Is this Britain’s Watergate moment?

Many Western governments have special programmes through which they invite African journalists to go to Western countries to observe how ‘a free press works’, so that they can return home and run a ‘free press’ there. But Western governments are not particularly enamoured of the ‘free press’ themselves. I have no doubt that if President Richard Nixon had had the power to close the Washington Post down in 1972–74, he would have done so. But the US constitution prevented him from touching the paper.

And currently in Britain, we are witnessing the unravelling of a story that reveals the ends to which Prime Minister David Cameron – and other Prime Ministers before him – went to court the biggest press mogul in Britain, Rupert Murdoch, so that he would use his media organs to support them. Cameron employed as his communications director a journalist, Andy Coulson, who had resigned from Murdoch's biggest-selling newspaper in the UK, the News of the World. Murdoch's former employees were also littered in the press section of the Metropolitan Police. The murky evidence uncovered so far shows that British politicians have very little right to hold up the British press as a paragon of virtue whose methods should be copied by African journalists.

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But let's begin in the United States. In 1972, a group of criminals, some of whom had, in the past, worked for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) on assignments involving ‘dirty tricks’, were caught carrying out a burglary in the offices of the Democratic Party’s National Convention, located at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. They were attempting to plant listening devices – or bug – the offices of the (then) US opposition party.

When the ‘plumbers’ (as they became known) were taken to court, the contents of their pockets were examined. A Washington Post reporter in the court recorded in his notebook the contact phone numbers found on the leader of the group. Back in his office, he called the numbers. One was a White House number. The other led to the CIA.

From that moment on, two star reporters of the Washington Post, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, relentlessly pursued the story of how it was that common burglars had been found to be in possession of the telephone numbers of such key institutions. The reporters were right to be suspicious. It turned out that the ‘plumbers’ were working for President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, chair of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). Mitchell’s committee wanted to know the Democratic Party’s strategy for the coming election so as to evolve counter-strategies to defeat the Democrats. Planting listening devices in the offices of the opposition was illegal, but that did not deter CREEP.

Now, when the plumbers were caught, Nixon and Mitchell used every means available to them to try to cover up the crime. Mitchell even threatened to put the ‘tits’ of the publisher of the Washington Post, Katherine Graham, in a vice and press it hard if one story was published! However, the Washington Post was not intimidated and assisted by a whistleblower called ‘Deep Throat’, its two reporters were able, doggedly, to uncover and report on the cover-up. On 8 August 1974, Nixon resigned, caught in the web of lies and illegalities that entangled him as he and his team tried to cover-up the burglary.

In recent days, some Britons, living through events that bring Watergate to mind, have been wondering whether this is Britain’s ‘Watergate moment’. As a result of a scandal resulting from the hacking of mobile phones by the News of the World newspaper, the communications director of the prime minister, Andy Coulson, resigned in January 2011. He resigned because he was editor of the News of the World when the scandal first broke, and had to leave the paper. But despite being warned against doing so, Cameron brought Coulson into his office to work for him, as leader of the Conservative opposition. Then when Cameron won the election, he took Coulson along to No. 10 Downing Street as the government’s information supremo. However, the phone-hacking allegations didn’t die but rather gathered momentum, and Coulson resigned. (The equivalent resignation in the Watergate scandal would be that of either John Erlichman or H.R. Haldeman.)

And then, in the wake of the same scandal, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard) Sir Paul Stephenson also resigned (an act equivalent in Watergate terms to the resignation of John Mitchell?). Sir Paul Stephenson’s head rolled because it had become clear that Scotland Yard had cultivated a rather ‘cosy’ relationship with the News of the World, which led to a situation that enabled the News of the World to escape lightly when some of its personnel were caught carrying out illegal phone-hacking. Only one reporter and the private investigator he used were jailed, while the police ignored evidence – amounting to 11,000 pages – that was collected from the private investigator. Nearly 4,000 people were on the private investigator’s list, but the police only informed a handful of them that their phones might have been hacked. So, more heads rolled: Assistant Commissioner of Police John Yates, who, in his own words, conducted a ‘crap review’ of the mountain of evidence gathered on phone-hacking, followed his boss and resigned.

Another big police resignation is expected soon. He is the Metropolitan Police’s communications director, Dick Ferdocio, who admitted to a Parliamentary Select Committee that 10 out of the 45 press office staff working under him used to work at the News of the World. He also admitted that he never asked a former deputy editor of the paper, Neil Wallis, about phone hacking before employing Wallis as a part-time consultant. Ferdocio is currently under official investigation and only a miracle can save his job.

