that your story is 100% bang on. Can’t tell you how I know, but I just know.”
He then instructed his Editor to get on TV and tell the world that Princess Diana is "a liar", and to promise more material in the Sunday tabloid the following week.
Though relieved, Morgan couldn’t help admitting to Murdoch that he didn’t have any more material. Murdoch replied: “Oh, you will have by Sunday, don’t worry. Gotta go. Good luck.”
How had Murdoch independently verified the story? It was Alex Marunchak who had seen the police report. Would the proprietor have checked with his veteran News Editor?
At the Leveson Inquiry into the practices, culture and ethics of the press in 2012 – following the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal the year before – Murdoch explicitly denied even remembering meeting Marunchak. But, in careful legal language guarding against any surviving photos, he added: "I might have shaken hands, walking through the office."
By that point, Marunchak had served in a number of senior roles at the News of the World from his first days in the Wapping dispute, attending parties with the News International CEO and senior police officers, to being made Editor of the Irish edition two decades later.
Steve Grayson, a freelance photographer who worked at the Sunday tabloid in the late 1990s, recalls Marunchak explicitly saying that he had a direct call from Murdoch on one occasion.
Despite his growing global influence, there is also no doubt that, during this era, Murdoch himself still called senior management at the newspaper most Friday or Saturday nights to check what stories were coming up. And there’s more evidence that Murdoch was well aware of the existence of Marunchak, who had served his company for more than 25 years.
Prince Harry with his lawyer David Sherborne at the High Court during his recent trial against Mirror Group Newspapers. Photo: PA/Alamy
In correspondence from September 1997, the then Taoiseach of Ireland, Bertie Ahern, wrote personally to Murdoch to thank him for the News of the World’s coverage of the country's General Election. He said he particularly “appreciated the very professional approach of your Associate Editor Alex Marunchak”. Ahern even asked Murdoch to pass on “my thanks and best wishes to Alex”.
Murdoch replied on 30 September 1997: “I shall be delighted to pass on your comments.”
Whatever Murdoch’s uncertain memories of Alex Marunchak, the ultimate source of Piers Morgan’s scoop was a confidential police file. Later, Morgan was careful to say that the source wasn’t a ‘serving police officer’ – partly because that would have opened him, and any police officer, up to criminal charges.
Nobody was censured or sanctioned for the phone pest story. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
Gary Jones went on to win the Press Gazette’s Reporter of the Year Award, partly due to his News of the World exclusive about Diana’s anonymous calls.
Criticised by the then Press Complaints Council for another intrusive royal splash, Morgan would leave the Murdoch Sunday tabloid in 1995 and take up an even more senior position editing its rival, the Daily Mirror.
He would soon bring over Jones and, with him, the dark arts of Sid Fillery and Jonathan Rees.
Ongoing Trials
While the judge has not ruled whether Prince Harry’s claims can date back to 1994 and the targeting of his mother, the evidence of Gary Jones’ relationship with Southern Investigations has already been heard in the case of the Duke of Sussex and other claimants against Mirror Group Newspapers.
The judge in that case, Justice Fancourt, concluded that Piers Morgan, as Editor of the Mirror newspapers, must have known about phone-hacking and other unlawful information gathering.
Meanwhile, similar evidence is due to be heard in the pending claims by Prince Harry and others (including Baroness Doreen Lawrence) in claims against the publishers of the Mail and Mail on Sunday.
According to the particulars of claim issued so far, Associated Newspapers also procured the services of private investigators involved in illicit information, including allegations that Southern Investigations were involved in targeting the family of Stephen Lawrence, murdered by a racist gang connected to the south-east London underworld in 1993.
Like the tabloids used to say, this story will run and run.
‘Telegraph Takeover Bid Backed by UAE Doesn’t Matter – Because there’s an Agenda at Every Newspaper’
Many years ago, I was a junior business reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. It had been decided that I was to write that weekend’s main editorial based on an official report castigating Mohamed Al Fayed over the purchase of House of Fraser which included Harrods.
Fayed, it seems, had been deliberately opaque about the true origins of his funding. We were having an editorial meeting, me and the paper’s much more senior executives, about what the leader should say, when who should walk in but Murdoch. We all leapt to attention. He made a gesture for everyone to sit down, and then asked what we were discussing. They said that I was just explaining the importance of the report and that it was going to be the paper’s leader and I was going to write it. Murdoch turned to me, inquisitively. Thanks guys.
Murdoch fixed me a stare. “Son, who cares? Why does it matter?” he inquired softly and slowly. Nobody else said anything. I was on my own. I was sweating but the room felt chilly. Gulp. I blathered about how we could never be too careful, how it was vital that people didn’t lie about the source of their wealth, how we had anti-money laundering rules to prevent this sort of thing, how organised crime was a growing problem and we had to be more on top of it, and drugs and terrorism…
Murdoch looked blank. I could feel the ground opening beneath my feet. Then, a man who was accompanying the press mogul – a tall American in black, shiny, crocodile shoes – said: “Hey, Rupe you remember that Fayed took us for 100 million, down in Texas?” Murdoch turned to him, and said, “You’re right, he did.” He wheeled round to me and added: “Son, write it as hard as you like”. With that, he and his pal walked off.
Rupert Murdoch, pictured at his annual party at Spencer House, St James' Place in London, June 2023
The Sunday Times was my first national newspaper and this was my first introduction to how proprietors secure a product that is to their taste and beliefs.
This was an overt example, where the man himself was present. Most of the time he did not need to be. It occurred subliminally – self-censorship, reporting a story in such a manner that you knew would please the bosses, would stick to an unwritten agenda and earn you an approving nod from on high.
