Nick Davies - Hack Attack

Full transcript: Nick Davies on London Real

9:04 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Nick Davies, the man who took the Rupert Murdoch empire to court over the British phone hacking scandal, and brokered the relationship between the Guardian newspaper and WikiLeaks. You have written extensively as a freelancer as well as for the Guardian and the Observer, and have been named Reporter of the Year, Journalist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year at the British Press Awards. Your book Hack Attack, how the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch, became a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2015.

9:45 Nick, welcome to London Real. Hi, thank you for being here. I guess it’s been eight, almost nine years now, since the hacking scandal broke in ’07. You know, we have people all around the world that tune in here, and I was wondering if after that much time has passed, if you have a different perspective on it that you did even a year ago or two years ago. I know as the public we were fed little bits of it piecemeal, and it’s something I kind of want to explore with you today because we heard things in ’07 and then in ’11 and then we saw a tribunal and kind of the pieces, but is there any way that you look at it differently now than when you were in it?

10:21 Actually, I don’t think I do look at it differently, but the because the big picture was always clear from the outset, so you could make the mistake of thinking that the phone hacking scandal is about phone hacking. It isn’t. That’s just the beginning of the thing. This was always obviously a story about power and the immediate reason for that is that you had this newspaper, the News of the World, where they were routinely breaking the law to get hold of information for their stories, very frequently by hacking into people’s voicemail messages.

10:55 But the crucial thing was that by the time I started working on it, it was clear that the police at Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police, were sitting on very detailed, voluminous evidence of that crime occurring and had decided not to investigate it. So why would the most powerful police force in the United Kingdom make a decision like that? And then you see that the press regulator, which was never very powerful, was sitting on the sidelines and they too were refusing to investigate it and in fact when we started working, they put out a report that said the Guardian, my newspaper, lot of old crap and defended the News of the World.

11:34 What’s going on here? This is about power. This is about the fear of getting into a fight with the most powerful news organization in the country. And the final part of this is when you move beyond it, you see the same pattern in government. So you may have heard of this rather quaint old idea that we adopted here for a while.

11:53 This they call it democracy. It’s a kind of odd thing. The idea was that each of us would vote and we’d elect a government that would, roughly speaking, do what we wanted, but forget that you have this former Australian with an American passport, who owns four national newspapers and a national news channel, and he has access to politicians of a kind ordinary people can’t dream of, and he has power to influence what that government decides to do far more than the electorate.

12:20 So what I’m saying is that the hacking of voicemail messages is just the way in to a story about power. From the outset it was obviously about power, and I don’t think in that sense the big picture perspective on the story’s changed. It almost feels like the movie All the President’s Men, where they follow the money. It’s like each one of these steps, as I’ve heard you talk about it, almost leads to something else and then leads to something else and it kind of further unfolds to where, almost then, there’s a public sentiment that allows it to kind of move forward and then you talked about this kind of soft power that the media has over the politicians, where it’s not even a over threat.

12:55 It’s this kind of, this institutionalized, yeah, passive power. So that’s the idea with passive power, it’s a bit like the power of a bully in a school playground, and once this bully has beaten up two or three kids and made PP out of them, the other kids get the message, and they set out to placate the bully. It’s about fear. So in the case of somebody like Rupert Murdoch you can see two kinds of fear operating. This is really thinking in the kind of political context, which is the one that matters.

13:26 So first of all there is an individual fear that his newspapers might come and expose my, I, this imaginary politician’s personal life, sex life, which there’s a history of that exactly. So this is the point that every MP, every captain of industry, every trade union leader has seen it happen to somebody in their circle, that they’ve had this enormously painful and humiliating experience of their sex life being exposed all over the front page of Murdoch’s newspapers, and they don’t want that to happen to them. So Murdoch doesn’t have to threaten that he’s going to do that.

14:00 They start off, almost all of them, from a position of fear, and then you can add to that individual fear, a kind of organisational fear, that again they’ve seen it happen to other people, that if these newspapers target your union, your corporation, your political party, they can destabilise that organisation to the point where it ceases to be able to function because every day is a crisis, because some damn new thing has appeared on the front page of a newspaper. It may be true, it may be false, but the share price is falling, the staff are rebelling, there are people withdrawing their support. It’s chaos.

14:31 So you put those two fears together and that begins to explain the extraordinary power of a media mogul in our society, and why he doesn’t have to run around telling people what to do, they will take the initiative to try to placate him, to try to calm him down, so they don’t get into trouble, and it’s kind of scary, bearing in mind the myths we tell about ourselves, that we live in this democratic society. And strangely enough it’s because the royal family was involved in ’07 that this even surfaced, because anyone else, if that had been initially hacked, it probably never would have been looked into or investigated further. Yeah, I’m sure that’s right, because there were examples over the years of public figures who realised that the News of the World must be getting inside their voicemail messages, and that went nowhere, but what happened was that Prince William and his staff realised that two particular stories that appeared in the gossip column in the News of the World could only have come from voicemail messages, and so they called in the police, and as you suggest.

15:35 I mean, the joke is that really Murdoch’s prestige in this country at that time was very, very high and very few people had more prestige, and the royal family just happened to be one of that small group. So the police did investigate, but then what is upsetting is that they investigated only in this very, very limited way. This, so it’s the royal family, the police take off their helmets and do them, so they come in and they do the job but they present to the court a case which says, well, there are only eight victims of this crime.

16:06 In fact they were sitting on evidence that there were 5,500. They ignore all the others. They present this case, which is essentially about the royal family, and even then it’s quite quirky and British, because they knew very well that the primary victims of this voicemail interception were Prince William, Prince Harry, Prince Charles, the royal family themselves, but you can’t have a member of the royal family giving statements to the police or being called as a witness, heaven forbid.

16:30 How common. So they, they built the case around the staff, three of them, who’d had their voicemails hacked, but it’s so interesting because you’ve got this passive power of Murdoch, right? And it’s the same with the royal family. I don’t think the royal family or the household had to tell the police, don’t call the Queen as a witness. It’s just assumed she’s too important to be treated, power there, exactly, passive power.

16:51 This society has not really moved on in that respect. Mind you, actually, that’s probably a mistake, I would think. Power tends to operate like that across the world, maybe a little bit more brazen here, and what about the police? Was it financial, that incentive to have that relationship with the press, or again were they in fear of the Rupert Murdoch, you know, press machine? Okay, there’s two different levels.

17:11 So I think when you get to the senior levels, who are making decisions about who to investigate and who to back off, it’s about the political fear that we’ve mentioned. At the lower levels there were ordinary constables and the like who were earning small amounts of money by selling tips to newspapers, and that was illegal, and now there’s something like, I think, a grand total of about 30 police officers prison officers and civil servants who’ve been convicted. Most of them have ended up in prison.

17:41 Now that’s been exposed, but they’re two different things. It isn’t the case that because newspapers were paying bribes to junior police officers, that’s the reason why the investigation didn’t take place. That’s a political decision. Did the police get off easy in your opinion? Were they ever held accountable for what was going on?

17:59 So at the political level they behaved really, really badly, because when we at the Guardian started dragging out the truth about all this, there was an assistant commissioner who was particularly aggressive in denouncing the newspaper and in denying the story, and he had access to all this detailed evidence, which proved that what we were saying was true, and at the end of the day he had to resign. So he lost his career and he would probably have become the next commissioner. So that was quite a big, painful punishment that he suffered, and at the same time the ultimate boss, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, also resigned, kind of in the backwash of the scandal, so those two did become accountable.

18:38 And at the lower level, as I’ve said, the junior officers who were taking bribes to some extent have been caught and convicted and often imprisoned. If you look at it institutionally, you know, I’m saying the story is about power, where power doesn’t let other people unseat it at all easily. So we haven’t changed very much. So if you look at the way that the Metropolitan Police react, the leadership of Scotland Yard spent many, many months concealing the truth and attacking the journalists and members of parliament who were trying to bring it out.

19:14 This was a cover-up at the most senior levels of the Metropolitan Police. We were able to get the story out in part because middle-ranking police officers who knew bits and pieces spoke to us. Good, brave whistleblowers. Okay, so the leadership of Scotland Yard sees this scandal blow up, the boss man resigns and so does the assistant commissioner, and they react in a cynical and authoritarian way. They take advantage of the shameful fact that junior officers had been taking bribes to say, okay, we now have to clamp down on the links between police officers and journalists.

19:53 In future nobody’s allowed to talk to a journalist unless we authorise it. So what this does is to silence the whistleblowers in the middle ranks, who are the guys who tried to tell the truth and allow the upper ranks, who are the guys who were doing the cover-up, to decide what we in the public are told. So it was a complete inversion of what they should have done. They should have said in order to stop the bribes being paid and in order to stop the upper ranks engaging in this kind of cover up, again we need to be far more transparent.