Meanwhile, the toll of job losses rose: as the scandal got nearer the top of his organisation, the owner of the News of the World, Rupert Murdoch, closed down the paper, throwing 200 people out of their jobs. His hope must have been that its closure would distance him from the paper’s unsavoury methods. But Murdoch’s gesture became meaningless when he stuck loyally by Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International (the parent company of the News of the World). Brooks had been editor of Murdoch’s News of the World at the time of the phone-hacking, before moving to its tabloid sister, the Sun.

Murdoch refused to accept Rebekah Brooks’s resignation. But he finally had to let her go, as the police arrested her and formally quizzed about the phone-hacking. Meanwhile, Murdoch and his son, James, chair of News International, were summoned to appear before one of the two select committees of the House of Commons dealing with the phone-hacking. At first, Murdoch appeared to be trying to hide behind his American citizenship to avoid appearing before the parliamentary committee. But he was served with a summons by the office of the Parliament’s ‘serjeant-at-arms’ which, if ignored, could have led to his arrest and imprisonment (if Parliament so decided) in an ancient dungeon beneath the Houses of Parliament in Westminster.

So Murdoch and his son finally appeared before Parliament. Murdoch confessed to the parliamentary committee that it was ‘the most humble day’ of his life. In answer to questions, he told the committee that he deeply regretted the methods of the News of the World. He didn’t know it was doing such things, for he employed 53,000 people around the world and did not know about everything they did. The News of the World operation amounted to only 1 per cent of his business, he said.

Murdoch was being clinically grilled when, ironically, he was given a respite by a man filled with hostility, who attacked him physically. Before anyone could intervene, this man had smeared Murdoch’s face with a pie made of shaving foam. What the man did not anticipate were the lightning reflexes of Murdoch’s Chinese wife, Wendi Deng. She had been sitting quietly behind her husband, and when she saw him being attacked, she leapt from her seat and hit out at the man with her open hand – quite hard!

The man was taken away by the police. Deng calmly wiped the foam from her husband’s face. Having regained his composure, Murdoch continued his evidence, albeit with his smeared jacket off. He didn’t comment on the incident, but if his appearance was ‘the humblest day of his life’, then the attack must have counted as one of ‘the most frightening’ days of his life. The attack, however, swung public sympathy to his side. The British media loved his wife’s rush to his defence. They heaped praises on her, calling her a ‘Crouching Tiger’ (after the thrilling Chinese kung-fu film, ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’.) The heat of publicity moved from Murdoch to his wife, and it was all positive.

No such luck for Murdoch’s son, James. He is likely to be recalled before the parliamentary committee because two of his ex-employees, a former News of the World editor and the paper’s former legal director, have fingered him as having been ‘mistaken’ when he told the parliamentary committee that he had not been told of a particularly damaging email, which showed that he was aware of what was going on. If the committee concludes that he misled it, he could be penalised with a fine or imprisonment.

Prime Minister Cameron is also facing tremendous pressure from the Labour opposition as a result of his employment of Andy Coulson, a man who had resigned as editor of the News of the World because the paper had hacked phones under his watch. Cameron has set up two committees to investigate the scandal and its implications for relations between the media and politicians generally. But Labour politicians are not allowing any opportunity to pass without pointing to his ‘lack of judgment’ in appointing Andy Coulson. They keep reminding the prime minister that he should have known that Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World at the time the scandal broke – only to become, a short time later, Cameron’s director of communications.

Labour MPs keep asking Cameron the deadly ‘Watergate question’: ‘What did you know about the hacking of telephones under Mt Coulson, and when did you know it?’

Another deadly question is: ‘You saw News International personnel many times whilst your government was considering whether to allow News International to acquire the majority shareholding in BSkyB, a company in which it currently holds only a minority of the shares. Did you discuss the takeover bid with them?’

Cameron’s answer to the second question is that he did not discuss any ‘inappropriate’ issue with the News International personnel he met. But Labour is not impressed – what is ‘appropriate’ and what is ‘inappropriate’? Isn’t Cameron acting like a judge and jury in his own case?

Each passing day brings new revelations which indicate that the furore over phone-hacking is far from over and may in fact extend to other forms of information purloining, such as ‘blagging’ (pretending to be someone else, so as to get banks or other organisations to divulge a person’s confidential personal information) and ‘pinging’ (paying bent police officers to trace the whereabouts of an individual from the person’s mobile phone).

One unmistakable effect the scandal has had upon the British body politic is that in future politicians will think twice before employing ‘smart Alec’ publicists to deliver their message to the electorate. For the methods that give such ‘smart Alec’ publicists their prowess may not necessarily work to the good of clean, open government.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Cameron Duodu is a writer and commentator.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.