It occurred in the same way at every newspaper where I’ve worked: Sunday Express, Daily Express, Observer, Independent on Sunday, Independent, Evening Standard. Really, it happens everywhere, in every job: you know what the chief thinks and unless you’re desperate to leave you toe the party line. Which is why it is perplexing to read so much guff about the proposed takeover of the Telegraph by a consortium backed by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, vice-president of the United Arab Emirates.
The Sheikh also owns Manchester City and, in that regard, his being a member of the UAE government is rarely mentioned; references to him in the football press tend to dwell on his fabulous wealth.
A football club is very different from a major newspaper. But, honestly, reading the howls of protest from some journalistic quarters you could be forgiven for thinking they are allowed a free hand in everything they write, that they’ve never been told to temper an argument or as I say, have done it themselves, without being instructed?
Perhaps they are, in which case, I must be an oppressed rare species – on my own, wandering through the media landscape, subject to the inability to express myself. I am not, because most articles do not touch the management floor.
There have been occasions, though, when I’ve been encouraged to pursue a subject in which the owner has a ‘special interest’. Again, I ask, has anyone else not experienced the same, and provided what I write is true, is it that bad?
To that list of titles, I could have added another, The National. That’s right, for the last four years I’ve written a weekly column for the UAE newspaper owned by one Sheikh Mansour. Ah, I hear you cry: "he’s told you to write this, you’re under orders." Not a bit of it. In that period, I’ve had no contact with the Sheikh or his official representatives. I do speak to the paper’s Editor-in-Chief, Mina Al-Oraibi – that’s right a woman in charge of a newspaper, a concept still unfamiliar to those main critics of the Mansour deal, the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times.
One piece I submitted was rejected; post-COVID, a firm of consultants produced a study saying that luxury goods were over, that the outbreak had made us turn our backs on excess. I thought this would be a suitable column topic.
Colleagues at the paper disagreed; they had plenty of evidence to show the claim was wrong, that bling was very much alive. I said I would choose another subject. As it was, they were right, the consultancy was wrong. Another piece, on Al Fayed, I quoted him using a profanity against Prince Philip. It had to come out, they said, as, to be fair, it probably would have done in any British-based title.
It may hurt the anti-Mansour investment (and it is an investment, his people are insisting, saying he will only be a ‘passive partner’ in a US-run vehicle) brigade to learn this but in my experience, The National is run along professional lines. It has a newsroom of the sort they would recognise. To my knowledge there is not a UAE commissar sitting alongside Al-Oraibi and her senior team.
It's staffed too by journalists from across Fleet Street, from the Telegraph, Independent, Daily Mail and others. Its editorial offices in UAE, London and Washington DC are fully manned and well-resourced. I deal regularly with the London bureau and as far as I am aware, the editor, Damien McElroy (ex-Telegraph) is free to cover whatever he likes.
Because it’s not so tightly constrained and prone to the cycles of advertising as others, The National can keep its website open to all – a breath of fresh air in this age of paywalls and subscriptions. The paper has as its mission ‘The Middle East. Explained’.
That’s its USP, writing about the Middle East, and yes, often providing a UAE slant. Is that awful? It’s where the title hails from, it’s home. It’s no different from London newspapers seeing things through British eyes. No different either from pro-Conservative newspapers seeing things through a pro-Conservative prism. Perish the thought.
Murdoch’s monster Trump all trussed up and in for a wild ride
A hog-tied Joe Biden is depicted in a life-size decal on the tailgate of a pickup truck in an image Donald Trump posts on Truth Social, Good Friday. Cue howls of outrage. Clearly, The Donald wants to make himself centre of attention again, via a “dead cat on the tailgate” decoy, in case we dwell…
The post Murdoch’s monster Trump all trussed up and in for a wild ride appeared first on The AIM Network.
‘Starmer Cosied Up to the Murdoch Press in the Same Week It Faced New Allegations of Criminality – Why?’
What is the word for a politician who will do anything to get hold of power?
The question arises thanks to the front page of Friday's Sun newspaper, on which, beneath a banner reading "Labour leader at Sun HQ", we were told that "Keir joins revolt over 3 Lions shirt – he blasts woke flag and high price".
There are only two possibilities here. Either the Leader of the Labour Party sincerely believes that the design of the England football shirt is a matter that should properly engage the attention of a leader of the Opposition. Or – surely much more likely – he just doesn’t care what he says so long as it gets him nice coverage in the Sun, in which case he provides an answer to the question above.
It is actually worse than that, because this is only the latest evidence that Starmer is selling his soul to Murdoch.
He has already attended the media baron's summer party, paying personal homage to the old man and drinking his champagne. And now he is happy to visit the Sun’s offices and play rent-a-quote in support of a vacuous anti-woke jibe.
In terms of displaying lack of principle, this obviously does not compete with refusing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and failing to acknowledge the economic disaster that is Brexit, but it is amoral in its own way.
For the Murdoch press is not only responsible, over decades, for demeaning everything that could be described as decent about Britain and for wrecking the lives of countless innocent people – it is also responsible for wholesale, proven law-breaking.
And remarkably, Starmer’s visit to ‘Sun HQ’ took place just a day after we were presented with a new and shocking picture of the scale of that criminality – some of it well established as fact, some in the form of fresh and very detailed accusations.
It comes in a series of monster documents revealed in court, some of which can be accessed here.
These latest legal claims allege that law-breaking at the Murdoch tabloids has been even more widespread and systematic, has persisted for much longer and has implicated even more staff and senior executives than previously acknowledged.