20:22 Let officers talk to the public. There’s some stuff out there which is secret. They mustn’t tell secrets, but in principle open the doors, that’ll reduce the corruption. It’ll reduce the cover-ups. So it was a disgraceful, cynical, authoritarian reaction by Scotland Yard, and they’ve got away with it because they’re powerful, right?

20:38 And that’s power protecting itself, and it always does that. Exactly, but in a big way. So there was a phase there where they were enormously embarrassed. You know that expression about how the lights go on in the brothel and everybody’s running around without their clothes on? It was kind of like that.

20:52 Police, politicians, the lot. But really unstoppably, it all falls back into place slowly over the next year or two, and when we published that book Hack Attack about all this, I caught a little bit of criticism from reviewers saying, oh, why is this guy so pessimistic? He says nothing has changed. But truly I mean, I think we’ve probably stopped newspapers committing crimes, but if you look at the way that power operates, it’s the opposite of change. They’ve still got it, and the Murdoch Empire, not a big change when it comes to their power.

21:22 No. So it’s just been disclosed, in fact, that since the general election in this country, which was what, about seven months ago, Murdoch and his people have had 10 meetings, I think, with the prime minister or his people in Downing Street. How many meetings have you had? I mean, he hasn’t invited me in either. So they’ve still got the access, and the access is the beginning of the influence if you can get in there because they’re frightened of you.

21:45 Oh please, Rupert, sit down, will you have sugar with your tea, and what do you think about the European referendum? What do you think about wage rates and the minimum wage? He’s got the chance to tell government what he wants, and against the background that they wish to placate him, and you assert that Rupert Murdoch influenced Tony Blair on the decision about the EU, and on a variety of, you know, foreign policy issues as well. Is that right? Yeah, so it’s quite amazing, actually.

22:09 So you can look at very big issues. The two I highlighted quite briefly in the book were one: if you look at Tony Blair’s desire as prime minister to take Britain into the European currency, the euro, you can see that Rupert Murdoch has what I think you could argue is a decisive influence on that. So the prime minister may have wanted to take us into the euro. We didn’t go there, rightly or wrongly, because of Murdoch’s influence. There’s a staggering scale of influence.

22:37 I mean, Blair might argue with me, but I think that’s a perfectly reasonable analysis, and I know certainly people in very senior political circles who agree with that. And then the other thing is the invasion of Iraq. I think that there, what you would say is Murdoch has a really significant influence. It’s substantial, but it’s probably not quite decisive. Even if he hadn’t existed, probably the pressure from Washington was enough to get us in there, but there is an enormous amount of contact going on between Murdoch and Blair and his cabinet.

23:05 There are points, I think, where Murdoch’s almost a sort of messenger from Washington, and he clearly wants that to happen, and that may be for ideological reasons, it may be for commercial reasons to do with the price of oil. I, I that I can’t explain, but he’s in there pushing hard. And there was a moment I quoted in the book where he was, he was somewhere and there was a bit of a press scrum around him. This is Rupert Murdoch, and some journalist said do you think you influenced Blair’s decision to go into Iraq?

23:33 And he says something like, I don’t know, we certainly tried, and you know, there you begin to see it from the lion’s mouth. So the funny thing is also it extends across the spectrum, because I told in the book this story about how Rebekah Wade, as she then was, broke up with her partner, got divorced, and started a relationship with Charlie Brooks, to whom she eventually became married. And during that phase, when she was first going out with Charlie. Gordon Brown, who was then the Chancellor of the Exchequer understood that Rebekah’s new boyfriend Charlie was a racehorse trainer, and he wanted to try and find some way to please Rebekah, and he knew that everybody in the horse racing world hates the specialist tax which they have to pay which is called the horse race levy.

24:21 So I heard from two different officials that our Chancellor of the Exchequer commissioned those officials to do a study to see whether they could repeal the horse race levy, not because there was an enormous political pressure to do so, not because there was a financial and economic case for it, but because it would be a way of pleasing Rebekah’s new boyfriend, and therefore pleasing her. So it’s kind of on this spectrum from that kind of absurd genuflection and distortion of policy on a little thing, right? The way through to the really big issues.

24:51 We’ve got to keep Rupert and his people happy. Walk me through this timeline, because I think each few years there are important events that kind of shape the whole piece and show what’s actually happening, because in ’07 I was here. I remember a little bit about the royal family, but it didn’t hook in the public’s mind, did it? Did it not hook until 2011, when it was Milly Dowler were involved, or what was the kind of the timeline? Okay, big events there.

25:16 So January 2007, there’s a rather small trial at the Old Bailey where you have the Royal correspondent of the News of the World, Clive Goodman, and this specialist private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire. They plead guilty to intercepting the voicemail of these eight people, and they get short prison sentences. So that’s not a big story. It only lasts 48 hours. Everybody forgets about it.

25:38 So that’s January ’07. January ’08, I was contacted by somebody who said there’s an awful lot more to that story. And by that time, as a crucial element of the power background here, the guy who’d been editing the News of the World when all the crime was going on, Andy Coulson, had left and had gone to work for David Cameron, who was already the leader of the Conservative Party, and it was clear that he was very likely to win the next general election, and then Andy Coulson would be in Downing Street, and his job would be to communicate, in communication terms, between the government and the people of this country.

26:15 And if the source who was approaching me was right, then Andy Coulson was a liar. He was lying about the crime at the newspaper. And without wanting to sound too naive, the last place, the last person you want to be in charge of communication between government and people is a liar. Plus there was this other thought that if he, if Coulson really had presided over a regime of that private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and others intercepting people’s communications, what would he do if he was in Downing Street and he thought, for example, that a cabinet minister was leaking information to a journalist, would he call in a private investigator to intercept their communications?

26:53 There was a very similar scandal in France under President Mitterrand. So for those two reasons, what this source was telling me about the scale of crime was immediately interesting and immediately took you into that world of power. Did you not believe it at first? Did you think no? I, well, no, I, this was a credible source, but at the beginning when he very first spoke to me, I didn’t quite see the reason for bothering to get into the story.

27:17 And then I saw the power connections. So January ’07 there’s the trial of the two guys. It doesn’t amount to much. January ’08, that source approaches me. I’m doing other stories, but I start working on it.

27:27 The source is wonderful, and we roll it along, roll it along in the wings, and it actually is something like 18 months before I’ve got enough information to publish a story, and that’s quite a big one. How does the source approach you? I’m just curious, is it a Deep Throat, dark, you know, parking structure, or is it just really simple? He actually sent me an email and said I need to talk to you, it’s important, here’s my number, call me and we’ll arrange to meet, but don’t leave a voicemail, which was kind of cute, and I didn’t understand why at the time.

27:57 And so I met him, in fact, in a hotel room in London, very well-informed, intelligent, likable person who stuck with me all the way through. So you have the trial of the two guys, January ’07, that source approaches me January ’08. The first story is July ’09. It’s a big one. It says that Murdoch’s people in the UK have just paid out more than a million pounds to block legal actions which would have exposed the scale of the phone hacking and so everybody starts running around shouting.

28:29 We have the assistant commissioner from Scotland Yard coming out and saying the Guardian have got this wrong, the News of the World are okay. And then Rebekah Brooks, who’s by now Murdoch’s chief executive in the UK, she puts out a statement saying that we are deliberately misleading the British people. We’re up against the wall. You then have a two-year period where we’re publishing story after story. I mean, 60, 70, 100 stories, I don’t know, and finally in July ’09, where I mean they’re beginning to wobble.

28:55 By January ’09 they’re in trouble, they’re on the retreat. Andy Coulson resigns in January ’09 from his job in Downing Street. Okay, January ’09, oh, oh, sorry, January ’11. You’re quite right, after 18 months, after and the, and you’re alone. The Guardian is alone in publishing almost.

29:10 There’s one or two other reporters on the fringe, and there’s MPs and lawyers who are joining in here. So yeah, Coulson resigns in the January. The police set up a decent new inquiry in the January, but it doesn’t really take off until we did the story about Milly Dowler, this schoolgirl who’d been abducted and murdered, that the News of the World had been inside her voicemail. That was in July 2011. If we’d done that story on its own, it wouldn’t have had big breakthrough impact, but the dam was straining and almost ready to burst, and that story did it.

29:39 And that got the public’s attention, because they had information in that voicemail that potentially could have saved her life, and the public was outraged. No, no, no, it’s simpler than that. It’s an emotional reaction. They, this, the face of that 12-year-old schoolgirl is enormously familiar to people in this country. When she went missing, her photograph was everywhere, video home video of her was all over the television as the police tried to find her, and then eventually she’s found murdered, and a horrible, horrible man went to jail for it.

30:09 There’s an enormous amount of sympathy and care for that little girl built in, and all we’re saying essentially is something disgusting that while she was missing, before the body was found, at a time when her family, her mother, father, friends, are calling her, saying Milly, Milly, please get in touch. There are journalists with beer on their breath and breakfast egg on their tie listening to all that, and it’s just, it’s too much. Just back off. There are some things you can’t do, even if even if the police aren’t watching you.