The allegations extend far beyond phone-hacking and unlawful information gathering to include, for example, perjury and the deliberate destruction of evidence of criminality – matters which, you might think, would be of concern to a former Director of Public Prosecutions such as Starmer.
And though – yes, this needs to be placed on record – the company continues to deny a good deal of it, the Labour leadership should ask itself why the company systematically chooses to avoid confronting the charges in open court and instead pays off the claimants, thus far at a cost of £1.2 billion.
Quite a few of Labour's new chums are named in the documents.
There is an awful lot, for example, about Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s longstanding CEO in the UK and a former Editor of the Sun. She knew more and earlier about criminal activities than previously admitted, the documents allege, and they suggest directly that she participated in the cover-up. Again, she has denied these things and was cleared of similar criminal charges back in 2014, but the new claims draw on a wealth of evidence not available back then, including evidence relating to the hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone.
The name of the Sun’s current Editor, Victoria Newton, also keeps turning up in the court documents in very dark contexts. How, for example, will she account for the email she sent Brooks in 2006 saying "just blagged the bill from the Dorchester now – 11 grand – v expensive?"
And there is veteran Sun reporter Nick Parker who, phone records show, phoned a specialist blagger of medical records 1,763 times between 2005 and 2010 – more than once every working day.
The catalogue of names and worse-than-doubtful alleged behaviour is very long – and the allegations relate to events up to 2011, including during the Leveson Inquiry into the press, when Murdoch witnesses swore blind they had never done anything dodgy.
Ancient history, people will say. Hardly.
These are people Keir Starmer is associating himself with right now. And remember that Murdoch is also still the owner of Fox, a channel that encouraged an insurrection in the US in 2020.
People will also say there is nothing new in it all, because Tony Blair sucked up to Murdoch before the 1997 election and Gordon Brown was pally with Brooks before 2010. Well, we now know that Murdoch people hacked Labour phones behind those leaders’ backs – shouldn’t Starmer and his people see that as a warning?
And, of course, people will also say that you need to do unpleasant things to win power, which brings us back to the question we started with. Surely there is a line you don’t cross? And, surely, given all we know about his methods, Murdoch must be on the far side of that line.
‘Media Bill Votes Will Show Us the Real Keir Starmer’
Votes in the House of Commons tomorrow, 30 January, will tell us a great deal about the kind of Labour Party Keir Starmer intends to lead into this year’s general election and the kind of government he envisages beyond that.
With the Government’s Media Bill reaching its report stage, Labour must choose whether to back amendments which would keep alive the possibility of Leveson-style reform of press regulation – or to do nothing and allow the Conservatives to bury it for good.
The choice it makes will tell us whether it hopes ultimately to govern the country on an independent agenda or whether it has decided to let billionaire press owners continue dominating the country’s politics by their familiar unscrupulous means.
The Leveson Inquiry – into the culture, practices, and ethics of the press – took place following the exposure of the phone-hacking scandal in 2011-12. It made a number of recommendations.
Until now, Labour policy has been pro-Leveson – a position that goes back beyond the Jeremy Corbyn years to when Ed Miliband was leader. But it is also a policy feared and hated by the big national newspaper groups.
In recent months, all the body language of the Starmer leadership has suggested it is now ready to appease the billionaire owners of the Mail, The Sun, The Times and the Telegraph, evidently in the short-term hope that they will give it a softer ride in election coverage.
The precise issue tomorrow might seem obscure: whether to repeal section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act of 2013 – a piece of legislation which, thanks to the unscrupulous blocking tactics of the Conservatives, has never been allowed to enter into force.
Section 40 is the key to making the Leveson reforms of press regulation work. It was designed to make possible independent, effective press accountability of a kind that the UK has never known. More than that, it would also give press journalism unprecedented protection against bullying by the rich and powerful.
Murdoch, Lord Rothermere and the Barclay family fear press accountability like nothing else – because their newspapers simply could not function as they currently do if they were truly answerable for inaccuracy, distortion, intrusion and other ethical misconduct.
If Starmer’s Labour abandons a decade of commitment to Section 40 tomorrow, therefore, they will be giving the press what they want: licensing the big national newspapers to continue abusing ordinary citizens and misleading the public as a whole.
And everything suggests that that is Labour’s intention.
Not only has it failed to table any amendment relating to repeal of section 40 (and amendments are what the parliamentary ‘report stage’ is all about) but the party leadership has dropped heavy hints that it will not even support weak amendments tabled by others.
You might say that it does not matter, since the Conservatives have the votes to get what they want whatever Labour does, and that may be so. But the position Labour takes on this will send a clear signal to Fleet Street and to the public.
Appeasing the press is not merely a tactic for getting through an election. It will show that Labour is ready to accept right-wing press influence over its policies when it is in government.
Only a fool could imagine that the Murdoch and Mail papers do not intend to bully and hound a new Labour government, no matter how big its majority. Only a fool could believe that they do not intend to use all their unscrupulous methods to force Labour’s hand on Europe, on welfare, on climate change, on refugees – on their whole bigoted, selfish agenda.
If Labour takes them on, if it makes them responsible to an effective, independent regulator, it will be able to govern in the interests of the public – in other words, of ordinary people. If it does not, it will have its arm twisted permanently behind its back by the press billionaires.
And it would be naive and wrongheaded to imagine that Labour might duck the issue now but turn around and take action on media abuses after it has been elected, without a manifesto mandate. British politics does not work that way.
Tomorrow’s votes will tell us a lot.
Getting Away with Murder? What Harry’s Win Against the Mirror Means for Murdoch and the Mail
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Hidden in today's voluminous High Court judgment of the case of Prince Harry against Mirror Group Newspapers is a finding which breaks open what Gordon Brown called the "criminal media nexus" of corrupt cops, tabloid journalists and private investigators and the "dark arts" that came to dominate the British press.
The evidence of one important witness, Derek Haslam, will be key to cases against the Murdoch and Mail newspapers due for trial next year.
Derek Haslam, a former Met detective, was tasked to go undercover in 1997 for the Met’s internal ‘Ghost Squad’ inquiry into police corruption to investigate the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator who many believed had discovered a major story of police corruption he was pitching to newspapers before being axed to death in the South London pub car park.
Haslam’s target was Daniel Morgan’s old private detective agency, Southern Investigations, and the two men there originally arrested on suspicion of involvement in his murder: the firm’s co-founder Jonathan Rees and a former Met Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery.
Gary Jones once worked for the News of the World and the Daily Mirror. Today he edits the Daily Express. Will he figure in the report of the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel, out next week? Brian Cathcart considers the evidence
Brian Cathcart
The Mirror and the Daniel Morgan Murder Suspects
Justice Fancourt's ruling in the high Court lays out Haslam's evidence.
"Mr Derek Haslam, who operated as an undercover surveillance officer, was instructed to watch Jonathan Rees (the joint owner and operator of Southern Investigations, with Sid Fillery) with regard to activities with corrupt police officers and an investigation into the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan.
"Mr Haslam said that Rees boasted of obtaining information by phone tapping and computer and phone hacking, and admitted to him that he had supplied phone hacked information to MGN. He said that Rees had employed BT engineers to tap landlines. However, it is clear from Mr Haslam’s evidence that the majority of Rees’s information was obtained by other illegal means.
"Mr Haslam said that Rees frequently met with journalists and corrupt police officers in pubs, bragged about working for the Mirror and the Sunday Mirror, and that he had been introduced by Rees to Gary Jones of the Mirror and Doug Kempster of the Sunday Mirror.
"He said that both were clearly good customers of Rees and that he spoke about them often, and in particular boasted about having supplied information about Prince Michael of Kent’s bank account, which was unlawfully obtained.
"In cross examination, Mr Haslam was able to recall in which pubs meetings with Rees and Fillery would take place, and said that Jones and Kempster would come on occasions. On occasions there was a bank manager called Rob there, as well as policemen, and he was known as 'Rob the Bank'."
The Gary Jones mentioned is currently the editor of the Express newspaper. He was a crime reporter at News of the World in the 90s when the Sunday tabloid was under the editorship of Piers Morgan and the main employer of Rees and Fillery. When Morgan moved to the Mirror group he took Gary Jones with him.
But by then the police had installed a bug in the premises of the private detective agency. On 6 July 1999, when Jones was a senior reporter at the Daily Mirror, he was caught on tape querying invoices totalling £16,991 that Southern Investigations had billed the Mirror.
"This is tiresome, fucking tiresome," Ress told Jones. "We are not going to put the numbers in there because what we are doing is illegal, isn’t it? I don’t want people coming in and nicking us for a criminal offence, you know."
Today's judgment, among other things, vindicates this suppressed evidence. Justice Fancourt accepted Haslam's evidence in broad terms and called his testimony "clear and compelling".
But this is only the beginning of the story because Haslam's evidence is also a key testimony in more trials due next year brought by several claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John and Hugh Grant over unlawful information gathering against the Mail group and Murdoch’s publications.
And this opens up the whole issue of police and press corruption around the murders of Stephen Lawrence and Daniel Morgan
‘Reckless to the Point of Madness’: How the Murdoch Empire Hacked British Politics
Journalist Nick Davies talks to Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber in Prospect magazine’s ‘Media Confidential’ podcast about the new revelations from the settlement by News Group Newspapers
Nick Davies
The Murdoch Connection to Corrupt Policing
It’s no coincidence that two of the most notorious murders of the last half-century occurred within a few miles of each other in south-east London: the assassination of private investigator Daniel Morgan in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham in 1987, and the racist murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence in Eltham in 1993.
Back in the 1980s and 90s, the proximity between those corrupt police officers and the national press was so extensive the area was known as the ‘News of the World Regional Crime Squad’. The senior luminary to come out of the area, Commander Ray Adams, was described at the time as Rupert Murdoch’s ‘Yard Man’ (he went on to become deputy head of security for NDS – the global security arm for Murdoch’s News Corp).
In the meantime, over the past three decades, the murders of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence were subject to a dozen or more partial and problematic police investigations.
The 1998 Macpherson Inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s murder concluded that the Metropolitan Police was guilty of “institutional racism”. An independent review by Mark Ellison KC in 2014 – around the phone-hacking scandal – established police corruption was a factor too.
Read the full story
To get the full story of the Criminal Media Nexus, with new information and exclusive to print articles by Jake Arnott, Duncan Campbell and Dan Evans, buy the current edition of Byline Times, onsale now
Similarly, the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel Inquiry led by Baroness O’Loan concluded in 2021 that the UK’s largest police force suffered from “institutional corruption”.
The News of the World was the main customer for Southern Investigations for almost 20 years, and Rees and Fillery trained and supported its star reporter, Mazher Mahmood. As he went undercover for nine years, Haslam reported back to his ‘handlers’ about the array of unlawful information gathering services available to Rees and Fillery: moonlighting police covert entry teams for break-ins, a BT engineer to tap phone lines, a bank employee to access confidential financial statements.