30:41 There are just some things you know you can’t do, and that’s one of them. And what happened was that there was this chain reaction, that coming after two years of exposure, that story was strong enough that it forced the other newspapers who’d been refusing to cover the story for various reasons to get involved. And there was this extraordinary sequence of events, where the day after we’d done the Milly Dowler story, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that the families of some of the people who’d been killed in terrorist bombs in the London Underground system in July 2005 had had their voicemails hacked.

31:18 And you, again, you’re hitting that button, how could you do it? And then the next day, the Telegraph disclosed that the families of British soldiers killed in Afghanistan had also had their voicemail hacked, and that sequence is just so powerful that you’ve got a sort of tsunami of revulsion spreading across the country, and in the commercial world people start saying we’re not going to advertise in your newspaper anymore, and in the political world all those politicians who were frightened of Murdoch and placating him, all so to speak, cross the floor and start to speak out. It just becomes impossible to support him.

31:52 For someone who’s been covering that for 18 months, I mean, does that finally feel like thank God that we finally have some momentum here, so everyone can know what you’ve known for 18 months? I just wonder what it’s like to hold on to that story for that long. Is it frustrating? Is it liberating? Is it gratifying?

32:08 Okay, so I think if you took the first six months after we published that first story, we’re under attack from the police, from the Murdoch company, then the Press Complaints Commission published a report saying we were wrong, and it’s an anxious time. Uh, I told in the book about how during that period I got into a taxi in London. The driver says, what do you do? Oh, I’m a reporter. What sort of work do you do?

32:32 And when I told him that I’d been working on the phone hacking story, oh yeah, that all turned out to be wrong, didn’t it? And you think, oh s*** you know, this is this is not great. So you’re being made to look like an idiot in the lie, and your newspaper is suffering. So that was worrying, but very slowly we began to turn it around. And I think that, as I said, by the time we got round to publishing the Milly Dowler story, we’d already crossed the vindication line where it was clear that what we were saying was true, and Andy Coulson resigned.

32:59 The new police inquiry is set up. I think once the Milly Dowler story has been published, what happens is it’s just like an adrenaline overload. So I’m sitting at home trying to write follow-up stories, and the phone never stops ringing, because other journalists want information, and television interviews and radio interviews, and there are reactions happening four or five days later. The News of the World closed. That’s like, what the hell did that happen?

33:23 Why did? Whoa. So you’re you’re running on adrenaline, you’re sleeping three or four hours a night. It’s it’s that really. It’s just overwhelming.

33:30 What happens, and that lasted for two or three weeks, including that Rupert Murdoch and James Murdoch appearing in front of the select committee, which you remember, right? And that’s, but that is a journalist’s crowning achievement. That’s what everyone puts in all the years to have a moment like that, where everything’s relevant, the work you put in is now being listened to, and you can see the potential to really change the power structure. Were you optimistic then, or did you really wonder if there was anything that was going to change?

33:57 Well, I think the honest answer is it was all moving too fast for me to step back and think, hmm, I wonder what’s going to happen here. But I think once things calmed down, I did think that we would get a decent way of regulating the press, so that the bad newspapers, well, and the good would have to abide by the code of conduct which they themselves have written. I thought we’d get that much out of it, but we didn’t. But I didn’t have any illusions about changing the ability of a media mogul to go and bully government.

34:26 That was never within our reach. What we said about the way that power holds on, those few weeks happen adrenaline. What are, kind of, those next big steps? Well, then once you see, the weird thing about being a reporter or maybe writing non-fiction books is that you can dump lots and lots of information into the public domain, but what you can’t do is to predict or control what then happens. So once you’ve hit the Milly moment, events then take over.

34:51 I, I almost become a spectator on my own story. I think I do become a spectator. So there are two more police inquiries that are set up, one into email hacking and sundry other crimes, one into bribery and corruption, as well as the other new inquiry into voicemail hacking. So there’s masses of police activity. Then in the midst of the furor after Milly Dowler, David Cameron announces the Leveson Inquiry, and that has, that was, I thought, extraordinary.

35:19 And if, I mean, I, I thought that was a great inquiry, and to the extent that I had anything to do with the chain reaction which led to it, I was glad, because power naturally enjoys being secretive. If you have power, you have the ability to make things secret. If you can make things secret, you can exercise power more easily. It’s a perfect marriage. Can you explain Leveson Inquiry for so?

35:44 The Prime Minister appointed this High Court judge, Lord Justice Leveson, who was given a great deal of power to summon witnesses to appear in front of him and to order the production of documents, text messages, email messages, in order to uncover the culture and practice of the press. It wasn’t about voicemail hacking. It’s about what the hell have these newspapers been doing? And the result of that was that day after day, week after week, live online, we had four Prime Ministers compelled to come and sit in front of a microphone and explain what had really been going on in their offices in relation to the press and the media barons, but not just the four Prime Ministers.

36:27 Cabinet ministers, senior civil servants, police officers, chief constables, reporters, the most secretive animals of all, newspaper editors. They all had to come and sit in front of that microphone and explain in detail what had been going on in the corridors of power, and on occasion that included having text messages and emails disclosed. So that was really exciting. Why shouldn’t we know what’s going on in the corridors of power? Okay, you’ve got to keep some nuclear stuff secret and some financial stuff secret, but you guys keep much too much secret, and this was a, I would say, a unique chance to see the mechanics of power exposed.

37:06 That was great. Uh, and there was some nitty-gritty in there about what had been going on behind the scenes, more or less at the same time as we did the Milly Dowler story, when Murdoch’s people in the UK were trying to buy the big chunk that they didn’t already own of the satellite broadcaster BSkyB, which is an enormously lucrative, big, fat cash cow, and they wanted it very badly. And what you could see in the Leveson Inquiry was that, quite improperly, the government minister who was having to make the decision about whether there was a monopoly problem, a competition problem, around that purchase, had secretly opened a back channel to the Murdoch people, and there was all sorts of information flowing backwards and forwards through that back channel, and that’s completely against the rules.

37:57 This minister was operating in what they call a quasi-judicial role, as though he were a judge, and his officials had made it clear you can’t have any contact with the Murdoch people while you’re making this decision. So the exposure of that back channel was really rather thrilling, because I haven’t been able to expose that as a reporter, but Lord Justice Leveson had the power to pull that out. I mean, that’s just one example. You had week after week after week, and that was in 2013.

38:23 Was Leveson? No, I would say winter 2012. Okay. And the News of the World had closed by then. The News of the World closed extremely rapidly.

38:31 So we published the Milly story, I think, on a Monday, and by Thursday they were announcing the paper was closed, and that Sunday was its last edition. That’s July 2011. Okay, how did it make you feel when they had to close down? I’m sure, oh, pretty sick. You had colleagues there, because that’s a family.

38:47 Yeah. So nobody in the Guardian, or in the political world to the extent that it was reacting to these stories, was asking for the News of the World to be closed. And I don’t know, I think the newspaper was employing about 200 people at that time, of whom perhaps a dozen were involved in crimes. So it was disgusting to throw more than 180 people out of work when they were innocent. And the reason that that was done was primarily, we now know, because of the political problems they were running into with the BSkyB bid, that as I said, this story had built up to the point where it was causing them lots of trouble, and it had begun to cause political difficulty for the bid.

39:30 So they thought, it’s clear, this is from internal email which has since been disclosed: if we shut the paper, we can kind of wash our hands of it and say we now have clean hands. So let us go ahead with this big sacrifice, the paper, and we might be able to get them BSkyB. Exactly, and that was pretty cynical, right? Which didn’t work, obviously. No, but at the time, that was a big bet for Murdoch to make, because he had to shut that paper down.

39:55 It was. Yeah, but I mean, these are selfish, ruthless people. I don’t think they worried too much about the people. I mean, that may be unfair, but it doesn’t seem to me they worried very much about the people whose jobs were being lost. Some of them were subsequently re-employed, because they then relaunched a different Sunday newspaper a year or so later.

40:13 Did journalists react to you when that happened? Did you get heat? Did you get blame? Were you a hated man? Well, so it, it divides into two chunks, really.

40:22 I think an enormous number of journalists, including as many as 30 different people who’d worked for the News of the World, wanted all this crime and corruption exposed, because most journalists do not think that we should be committing crimes. They don’t think we should be invading people’s privacy. They don’t think we should be bullying government. They know what’s right and what’s wrong. There is a small number of journalists who are addicted to that kind of world of tabloid crime and tabloid bullying, and they certainly hate me, hate Alan Rusbridger, who was the editor of the Guardian, hate Tom Watson, the most outspoken politician on it.

40:56 And yeah, you know, what can you do about them? So they would be, those sort of people would say, ah, it was the Guardian that closed the News of the World. Well, it really wasn’t. It was their boss, Rupert Murdoch. But you know, Tennyson has that great line, I’d be a fool to reason with a fool, and I’m not interested in engaging in debate with the bad guys in Fleet Street.