“We can get the Queen’s medical records,” Haslam recalls Rees once boasting. But most disturbing of all was the ready access to former or serving Met officers who could be bought off for unlawful information.
Haslam's reports about unlawful news gathering and the probe in the premises of Southern Investigations caused a stir in the Met. Commander Bob Quick drew up a secret intelligence report detailing 46 'media crimes' and recommending the arrest of two News of the World journalists, Alex Marunchak and Mazher Mahmood, and Doug Kempster from the Mirror.
But Quick's senior officers in the Met did nothing about the report. Indeed several of them went on to accept well-paid columns in Murdoch's newspapers.
Witness statements on behalf of the claimants against Associated News plunge us straight back into what Gordon Brown once described as the ‘criminal media nexus’
Peter Jukes
The Mail and the Stephen Lawrence Murder
More startling and surprising is Haslam's evidence against ANL, the publishers of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. He says Rees and Fillery were major suppliers of unlawful information to the Mail titles who were interested in finding out if Doreen Lawrence and her campaign for justice had been “infiltrated by left-wing groups”.
Again the major source of for Southern Investigation's stories were corrupt cops. Among the dozens of officers in regular communication during Rees and Fillery in their heyday were two men who played an important role in the original Stephen Lawrence murder investigation: Commander Ray Adams and his bagman DC John (OJ) Davidson. Having left the force both became, in Haslam’s words, “security consultants and important sub-contractors for Southern [Investigations]”
In the January print edition of Byline Times, Jake Arnott puts together some of the new evidence linking Davidson and Adams to both the Morgan and Lawrence cases. And former Guardian crime reporter Duncan Campbell and investigative journalist and whistleblower Dan Evans recollect the former Flying Squad detective – John Ross – who also “specialised in selling information to the Mail and other newspapers from corrupt, serving officers” and was also targeting Doreen Lawrence, according to Haslam.
Haslam has already been the subject of spurious attacks by Fleet Street journalists because his evidence doesn’t suit their industry or agenda. They would rather muddy the investigations into an infamous racist stabbing and an axe murder with low-level character assassinations and hatchet jobs against key witnesses.
This is a disservice to the present as well as recent history and shows so much of the British press is more intent on deceiving their readers rather than informing them. They are trying to get away with murder.
To get the full story, with exclusive to print articles by Jake Arnott, Duncan Campbell and Dan Evans, buy the current edition of Byline Times, onsale now
Revealed: The Emails Behind the Royal ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Affair
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This article was first published in the November 2023 print edition of Byline Times
A series of anonymous emails blowing the whistle on payments by The Sun to the partner of a senior royal aide were written by three former colleagues of the controversial journalist Dan Wootton, a Byline Times investigation can reveal
This newspaper has received credible intelligence to suggest the three worked together to inform on the Murdoch tabloid’s former executive editor as they feared a cover-up by publisher News UK if they did not.
To protect themselves from exposure, the colleagues went to extraordinary lengths to cover their tracks, after reaching out to Scotland Yard, Buckingham Palace lawyers, and retired Guardian journalist Nick Davies.
Byline Times will not be identifying them as a matter of journalistic source protection. However, it can reveal how they presented themselves as being a temporary worker and a friend of a junior News UK administrator with access to The Sun’s editorial payment systems.
They acted following the publication of two stories about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and their son Archie in June and July 2019, and the subsequent discovery of payments totalling £4,000 to a publicist whose partner is Prince William’s former press officer Christian Jones.
For the first time, this newspaper is reproducing some of the emails’ content. Part of them reads: “If a journalist is using someone’s [partner] to pay Prince William’s PR for information about his own brother and sister-in-law that shouldn’t happen.”
They add: “Someone in editorial started questioning why stories that weren’t on the front page were getting thousands of pounds in fees. My friend says someone saw a string of payments within a few weeks to [the publicist, Jones’ partner] about royals and then asked who this person was. They couldn’t understand why a showbiz PR would have that kind of knowledge.”
The insider information was later handed to Neil Basu, the former Met Police Assistant Commissioner overseeing counter-terrorism at the time, and led to two internal inquiries at Buckingham Palace.
News UK denies making any unlawful payments to third parties, and Jones and his partner say they did not provide private information about the Sussexes to The Sun.
Byline Times has sourced its own copies of the emails, which were first addressed to Nick Davies in spring 2020.
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Davies – whose investigations for the Guardian exposed the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, leading to that newspaper’s closure in 2011 and a major Old Bailey trial – confirmed his role in passing on the anonymous communications to relevant third-parties.
“I am retired, but I still get approached with stories two or three times a week and have to say no to them,” he said. “But this email was clearly important. There was a clear public interest if there had been misfeasance by a public official. It was important and there was clearly a chance that what was being said was true. So I boosted it into the hands of people with power.”
First, Davies reached out to lawyers for the Duke of Sussex, who also passed the information on to Neil Basu.
“I was in the middle, and I admitted I had no idea if what the email said was true,” Davies added. “It was detailed information, but the truth was not clear. The police needed some kind of evidence to put before a judge to get a warrant to go to Buckingham Palace and search Christian Jones’ records and those at The Sun. They needed to meet the source to get a sworn statement or some other form of sworn evidence. I urged them [the anonymous whistleblower] to meet the police, who were willing to do so off-the-record, but the source would not come forward.”
The information in the emails was so detailed and credible, however, that it prompted the Duke of Sussex to explore a civil lawsuit with a formal ‘letter before action’ to The Sun. The information they contained centred on the appropriateness of payments going to the partner of someone acting in an official capacity for the Royal Family.
The Sun front page 09.01.20 The Emails
Byline Times can reproduce parts of the emails which went on to have such wide-reaching ramifications.
Posing as The Sun worker’s friend, the authors wrote to Davies: “I understand you are now retired from journalism. Perhaps if this is not of interest to you directly, you might wish to pass it on to someone capable if you think it worthwhile. I have no wish to be involved because I would fear for the safety and wellbeing of my loved ones. You played a pivotal role in exposing wrongdoing at News International. The company, now News UK, claims to be the cleanest media company in the world. It is not. I will give you one example. See where it leads.”
The emails claimed to be from a News UK worker who, during a brief period of employment there, had access to payment systems used by editorial teams and had knowledge of internal legal compliance protocols. The worker, it was claimed, had maintained a friendship with a second whistleblower at the tabloid.
One email went on: “Everyone there now has to undergo strict training to avoid corrupt payments, but at The Sun they are circumventing this. I know this because there is one case involving one of the top editors, Dan Wootton, that has been hushed up.”
The email continued: “The impression my friend gave is that only a few people within The Sun know about it. They’ve told me before that when the connection was made between [Christian Jones’ partner, the publicist] and Jones there was a real sense of panic because Wootton is so powerful within that office.
“He deals directly with [chief executive] Rebekah Brooks on stories sometimes, he has his own radio show, and he’s forced out a lot of people as he’s moved up through the organisation. He’s tried and succeeded to get people sacked. He’s that powerful.”
EXCLUSIVE
The Truth About Megxit: How Dan Wootton and a Cash-For-Leaks Scandal Split the Royal Family
As Scotland Yard probes the journalist Dan Wootton over allegations of blackmail and serial sexual catfishing after a three-year special investigation by Byline Times, this newspaper can now reveal
how his payments to the partner
of a top royal aide forced the
Duke and Duchess of Sussex to run
from the UK
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem
Explaining the situation, the emails continue: “[Dan Wootton] is a showbiz journalist, but in the last year or so, if you check you will see he has written a number of stories about the Royal Family. There were concerns raised internally last year over a number of payments he had made, totalling thousands of pounds, to a freelance PR.
“If you look on Google, [the publicist] worked for a number of showbiz PR firms, so perhaps not a big deal. The reason concerns were flagged was because Wootton suddenly began paying [the publicist] thousands of pounds … for royal stories, starting on or around 15 July last year (2019).”
It went on: “These began with large payments of £3,000 upwards for single stories about the Duchess of Sussex that only someone very close to them could know about. The information was very detailed and questions were asked very discreetly internally about why the amounts paid were suddenly so high about stories possibly involving public officials (which is a big red flag at News UK now).
“The answer, it was quickly established, was that [the publicist] is the partner of William and Kate’s press secretary, Christian Jones.”
The email went on: “By the company’s own updated rules, any suspicion of a payment to a public official should be flagged up immediately to lawyers. The reason I’m contacting you is that this didn’t happen. I have no reason why although given the seniority of the journalist and the panic it would cause internally, perhaps that is sufficient explanation.
“Only a handful of people had direct knowledge of it and I’m not sure Dan Wootton was even confronted about it. I don’t know the journalists personally but it really angers me that good people, secretaries even, lost jobs on the News of the World and here we are again possibly and it has not even been looked into.”
The emails go on: “After I left I heard someone involved was so angry they had emailed a Mr Basu at Scotland Yard last December about it and possibly even a royal servant called Tyrrell [Gerrard Tyrrell, the Royal Family’s lawyer] to tip them off.
“All I know is [the publicist] is on The Sun’s payment system under a ZC (contributor) number paid lots of money by Dan Wootton, I know that much. The paper trail is there if someone wants to find it. It seems rotten to me. I hope this is of interest.”
In a subsequent email, the whistleblowers confirmed the detail of [the publicist’s] contributor code: “I think [the publicist’s] ZC number is ZC634*** [Byline Times’ redaction]. My friend thinks there was a payment for £3,000 made around the 15 July last year for a story about the Duchess of Sussex and her nannies which was published on 28 June. There was also a payment of £1,000 made for a story about godparents to Meghan’s son. I don’t have any more details and I don’t know if I can get any more without arousing suspicion for my friend.”
EXCLUSIVE
In Plain Sight: The Picture the Palace Probe Missed
In 2020, Simon Case was tasked to investigate payments from Dan Wootton and The Sun to the partner of a royal press officer, allegedly for information about Prince Harry and Meghan. He found there was no evidence of wrongdoing. But Byline Times can shed further light
Tom Latchem and Dan Evans
The informants went on to talk about internal compliance policies intended to protect News UK from Operation Elveden-type scandals and bribery allegations.
Since Elveden, which closed down in 2016, News UK has upgraded its internal compliance systems to flag suspicious payments to serving public officials with a self-certifying system based around e-learning modules.
The email added: “This is used for every new contributor the company pays like a source. It’s a single sheet and has a box on it which asks the journalist to tick yes/no whether the person is a public official.”
Byline Times understands that the New York HQ of parent company News Corporation could be alerted to red flags. It followed the creation in 2011 of a management standards committee, one of whose first jobs was to assist UK police and act as ‘assisting suspects’ in the Elveden probe, and hand over evidence against employees in order to avoid corporate charges, which could have infringed the US Federal Foreign Corrupt Practices Act with the potential to impact directly on owner Rupert Murdoch.