41:19 They have spent years bringing shame on the profession of all of us. Most journalists are decent, honest people who really want to tell the truth about the world to people, and they may fail, but that’s what they’re trying to do. And there’s just this small minority of bullies and bad guys who’ve got themselves into powerful positions on some newspapers, and they are remorseless, merciless and unreformed. From the Leveson Commission, did you ever see Murdoch having to testify?

41:45 Did you? Yes. So Murdoch popped up twice, once at the select committee about two weeks after we’d done the Milly Dowler story in July 2011, and again at Leveson, where he gave evidence on oath. When he was in front of the select committee, there was some quite good questioning, but those committees are famous for not being particularly good at interrogating people, because these are politicians. At Leveson he was up against this very clever and articulate barrister called Robert Jay, who’s now become a High Court judge, and he was sweating.

42:17 He was in trouble. I think that Robert Jay would agree that at the end of the day he didn’t finally break him, but he had him up against the wall. I remember watching that and it felt like he was really trying, but sometimes it felt like he wasn’t going for the knockout blow. That’s just the only recollection I have. Robert Jay.

42:33 Yeah, but maybe it’s because Rupert was kind of playing this, you know, kind of this senility play, or kind of this, well, there’s that, but also the nature of a public inquiry is slightly odd, that because I gave evidence there twice, that Robert Jay can push you pretty hard, but he hasn’t got the freedom of movement that he would if he was cross-examining in a criminal court. Yeah, he’s got to be a little bit courteous. He’s acting for the inquiry, he’s not acting for the opposition, so there’s a slight compromise on the extent of the aggression that he’s allowed to deploy, but he definitely had Murdoch in trouble.

43:05 I can’t remember all the detail, to tell you the truth, but I can remember writing about it. And do you listen to Bob Dylan? Uh, yes, sometimes. You know, he had, ages ago, mid-’60s, had this song about even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked, and later when he sang it after the Watergate scandal, everybody cheered. But I use that at the end of the story: even the president of News Corp sometimes may have to stand naked.

43:26 What was it like being in the room with him and watching him testify? Did he make eye contact with you? No. So I was sitting there in this select committee room when he and James Murdoch came in, and the first thing that struck me was how ordinary he is. He’s little, with a little crumpled suit and little bald head and little glasses, and you think, you know, he’s a big guy because he’s a media mogul, because he’s rich, because he’s got power, but physically he was rather small and unimpressive.

43:51 And then, as you’ve mentioned, he was sitting there doing this, I can’t quite remember who I am thing, which I am convinced was a stunt. I’ve ended up talking to quite a lot of people who’ve worked with him, and they say he’s notorious for being scary. If you are his lawyer or his PR person and you’re trying to brief him for a press conference or an appearance in front of a US Senate committee, you’re worried, because this guy’s going to go maverick on you.

44:16 He’s not going to stick to the script, so he’s not as gaga as he was coming across as. And I think they told him, if you find yourself in a corner and you’re worried that you might say something that blows it, just go gaga for a moment, and he was drumming his fingers. I can’t really remember what I said to Tony Blair. No, sorry, can’t remember. So there was a lot of that.

44:35 Okay, so on the whole, do you think that could have gone the other way? Do you think if he had been in a weird mood, in the mood he’s in sometimes when he tweets, that he might have just, that he might have said hold on a second, blah blah blah? Exactly. The tweets where he blows it are exactly examples of what those advisers are talking about, that he suddenly goes maverick and says terrible things. Can you imagine if that would have happened at the inquiry?

44:55 Would they, it would have been stunning. But I mean, they spent days and days with him rehearsing before the select committee and the inquiry, you know, and somebody pretending to be the inquisitor asking questions, how are you going to deal with this, how you going to deal with that, and if you forget the answer, go gaga. So, uh, what I’m trying, you asked me how what it was like sitting there. It was curiously unimpressive, and then it was really annoying that you remember at the select committee there was this idiot who stood up and walked down the side in front of me over towards Murdoch, who’s sitting a few chairs in front of me, and tried to slap him in the face with a plate full of shaving foam or something, and in the moment when he did that I could see him walking towards Murdoch, because he had to come in front of me to get to him, and I, in spite of all the efforts I’d made to expose what Murdoch’s people were up to, blurted out a warning instinctively, and I, that then becomes important because this is an old man.

45:53 He was 80 or 81, I think, at that time. This is a young guy slapping something into his face, and it isn’t fair. Doesn’t matter if you’re angry with Murdoch, you don’t do that. And it was a disaster. This guy with the shaving foam was an idiot and an egomaniac, and the result was first of all it stopped the inquiry.

46:10 There was some quite good questioning that was building up pressure on him. All that pressure was lost, and then beyond that, rightly, public sympathy went his way, towards the old man who’s just been assaulted, plus the tabloid newspapers who were going to have to report this session, then had a lovely story to report which didn’t involve their admitting any of the facts that were being exposed, because they did the story about how Murdoch’s then wife jumped up and kind of attacked the attacker. Did that scare you when Wendy took a swing at him?

46:38 No, it’s all happening too quickly. That last, like a total of two seconds. What? No, but it, it was really stupid. Okay, and it took away attention and it gave them an excuse not, Ru the pressure, everything.

46:49 And we were all chucked out of the room. We weren’t even, but when it resumed we were in the next room watching on a screen. You didn’t, you couldn’t even see the man giving his evidence. But there we are. Anyway, before that it was really interesting, and James Murdoch got himself into a terrible twist in the detail of what he had hadn’t done, and so ultimately they couldn’t purchase BSkyB.

47:06 James was all teed up to kind of take that and ride it off and really be the successor with that deal to Rupert. That didn’t happen. He didn’t come away looking great, not horrible, but it didn’t kill his career. What was the aftermath of it? How do you look back on what happened there over the six months afterwards?

47:23 Well, hang on, there’s two different chapters here, because first of all, you know, George Clooney is trying to direct a film about this. I just heard that today. Okay, so one of the reasons for that is you’ve got a wonderful narrative. I sometimes say it’s a bit like the hobbits. These little guys, say there, the little reporter and the little lawyers and the little MPs, and we’re going to go for the big dragon, and there’s no way we’re going to win, but holy moly, we do.

47:45 And in the point in that month we’re talking about, when there’s a sort of a temporary victory, there is this extraordinary coincidence that we’ve been muddling along here trying to expose the phone hacking scandal in the background. Murdoch’s trying to buy BSkyB, and understand, this was the biggest cash deal on the planet that year. This was the biggest deal he’d ever tried to pull off in his entire career, and understand, if he’d got it, the point was to have this enormous amount of cash flowing his way each year so that he could borrow even more money and take over either Time Warner or Disney and finally become the biggest media company in the world.

48:21 This was a big, big thing, and this little hacking story that’s an irritation on the side is suddenly coming together at exactly the same time. So the government, with their back channel from the minister has finally got to the point of saying, okay, let’s give him the green light, let’s let him have BSkyB, and they say, we’ll wait one more week for a bit more public reaction, and then we’ll give you the green light. And in that week the Milly Dowler story came out, and that’s what makes it such an extraordinary story.

48:49 The coincidence. So there you have this, this, this kind of chaos suddenly in high places, and you know all the politicians who’d been so fond of him are suddenly going on the radio and saying oh I never liked the man at all, and everything’s changed. I’ve said before that it was kind of like if you’re in the classroom and the children take over and they’re all dancing on the desks and the teachers disappearing down the road. So that’s chapter one, and then chapter two, things go back to normal.

49:15 So you’ve just mentioned James Murdoch, who endured a great deal of criticism, in fact disgrace, left the UK, went back to New York. New York was in a kind of nothing kind of role. Somebody there said to me, he calls meetings, people go to the meetings because of his surname. He’s got no power, but after a couple of years Murdoch breaks up the company and gives a great chunk of it to James, so he’s back with his power in the UK. We have Rebekah Brooks, who was his chief executive, charged with quite a lot of different crimes.

49:52 She’s put on trial along with many other people, and at the end of it the jury say not guilty, and I understood that once she had been found not guilty she would go back to work in some way, but I hadn’t anticipated what she actually would do, which was to persuade Murdoch to give her back her old job as the chief executive of the UK company. She’s entitled to it. She’s, she’s, the jury acquitted her, but it, it’s just hugely symbolic of everything going back to the way it was.

50:22 I was surprised when that happened. Yeah, it, it, it was provocative. I, I thought that Murdoch would persuade one of his mates, who’s a captain of industry somewhere, to hire her, but to actually put her back, not only in his own empire, but right back in the same place. It was a screw you. Is that him showing his passive power again in a way?

50:41 It’s, it’s showing his complete indifference, or a bit more than that. I mean, I think it was two fingers thrown up at the Establishment, which had betrayed him or rejected him, and a great, a great way to show future leaders that he rolled through that and went ahead and put her back anyways, regardless of how it looked. Yes. And then it’s a big problem for David Cameron, because at the time when the whole scandal blew up, up until that point Cameron had made it his business to be very, very close to the Murdoch empire, to Rupert Murdoch himself, to James Murdoch and to Rebekah Brooks, and when the scandal blew he couldn’t possibly maintain that alliance, and so he abandoned them, and he stood up in the House of Commons and said, for example, I think Rebekah Brooks should resign, and he set up the Leveson Inquiry, and so he joined the enemies of the Murdoch crew, and he must have been horrified to see them all creeping back around the edge and coming back into power.

51:36 And so I don’t actually know the detail of this, but clearly he has had to compromise with them. There are these meetings going on now, which we’ve just found out about, between him and his people and Murdoch, and I would assume that the social contact with Rebekah Brooks has resumed. You know, they live in the same part of the world in Oxfordshire. So, uh, he did, he did a, this is maybe rather a British subject to talk about, but there is a particular British politician, a Tory called John Whittingdale, who’s a decent man, I like him, but he’s very famously a big fan of Rupert Murdoch and of BSkyB.

52:12 Well, it was interesting that after the election in this country in May of this year, when David Cameron had to appoint somebody to be in charge of the media, he took this man John Whittingdale and gave him the job. Right, so I think that was a gesture to Rupert Murdoch, do come on, let’s be friends, look, look, John’s in charge, come on, you know he likes you, come on, come around for supper. So Cameron can’t afford to fight the guy anymore. You know that there’s no prime minister been elected since 1979 in this country without Rupert Murdoch’s support.

52:41 That doesn’t actually prove that they were elected because of Rupert Murdoch, but no politician wants to take the risk. You almost interviewed Rupert Murdoch. He agreed briefly to have you speak to him. What were you going to ask him, or what did you want to ask him? Oh well, this is deep waters.

52:56 So this was in the last month or two of that big trial, uh, at the Old Bailey, Rebekah Brooks and the others, and I had made contact with some of the Murdoch people in New York, and I was saying to them, look, you must be very worried about the PR strategy once this trial ends, and you’ll be thinking about this and thinking about that, but have you thought of this? Why doesn’t Rupert come out with his defence on the Guardian website? I’ll fly over, I’ll do a 10-minute interview with him, and it would be much more exciting, and you’ll break new ground if you do that, and I said, look, don’t be worried that I’m going to ask him embarrassing questions, because I can’t do that, because he’s got such an easy get out, which we’ve already seen him deploy.

53:37 If I ask him anything about phone hacking or crime, he says I don’t know, I was too far up the tree to know what was going on on the ground, so he’s safe, isn’t he? So they took that message back, and the message came back from them to me. He says yes, but the kind of consigliere around the Godfather was saying no, don’t do this thing, so it never actually happened. This thing is that I don’t know whether I’ve said this publicly, but actually I was up to, I had a secret agenda which was that, not surprisingly, by that time Murdoch had divorced his then wife or had separated from his then wife Wendy and stories had appeared in the British press, and also Vanity Fair, to the effect that he believed that his then wife Wendy had had an affair with Tony Blair.

54:24 I first heard that rumour. I just thought that’s ridiculous, but then there, there the Mail on Sunday published two very detailed stories, or quite detailed stories, and Vanity Fair published an extraordinary email which the former wife Wendy had written about Tony Blair and the beauty of his legs. Yeah. So if that’s right, Rupert Murdoch has fallen out with Tony Blair. I’m not interested in anybody’s sex life.

54:49 I don’t think we should be writing about each other’s sex life. But supposing I could get into Rupert’s room and do this 10-minute video, and then the video comes off. Okay, that’s great fun. That’s a great piece of drama. It’s the Hobbit in the Dragon’s Cave.

55:03 That’s absolutely wonderful in itself as a piece of journalism. Okay, Rupert, let’s just talk, tell me about your political dealings over 20 years with our prime minister. What was really going on in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? What did he say to you when he was telling the public he hadn’t made up his mind about invading? Was he already committed?

55:21 What really went on over this, over that, over Gordon Brown? What messages did you carry from the White House? There’s the story. So, and in the background, one of the things that was being said by reporters in London was that the two big stories which had appeared in the Mail on Sunday about the alleged affair with Blair had been leaked with Rupert’s permission, that he was that angry with Blair that he wanted the story out to damage him. So I was thinking, well, if he’s interested in damaging him, there must be some political stories, so you thought you might be able to get in that way.

55:53 Once I’m in the room, I can start to have that conversation off camera. Yeah, yeah, right, and just start it. Do you believe there was an affair? I, I mean, I just don’t know. And furthermore, honestly, I just think we should get out of other people’s bedrooms, unless there’s a crime being committed, in which case we should probably call the cops.

56:09 What, you know, the whole, it’s a particularly ugly British disease, this, this constantly peeking through keyholes to see who’s shagging who or what they’re doing when they, it’s horrible, but it sells papers, you know. And they say, well, it’s in the public interest that we disclose that so-and-so is having a bunk with a prostitute, or wears stockings when he goes home to bed. It isn’t in the public interest. It’s in the commercial interest of newspaper owners.

56:33 That’s all. Can you comment on that being a British phenomenon in your opinion? Why? Because the Americans come over here and they don’t understand it, but it’s a very British thing, and you have a unique look into why. So I’m, I’m curious.

56:46 Well, so part of it is, is quite a boring thing. It’s to do with newspaper circulations, which is that you have a very very dense population in this country, got 60 million people crammed into this small area, and ever since the Industrial Revolution you’ve been able to print newspapers, put them on a train in London and Glasgow and reach everybody by 5:00 the next morning. Well, you compare that to the newspaper market in the United States. You put a train, a newspaper, on a train at 10 o’clock in the evening, New York, head west, by 5:00 in the morning you’re in the middle of nowhere.

57:16 So we develop this incredibly vibrant national newspaper market, a dozen, maybe as many as 16 newspapers competing with each other trying to get all these readers. Where, in the US, for example, you get city newspapers, one or two, maximum three, in the case of New York. Most cities have two, and it’s a very gentle sort of competition. One goes up market, one goes down market. Here, these, you develop newspapers which will do anything to grab a reader.

57:41 They’re much more ruthless, much more invasive, and therefore the sex becomes something that they can do to survive in that market and to thrive. And the phone hacking, or no, hang on, on, on the phone. Yeah, the voicemail hacking is a shortcut to get those stories, but what’s weird is that there might be something in British culture which is peculiar in wanting to know about each other’s sex lives. That’s a very hard thing to analyse, but I’ve certainly heard wise, clever anthropologists suggest there’s something repressed about the Brits when it comes to sex.

58:12 In the north, on an island, separated, maybe, because I see. Well, this, we’re going off a bit, but I often think that national culture has an awful lot to do with climate. So you go to Australia, for example, people grow up running around on beaches wearing almost nothing, and those, and, and it’s not a cliché. I think this is the reality of Australians. I love being in Australia.

58:30 They’re very, very open. They are people who love having a good time, and they communicate with each other, whereas we grow up spending half the year huddled inside coats, and we go into our own little house and we lock the door and we light the fire, so we’re much more separated from each other. So at the very least that must mean we know a little bit less about each other, so maybe that means we’re a little bit more intrigued about each other. There’s more that we don’t know, so there’s more that we’d like to find out, and the next second we’re peeping through a keyhole to see who’s shagging who.

58:57 I think you’re on to something. Now, how does this Hobbit story end? You went into the cave, you fought with the dragon, what’s the what, how does the story end? What happened? I’m not sure what you’re asking me.

59:10 Where is, I mean, as you tell kind of the end of the story, Rupert went up, you know, later Murdoch went to New York. Now he’s kind of back. You know, is there any conclusion, or how does the story end? That nothing eventually changed? No, I think very little has changed.

59:26 So I mentioned before, I think it’s true to say that our national newspapers have stopped committing and commissioning criminal activity. I wouldn’t rely on them to keep that position for terribly long, but at the moment I think they have. But beyond that, I mean, there, so Murdoch hasn’t lost any of his power. He did lose his prestige. There was a period of time there where people didn’t want to be seen with him.

59:56 That’s clearly changing, so there’s a symbolic moment waiting to occur, which may happen in the summer next year, 2016, which is the revival of News Corp’s summer party in London. In the past years, before this all blew up, this was an occasion for the power elite to come and kneel before Rupert, to kiss his finger, to queue up to speak to him, to seek his favour. And that stopped because he lost his prestige. People wouldn’t come to the party. I think he’ll be tempted to think he’s back enough to invite people and they’ll come.

1:00:34 So then the prestige will be back as well as the power. Beyond that I can’t think of any significant way it’s changed. I mean, so when we had a general election in the UK in May of this year, you saw some of the Murdoch newspapers and others ganging up to engage in a political project to persuade their readers not to vote Labour, not to vote for Ed Miliband, and that involved the familiar diet of falsehood, distortion and spite raining down on Ed Miliband, so that instead of the rational debate which could well have led the electorate to say, actually, we don’t want Miliband.