The email went on: “People internally on editorial … started getting suspicious about the scale of the payments made by Wootton, looked at it, someone did some research and found the connection between Jones and [his partner], presented it to the same senior execs, who then recoiled in horror at what had been found and stuck their heads in the sand without taking it further.”
It added: “Basically [they] said, yep, anyway, let’s move on, it’s a great story by Dan. I don’t think there’s any desire to push for it to be investigated. I think the view internally is to let sleeping dogs lie and hope no one ever makes the connection independently.”
Byline Times put a series of detailed questions to a lawyer for the Royal Family, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Dan Wootton, Christian Jones, Jones’ partner, and Simon Case.
The allegations about payments were put to News UK in 2020, when Byline Investigates, the sister website of Byline Times, first revealed payments were made. News UK threatened to sue in order to stifle publication. The identities of the senior executives said to have known about the connection between Christian Jones and his partner are not known and the extent that News UK management know that this happened, if at all, is unclear.
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem are former colleagues of Dan Wootton’s from the News of the World between 2007 and 2011. None of the sources or analysts cited either in this story or wider investigation were paid
In Plain Sight: The Picture the Palace Probe Missed
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This article was first published in the November 2023 print edition of Byline Times
It’s the friendship Prince William’s former right-hand-man Simon Case concluded simply didn’t exist. And yet here are one-time royal press secretary Christian Jones and his publicist partner huddling together for an intimate celebratory photograph with ‘cash-for-leaks’ journalist Dan Wootton.
The occasion was Wootton’s 35th birthday party in March 2018. The location was the private terrace of a £1,675-a-night suite at London’s exclusive hotel The Ned. The guests were 20 “incredible friends” (in Wootton’s own words) – hand-picked to enjoy his extensive largesse. The issue is that it was a ‘friendship’ that – when legal documents later named Christian Jones – he flatly denied.
None of which could have seemed possible as Jones and his partner toasted the birthday boy – just a few days from winning a third British Press Award for ‘Showbiz Reporter of the Year’, and five years before he was unmasked as a serial catfish targeting young celebrities and colleagues for sexual images – with Veuve Clicquot among the potted peonies and Carrara marble tables on the 35m sq entertaining terrace of a hotel suite complete with a mahogany four-poster bed and roll-top bathtub.
One of the party’s attendees told Byline Times that “there was no expense spared” and “everyone invited was part of Dan’s special group of mates”.
“Dan hired a private dining room and laid on a set menu with three options for each course,” they said. “It was champagne and cocktails and whatever you wanted from the menu. Just 20 ate and then a few more turned up to celebrate with Dan upstairs on his terrace before heading on to a club in Shoreditch. It was lavish. There was no expense spared. Everyone invited was part of Dan’s special group of mates. Dan paid for everything.
This apparent closeness, as illustrated by the photo Wootton uploaded to Instagram and captioned with three red hearts on 11 March 2018, presented a problem, however, for Jones and his long-term publicist partner.
For, after Jones took the job of deputy communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in December 2018, Wootton paid the publicist for stories which, according to a whistleblower account, led to a secretive internal investigation at The Sun newspaper, which feared being sucked into a leaks scandal just a few years after some of its journalists were prosecuted over payments to public officials.
Christian Jones (right) and Dan Wootton at The Ned ‘Just A Fluke’
The Sun has never confirmed anything on the record, but Byline Investigates – the sister website to this newspaper – revealed in June 2020 how lawyers for the Duke of Sussex, armed with credible but anonymously supplied information apparently originating from inside The Sun’s publisher News UK, were threatening to sue the tabloid over the publication of stories written by Wootton – and negatively spun against the Sussexes – headlined ‘Nanny McThree’ and ‘Tot Secret’.
They were published in June and July 2019 and centred on nannying and god-parenting arrangements for the Sussexes’ son Archie. Payments of £4,000 had been made to the publicist in August 2019 and were identified by way of an internal News UK accounting code. The matter had been referred to both Buckingham Palace and Britain’s then top anti-terrorism police officer, Scotland Yard’s Neil Basu, for investigation.
Basu’s job was to try to establish whether there was any case for a criminal prosecution for misconduct in public office – the crime for which nine police officers were convicted, based on evidence handed over by the Murdoch media empire to Scotland Yard’s 2016 Operation Elveden, for accepting money from journalists for information.
After the Metropolitan Police failed to obtain the full identity of the whistleblowing Sun insiders – which it required to obtain a warrant to search royal property – Simon Case, the then private secretary to Prince William, was tasked to investigate from within Kensington Palace, where Jones was employed.
Byline Times, through a number of sources close to the matter, has been able to establish some details of the investigation and the processes that ultimately cleared Christian Jones of wrongdoing. Both he and his partner insist the allegations that Wootton paid for private information about the Sussexes are incorrect.
But this newspaper can reveal that, although when formally questioned by Case – who is today the head of the British Civil Service and facing tough questions at the Covid Inquiry over the quality of decision-making during the pandemic – Jones admitted to knowing Wootton and dealing with him on a professional basis, he strongly denied that either he, or his partner, were close friends with the journalist.
“Quite a long and involved process resulted from Prince Harry’s lawyers sending a letter before action to The Sun,” one source said. “Of course, Christian had to be questioned by his bosses about it. He said that, yes, he had known Dan for a while, but that he did not know him very well, and that Prince William’s courtiers who appointed him didn’t have a problem with it.
“Christian also told them that his partner had indeed been paid by The Sun at the time stated in the whistleblower emails, and for the amounts described, but that the money related to stories about clients his partner represented in their work as a publicist, and was nothing to do with Prince Harry and Meghan.