1:01:10 There’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on, which is about newspapers breaking the boundaries of proper activity. It isn’t okay to use falsehood and distortion as a way of pursuing an argument, but they’re doing it as much as ever. They’ve crept back into people’s bedrooms. So there was, um, a member of the House of Lords whose name I’m afraid I’ve forgotten, who was turned over on video by one of the Sunday papers, uh, because he was taking, pro, taking cocaine with two prostitutes and having sex with him.

1:01:40 You remember this story? There was a terribly embarrassing picture of him sitting there with one of the women’s bras around his neck, and they say, oh, it’s public interest, because he’s taking cocaine, he’s committing a crime, and it’s true that all of our codes of conduct, there are different versions of it, they all agree that if somebody’s committing crime, then there’s a public interest in disclosing it. But if they really wanted to do that, they would expose the fact that he was snorting cocaine.

1:02:07 They wouldn’t then also expose the fact that he was having sex, nor would they run the picture of him with a bra around his naked chest. It’s sleazy paper. So I’m just, they’ve crept back, right, to most of their bad old ways, even if they haven’t gone back to committing crimes. Is there the crunch in journalism caused by the internet, caused by independent media? Can you speak on how this rolls up into this entire effect of people of less, less news staff, less time to check stories?

1:02:37 Yeah, because you have some thoughts on that and I want to hear them. So this was actually how I ended up doing the phone hacking story. So about seven years ago I published a book called Flat Earth News, which was an attempt to explain or describe the scale and origin of falsehood and distortion and propaganda in news organisations, and the core of what I was trying to say is that if you reduce the resources which are available in a newsroom, you prevent reporters, journalists, being able to do the essentials of their job, so they’re not able to go out and meet people and find stories.

1:03:18 They’re not able to check facts. They start to engage in a word that somebody else devised, and I maybe I popularised it: churnalism, not journalism, where the journalist sits chained to a keyboard recycling press releases, wire copy from Reuters or AP, that’s often also built on a press release, and that, that journalism recycling unchecked secondhand material means that you’re structurally likely to end up publishing falsehood, distortion and propaganda. So if the politician stands up and says there are weapons of mass destruction all over such and such a country, you recycle that as a bunch of quotes, and you haven’t got any chance at all of checking it, or at a much smaller level, the PR person puts out some press release just to promote a product, and they attach a celebrity to it, and the celebrity says this is, this product is a lot of fun, and that kind of b******t flows into print.

1:04:14 There’s a whole spectrum of activity in which we are being manipulated by that world of PR, which is, now, you know, there was an invisible moment in this country and lots of other developed countries, but in this country where news organisations went into decline, primarily because of the internet buggering up our business model, the number of journalists is coming down, but the number of PR people employed is going up, and in this invisible moment there are now more flacks than hacks, and they are generating the news, or what we laughingly call news that journalists reproduce. That’s scary. And we did a big study for this book, Flat Earth News.

1:04:51 I got some academics to do a massive study of newspaper stories to establish the percentage of what we call news which was actually being originally, by, by being put out by the PR industry for corporations, governments, whatever, and it was huge. It was up in the 60 and 70%, and that’s 10 years ago nearly, but that has happened. It was partly to do with big profit-seeking corporations taking over news organisations, ransacking the newsrooms for profit, so less staff, more output, but the internet has caused huge damage to news organisations.

1:05:24 So it’s taking away our readers. Every, I mean, across the developed world the circulation of printed papers is falling, so the readers are going on to free news sources online, plus the internet takes away our advertisers, and advertising is now fragmented across all these different websites, and we grab as much as we can for the printed paper, but all news organisations are now in huge financial trouble. And so where do we go from here? 10 years from now, it just gets worse.

1:05:54 Into where? So the first, first thing to notice is that that matters, because journalists have a very bad reputation because of the bad behaviour of the minority. But, uh, and so, so you could say, let’s say you take a small town, and you say to the people in this town, hey, the local newspaper is closing, and also the best pub in the town is closing. So which, which one is going to upset people? Screw the local newspaper, the journalists, they’re all liars.

1:06:19 They make things up, they’re always inventing quotes, you can’t believe a thing. You, okay, I, what I’m trying to convey is that if we lose our news organisations, it really matters. It isn’t just about unsavoury hacks losing their jobs. It’s about whether or not we can find out what’s going on in the world. It really matters, and the more, and the weaker the news organisations become, the more we pump out falsehood and distortion and propaganda, the more trouble we get into.

1:06:44 And notice that this is happening at a time when the list of really serious global problems is longer than it has been in my lifetime. So when I was a child, if you’d said to people in Western Europe, think of a problem that threatens our collective survival, physical survival, let’s say cold war nuclear exchange of weapons, they wouldn’t have been able to come up with much else. But now you have climate change right up the top of the list. You have poverty and inequality on a scale which was unimaginable in the developed world when I was a child, but but but is now a threat to the well-being, mental and physical, of millions of people in the developed world, and in the underdeveloped, got so much worse.

1:07:26 And then you throw in terrorism and the Middle East, and then I think Chinese expansionism, Russian expansionism. You look at all those problems, and then you say, how are we going to solve them? It, it’s a really a significant obstacle to finding solutions to those problems if you have news organisations that are pumping out falsehood and distortion. The whole of public debate becomes a mess, and it is a mess. You look how long it’s taken us to even start really to engage with climate change.

1:07:55 Look at the chaos around how to deal with ISIS. I don’t think it’s a long time since I’ve seen a public debate so ragged, so misinformed, so chaotic, so emotional, so hopeless. Who have you heard, a single person who’s got a decent strategy for dealing with ISIS? I’ve heard a few intelligence and military people privately, but in the public debate it’s terrible. It’s garbage, and our failure is part of that.

1:08:19 So, and in a small way, that the breaking of our business model also invites corrupt methods of getting news, because if you haven’t got the time to do your job properly and you can hire a private investigator who can in some way steal the information, that’s pretty cool and helpful, right? That’s a shortcut, just like a churn. Yeah, but as I said right at the beginning, that’s actually quite a small thing. isn’t terribly interesting that they were hacking voicemail.

1:08:46 It’s, it’s, that’s because it takes you into the world of power and the way in which power is still genuflecting to these news organisations. So then I think you said, where are we going to be in 10 years’ time? The answer is that nobody knows. None of us have a solution. So Rupert Murdoch has put these paywalls around his websites like Wall Street Journal.

1:09:06 Or yes, but you have to distinguish. If you put a. So Murdoch’s paywall is impenetrable. You cannot see what his newspapers are trying to sell you unless you subscribe, or the printed edition. Now that’s incredibly bad piece of marketing, to say the only people who will know what goods I am selling are the shrinking number of people who are out there buying this hard copy newspaper.

1:09:30 And of course what’s happened is that the number of people who are looking at his website crashed down when he put those paywalls up, and when the number of visitors to the website crashes, the advertisers crash. So in the case of the son, he’s had to change the paywall arrangement. I mean, that’s a disastrous way of doing it, and I would think he’s going to have to the Wall Street Journal is a little bit different, because what they’re selling to some extent is specialist.

1:09:53 It’s the specialist financial news. The Financial Times in the same way, they’ve been able to put up an impenetrable paywall, and people will. It’s big corporations and wealthy guys, but it’s the only place they can get the news. But it, that doesn’t apply to most newspapers. We, we’re telling people about plane crashes and train crashes that they can read for free on other websites.

1:10:13 So the Murdoch solution doesn’t seem to work. Then you have what we think of as the New York Times solution, which is a porous paywall. So that says, okay, in any given month you can read, let’s say, 12 stories on our website. Once you’ve hit the 12, we know your IP address, and we’re going to send you a message saying no more unless you pay. I hit it all the time.

1:10:31 Okay, but that’s much cleverer, because at least you can come into the shop and see what it is I’m trying to sell you, and then you might like it and you decide to buy. The Murdoch thing says you can’t come in the shop, you’re just going to have to buy. Are you saying he’s not a clever businessman? He isn’t a clever businessman. He’s a ruthless businessman.

1:10:45 Okay. It’s his ruthlessness that’s made him rich. He made dreadful decisions. He’s never got his head around the internet. You know, the whole business of buying MySpace just as it’s becoming pointless, Facebook’s taking over.

1:10:54 He, I mean, that sort of paywall is idiotic, isn’t it? Who opens the shop and says you can’t come in but buy anyway? Ain’t going to happen. So the New York model is much cleverer because it’s porous, plus they’ve created this bundle. So they have a huge subscriber section for their Sunday newspaper, so they’re saying if you want the Sunday newspaper, you can also be bundled in with a deal which gets you access to the internet.