“One of his partner’s clients supposedly had the same name as the Duchess of Sussex. There was the suggestion that this was the reason for some of the money paid and that the timing was just a fluke.
“On that basis, Christian faced no further action. He retained the confidence of Kensington Palace and later on had a couple of big promotions.”
Byline Times has learned that Jones’ position was that the allegations against him ought not to have been made at all on the basis of anonymous accusations, albeit they contained many correct details, including the internal News UK code, which warranted a legitimate case for further investigation.
Kensington Palace is understood to have sought to draw a line under the matter unless compelling new evidence emerged.
Alongside Wootton’s birthday Instagram photo, this newspaper has spoken to multiple other witnesses who say that Wootton tried to cultivate a friendship between the three.
EXCLUSIVE
The Truth About Megxit: How Dan Wootton and a Cash-For-Leaks Scandal Split the Royal Family
As Scotland Yard probes the journalist Dan Wootton over allegations of blackmail and serial sexual catfishing after a three-year special investigation by Byline Times, this newspaper can now reveal
how his payments to the partner
of a top royal aide forced the
Duke and Duchess of Sussex to run
from the UK
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem
‘It Wasn’t Like It Was A Secret’
“It is true that Dan knew [Jones’ partner] pretty well,” one source said. “At the time, they were quite a young publicist who had worked for a couple of the London agencies and were keen to get on in their career. Dan knew this and made a point of including [the publicist] in his group, beyond just seeing them at the usual premieres and television events where publicists and journalists tend to rub shoulders.
“For [the publicist], knowing Dan was undeniably useful professionally. Dan had a hell of a lot of power with the Murdoch press and [the publicist] sometimes had clients who either wanted to be in those papers or to be kept out of them.
“They enjoyed the benefits of knowing Dan. Sometimes they got to use The Sun’s box at the 02 for gigs. They were often around each other socially in the West End. You’d see them at the usual media haunts like Soho House and Shoreditch House.
“Sometimes Christian was there too. He got to know Dan through his partner. They used to go out together quite regularly for a while, sometimes in a small group, sometimes in larger ones, for food and drinks. It wasn’t like it was a secret. Lots of people in their social set saw them and knew about it and, justifiably, assumed they were pretty close.”
Wootton was at the zenith of his personal power at The Sun and on a senior rota to periodically assume overall editing duties when Jones took up his post at Kensington Palace around Christmas 2018.
Jones’ principal job was to handle media matters for the Cambridges – his actual employers – with a dual role to look after the Sussexes. But a few weeks into his new appointment, Jones himself became the story.
On 23 January, The Sun published photos of Jones out in London’s Notting Hill with the Duchess of Sussex under the headline: ‘“WHAT A HOTTIE” Meghan Markle’s hunky new press secretary sets pulses racing as female fans urge Harry to “be careful”’.
Alongside paparazzi pictures snatched after a low-key work lunch with Meghan, who at the time was pregnant with Archie, the paper wrote: “Royal fans have been left hot under the collar after Meghan Markle stepped out with her hunky new press secretary.”
The article went on to quote social media comments praising Jones’ physical appearance and cited his LinkedIn CV, crediting the Cardiff University graduate as being a former Brexit speechwriter and Treasury press officer.
“In his new role,” the piece added, “he will liaise with British and international media as well support the royals’ charitable work and engagements.”
A media management source said the article “raised eyebrows” at the palace at the time, considering Jones’ “main job was to be a trusted point-man to guide and protect his employers from invasive media” coverage. Yet, this was the “equivalent of clattering straight into the first hurdle”.
Byline Times understands that any social connection between Wootton, Jones, and his partner ended following the investigations into the payments.
The first source said that “the friendships pretty much died” after this because for Jones or his partner to be seen publicly with Wootton “would have been a very bad look”.
Despite the inauspicious start to working life at the royal household, Jones went on to enjoy a successful three years there during which he stepped into the shoes of Simon Case, when Boris Johnson brought him into his Government during the pandemic, to be the private secretary to the Cambridges.
He left Prince William and Kate in January 2021 to become a partner and head of corporate affairs for Bridgepoint, a £31.56 billion private asset investment fund in the City.
EXCLUSIVE
Revealed: The Emails Behind the Royal ‘Cash-For-Leaks’ Affair
Detailed but anonymous testimony from insiders at The Sun sat at the heart of cash-for-leaks allegations involving a royal official and the newspaper’s former top editor Dan Wootton. Now, Byline Times can publish the details for the first time
Dan Evans
Again, The Sun covered the career change, noting that Jones had enjoyed an “incredibly close relationship with Prince William”. The paper wrote: “Whereas Simon was credited with making the Duke a statesman – Christian has really helped them to steer them through their public-facing role during the pandemic. He’s helped them to grow in confidence by gently pushing them out of their comfort zone.”
Today, Jones’ partner continues to work as a publicist with some high-profile clients.
Wootton did not comment on the record at the time of the 2020 Byline Investigates story. But his lawyers at Mishcon de Reya, one of Britain’s most costly law firms, denied that any payments were made unlawfully to a public official or a proxy and claimed their client was the victim of a smear campaign by unknown bad actors.
Byline Times put a series of detailed questions to a lawyer for the Royal Family, a spokesperson for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Dan Wootton, Christian Jones, Jones’ partner, and Simon Case.
Dan Evans and Tom Latchem are former colleagues of Dan Wootton’s from the News of the World between 2007 and 2011. None of the sources or analysts cited either in this story or wider investigation were paid