1:11:19 So it’s like a loss leader thing. That’s a very cheap deal they’re offering people, and it gets them into the habit of subscribing. It’s the one ray of hope in online journalism right now is the New York Times model. Right, we are seeing some traction there. Yes, but it isn’t clear whether the porous paywall is what’s succeeding or the bundling, because not everybody’s going to be able to do the bundling thing.

1:11:39 Okay, so then at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got the Guardian, so if you go back, whatever it would be, 10 or 15 years, we were rather a small newspaper, distributing something like 400,000 copies a day in the United Kingdom. We have an open website, it’s free, we’re giving it away. So I was in the newsroom today, and they now have a screen up over the news desk which is constantly clicking over, telling you how many people have clicked on the Guardian’s website today since midnight.

1:12:07 Okay, so we were selling 400,000 copies. I was there about 10:00 this morning and it was already past 8 million. Right, 8 million clicks on the website. Yeah, we have 8 million unique users already hitting that website by 10 in the morning since midnight. Okay, UK time.

1:12:21 20 times your publish. It’s just staggering and that’ll go on all day. So in journalistic terms this is a feast. This is incredible. So we were national now, we’re global.

1:12:32 We had 400,000, now it’s millions and millions. And like, I wrote a story a few months ago about the Canadian Prime Minister. You published that in the UK newspaper, nobody gives a damn. That went wild in Canada. I mean, tens of thousands of people sharing it, and so from a journalistic point of view it could not be more exciting, but where are we getting the money from?

1:12:52 We’re trying to earn the money around the edge, so we do sponsored blogs. I think we still do one where if people are jogging they go online and they talk about their jogging, and Nike, or somebody, gives us some money to, to run it, and that’s okay, they’re not interfering at all with what’s written. We’re happy to have the money. So there’s that kind of model. We’ve, we’ve, we’re quite interested in the romantic world, because you may know that Guardian readers are the most sexually attractive.

1:13:16 Did you know that? I did not know that. What other people do? So Guardian Soulmates. We run, you see, which is where people come in order to try to, to create romantic relationships with Guardian readers, for the aforesaid, mentioned reason, and they pay whatever it is, 25 quid a month, to meet each other, so that’s generating quite a lot of money.

1:13:34 You need to spread the word. You’re quite a businessman for a journalist. I guess every journalist has to be a businessman these days, because the market’s changing. Well, actually I think the opposite. I think money is none of our business.

1:13:45 Okay. So there should be, and still is, a Chinese wall between the commercial people and the journalistic ones, and it just so happens that we’re having a great time, and they’ve got this terrible headache, and I mean, it comes across the wall, the way that it comes across the wall is that the commercial people are saying, you’re going to have to cut, we can’t employ this many reporters, and if we’ve got this number of reporters they can’t spend this much money. So, and the big picture here is, you say, where are we going to be in 10 years’ time?

1:14:12 Nobody knows, and, uh, I don’t, I mean, I really don’t know how we’re going to survive. You can see some specialists, like the FT, Financial Times, they’re going to survive because they’re not selling news, they’re selling something more specialist, for the mainstream news organisation. It’s very scary, and like I’ve already said, it isn’t just about journalists losing their jobs, it’s about whether we can carry on telling the truth. And there’s a sort of naive, I would say crazy, idea that it doesn’t matter if mainstream news collapses, because citizen journalism will come galloping in and do the job instead.

1:14:45 This is silly. It’s like saying the National Health Service can collapse, doesn’t matter, we’ll have citizen doctors who will come in and operate on your brain and mend your broken leg. Journalism needs skills and resources and accountability. You look at the citizen journalists, there are some, I would say a rather small minority who have at least enough of those three things to be doing a brilliant job, and there are some brilliant citizen journalists out there, and then there’s acres and acres and acres of garbage.

1:15:19 So, so you’re not impressed with New Media per se, which includes us. We are New Media. I just, it’s very important not to think that that can replace professional journalism. It doesn’t work. So you look at the citizen journalist who doesn’t have the resources to go out and investigate the subject he or she is writing about.

1:15:37 What happens is that they tweet or blog the nearest prejudice that they happen to be able to get hold of, right? Or if they’re not accountable, so you have fantastically vicious, untrue things being said, and these are often said anonymously. Even if they’ve got a name attached to them, they’re in some other jurisdiction. At least the press, I spent years showing up the defects of mainstream media, but at least we are accountable. At least we have resources and skills, again, which is whether or not you can get to the information and persuade people to talk instead of just inventing it.

1:16:10 So it’s, it’s very worrying, and, uh, we mustn’t fall for the idea that that’s an adequate replacement. Sometime or other, somehow or other, we have to find a way of saving the idea of a profession whose job it is to discriminate between truth and falsehood, and the fact that we’re not doing terribly well doesn’t help us to put that argument. But in principle, the point remains, you need a profession who does that. How do you stay excited about journalism when you broke a story that would define a career?

1:16:39 Most journalists would be excited that that career would have such a big story like that. How do you, how do you stay interested? Uh, well, I, I changed gear to tell you the truth. So, um, I began to feel quite burned out. So the, I, I think it was a period of seven years between working on the phone hacking and finally finishing this book and putting that out, and in the midst of that I got involved with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, which was, and all of this is kind of exhausting, and I’m getting old, so there came a point when I just said, I’ve had enough of doing heavy investigations, because those investigations are stressful while you’re doing them, because you don’t know whether you’re going to get to the end of the track, so you can spend weeks or months trying to dig out a story and you haven’t got it, so you fret.

1:17:20 Why can’t I get that person to talk? God, I can’t do this unless I’ve got that document. And then you put it out and then people start suing you and writing horrible things about you and investigating your private life, and all that kind of crap. So I had enough. So I just went, I went to see Alan Rusbridger when he was still editor, and he agreed, because I’m an old man, I could do a different sort of job.

1:17:40 So now my job is to write long, interesting features from somewhere on this particular planet. So I’ve been trying to engineer it as much as possible so that I go and do stories which are in countries where I’d like to go on holiday. So I went to Vietnam. I wrote and, and I mean, I work hard because I’m a bit driven, so I did this big piece about what had happened in Vietnam since the war. This was for the 40th anniversary, 1974, 2, was it 50th?

1:18:07 Must be 75. Anyway, I did uh, and uh, it was fascinating doing the research, but also, I, while I was there I took a week’s holiday, and in fact, doing the research was almost like a holiday because it’s so interesting. I was talking to men of my age who were Viet Cong guerrillas during the war. And I mean, this is only a silly little thing, but I was talking to this guy. He was saying he’d been at university, and he was, as a student, demonstrating in what was then Saigon against the American military presence in Vietnam, and he’d been beaten up and put in prison.

1:18:42 He’d got out and he’d gone into the jungle to join the Viet Cong, and I was saying, “W, that’s so weird because we’re the same age, and you were at university demonstrating in the streets of Saigon, which was obviously pretty violent and heavy, but actually me and my much softer world when I was at university, at the same time, almost every Saturday we were out demonstrating against the American presence in Vietnam.” And he leaned forward and he said thank you, and it was really rather touching. I mean, I hadn’t taken any of the risks that he had.

1:19:08 Anyway, I’m just trying to say, if you, what, what motivates me now is travelling and seeing the planet and writing interesting stories, and as much as possible never again writing a story that has the word Murdoch in it. Okay, what was your relationship like with WikiLeaks? You helped broker that information from the Guardian, and you said you did some work with them. And how has WikiLeaks changed over the last 10 years? That’s a complicated story.

1:19:33 So, um, that it was a very exciting story to work on. I had read a news story in the Guardian. This is June 2010, that said that the Pentagon had arrested this soldier who was then known as Bradley Manning and accused him of giving this truckload of secrets, well, this huge electronic truckload of secrets, to this guy Julian Assange from WikiLeaks. I had heard of Julian and WikiLeaks, but he was absolutely not well known then, as he is now, and my first reaction was to feel a bit irritated, because I told you I’d written that book Flat Earth News, and we talked in there about journalism recycling unchecked secondhand material.

1:20:15 I thought, why have we published this story saying they’ve arrested somebody, this, without following it up? The point is not that some poor soldier has been arrested for doing this. The point is that there’s a truckload of secrets out there somewhere, apparently in the hands of this Julian Assange guy. So this was in the middle of the phone hacking story, but it had gone quiet for various reasons, so I decided to try and track down Julian. It took three or four days.

1:20:42 I found he was in Brussels. I went to see him, and this was really exciting. Julian is a very, very clever, likable guy, and I went with our Brussels correspondent from the Guardian, Ian Traynor. The two of us sat down in a café with Julian, and Ian had to leave after a while, but I ended up talking to poor old Julian for six hours, and it was, the conversation began very simply. Is it right you’ve got all these secrets?

1:21:08 Yes. So what have you got? So he says, well, I’ve got the complete archive of every single US military operation in Afghanistan since they went in there in October 2001. Holy moly. What else?

1:21:27 Well, I’ve got the complete archive of every US military operation that they’ve conducted in Iraq since they went in there in March 2003, holy s***, what else you got? Well, there’s a huge archive of cables that have been exchanged between American embassies all over the world and the US State Department in Washington DC, and that goes back to 1966. It’s truth, and I’ve also got all the personal files of everybody in the detention facility in Guantanamo.

1:21:53 So this is, I mean, we subsequently called it the biggest leak in the history of the world. It was, I think, Ed Snowden made sense of beating it, but this was just astonishing, and he’s sitting there, and he’s very mild-mannered and cool, and he’s just saying, yeah, yeah, I’ve got all this stuff. So then we talked about what to do about it, and I had had this vague idea on the train going out to Brussels that I couldn’t just go up to him and say, I’m a greedy reporter from the mainstream, give me a story.

1:22:19 That I had to somehow help him to get across his point, and so I had thought and made notes about the idea of trying to set up an alliance between the Guardian and other newspapers who might be sympathetic, the New York Times, Le Monde, El País, and we fastened on to the idea, which he got very, very quickly, of the Guardian and the New York Times working together, because you may know that in London media law is very restrictive. We don’t really have what you should call a free press, whereas in the States the First Amendment is fantastically important. So the key thing about linking up with the New York Times was that if we, if we had the courts in London injunct us and preventing us publishing, the New York Times could go ahead, and if the courts knew that the New York Times were going to go ahead, they would be that much less likely to injunct us.

1:23:07 But that negotiation went on for about six hours. I can’t remember what your question was, but, but it was quite interesting dealing with Julian, because he’s, he’s younger than me and much more savvy about the internet and stuff. So we get to a point where we’ve agreed to do this, and we’ve agreed what order we’re going to, um, do these four packages of information. These got, we’re going to start with the Afghan war logs, and he produces a little black laptop which has got the war logs on.

1:23:31 Now this is a sort of massively fragmented archive of all sorts of disparate reports from US military units on the ground, and I say, okay, so we, we’d already agreed we couldn’t use our telephones because he was very likely to be under surveillance because of this operation that was going on. My girlfriend called me while we were talking, she said, how are you getting on? I said, it’s complete waste of time, he’s an idiot, which wasn’t true, but I, we just needed to be heard saying that.

1:23:54 So I said, okay, I’ll go back to the UK tomorrow on the first train and I’ll take this with me. He said, oh no, you don’t, you do that, you’re going to, if you get stopped by customs, they’re going to take it. Oh, so he was much more sophisticated than me. So he said, here’s what we do. Uh, I, tomorrow when you get back to the UK, I will set up a website.

1:24:14 The website will only be online for an hour or two. I will post all of this material onto that website, and you will have a password, and so he took a napkin out of one of those little silver containers in the middle of the table, and he he he did doodles around some of the letters and words on the napkin. Okay, so right, you put that in your pocket, and you go back, and, and I will tell you when it’s all up online. You use that password, you take it down on your side.

1:24:41 I take the website offline. It’s only there for an hour or two. Okay, it’s agreed, and if you get stopped by customs as you’re going back to the UK tomorrow, they’ll find a napkin in your pocket and think it’s for blowing your nose. And so that was how it was done. To just saying he was a lot more savvier than me, and that’s what you did, and that’s what we did.

1:24:56 In fact, I didn’t get stopped, and, and yes, and then he stuck it up online. I downloaded it. He took it off online, and then we started working on it. So all that was very exciting, and I think what, what made it more than merely exciting but to feel important was that it was clear that Bradley Manning, as he was then known, had leaked this material to Julian, because it was important. It contained all, all sorts of things which, as Manning put it at the time, the people of the world ought to know what is going on in Afghanistan and Iraq, what American diplomats around the world really do get up to, what’s really going on in Guantanamo.

1:25:39 So it felt like we were really doing something important. And so I went back to the Guardian. U, my editor Alan talked to, uh, the editor of the New York Times, who in turn, across a reporter, very soon Spiegel magazine became involved, so we were all working together on this first package. So it was a great thing. It got very complicated and eventually filed up.

1:26:08 Um, I don’t know, the first thing that went wrong was this. We were working in great secrecy, and just like I lied to my girlfriend when she called me up while we were talking in that café in Brussels, we, the little group, Julian and representatives of the three newspapers, disappeared into a room up the top of the Guardian building, and we came up with a false cover story as to what we were doing in there. So we were lying to our colleagues and to our friends and to our family.

1:26:35 Nobody could know what we were doing, and that was primarily because of the risk of the Americans going to court in London and injuncting us, which is a very serious risk, and in a secondary sort of way it was secret because, and Julian understood this, news organisations are commercial, they’re investing tens of thousands of pounds in reporter time and checking and in legal advice, and the payoff is that we get to publish. So after about five weeks we’d got to the point where we were, all three news organisations and WikiLeaks would all publish this material simultaneously at 10:00 on Sunday evening, UK time. Cool, everything’s good.

1:27:13 And I was sitting at home on the Saturday morning, and I had a phone call from a guy I know who’s a reporter on Channel 4 News in London, and he said, guess who I’m with? So I said, I don’t know, I don’t feel like doing guessing games. Who are you with? I’m with Julian Assange. What?

1:27:29 Why? And he said, and, uh, he’s given me the Afghan war logs, and he’s told me the stories that you found in there, and he’s a bit worried that when you find out about that it might rock the boat, and I cannot believe what I’m being told. So he said, Julian’s in the room with you? Yes. Could you ask him to speak to me?

1:27:50 So Julian comes on the line. Have you really done this? Yes. Julian, have you given it to anybody else? Yes.

1:27:58 Who? Al Jazeera and CNN. What? He says, I’ve told them to wait until you publish tomorrow evening. Why would you trust them?

1:28:06 He says, don’t worry, you can trust them. I am worried, and I can remember saying to him exact words, and I, he, I said, why have you done this? And he said it was always part of our agreement that I would do this. Now that was scary, because if he said that to you, it would make sense. You don’t know.

1:28:24 I’m the guy who sat with him in the cafe for six hours. I know very well this was not part of our agreement, and indeed everybody else who’s been involved in this operation knows that’s not part of the agreement. We’ve all been talking about what it is we’re doing. It’s scary that he can tell me that and expect me to believe it. There’s something very wrong here, and I said, well, it would have been, this is exact words, it would have been helpful and reassuring if you had talked to us before you did this.

1:28:49 And the conversation ended, and I called David Leigh from the Guardian, who was really running the research end of the thing, and I said, there’s been a leak, and we all suspected each other. The three news organisations were the ones who were going to, if anybody was going to stab anybody in the back, that was, and he said, what, Julian Assange? What? It was unbelievable, because it wasn’t just the threat to the commercial need, which all of us had and which he understood, we’re publishing this thing, but the threat to the secrecy.

1:29:23 Supposing somebody from CNN decides to talk to the American embassy in London and say, that’s it, we, we, we don’t publish, even if the New York Times can. And I think there was a personal level to it as well. I mean, I, I really like, I think I still in some ways like Julian. I trusted him, and it was stunning that he would do this. Really, what happened?

1:29:47 Ego moment, a psychopathic moment. What I, I just, I think he’s a very clever guy. He’s used to being the cleverest person in the room. He’s not used to listening to other people. He’s used to getting his own way, and it’s, he wanted more publicity, so he did it.

1:30:03 And um, what actually happened was that we subsequently were told Channel 4, so the three news organisations to whom he’d given this stuff had promised him they wouldn’t jump the gun, they would wait for us, but what actually happened was that Channel 4 went to the ITV network of which they’re part and said, can we have a news bulletin, because they don’t have a bulletin on a Saturday, and the network said, Julian who? Wiki what? Nah, forget it. That’s, that was all that stopped us being scooped and then in the event we went out on the Sunday evening, and then we blew it, because you cannot take on the intelligence agencies and the lawyers of the most powerful nation on earth unless you can trust each other, and he had just behaved in a silly and untrustworthy way, so we should have said, you’re out, enough, we can’t work with you, but we didn’t, because we were greedy.

1:30:54 We wanted the other packages. We were already working on the second one about Iraq. So instead all that happened was that, because I had to go back to the hacking story, and I had been the initial point of contact with him, and he had been down to stay in my house, we were getting on very well. I broke off contact, to, as we put it in internal discussions, to register our disapproval, and it wasn’t nearly enough because what then happened was more of a similar kind of chaos, where the, the initial agreement that those three news organisations, Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, would handle these packages disintegrated as other people were being brought in.

1:31:32 More and more disputes emerged. There was a chaotic point where Julian was so angry with the Guardian that he walked into the office with a lawyer and tried to persuade the editor that he owned the material that the Guardian were threatening to publish, which the American government would not have agreed with. And Alan Rusbridger, who’s much more diplomatic, I think, negotiated his way through it, but it just became chaotic, and then it got even worse, because so this is all going on.

1:32:03 We started publishing end of July 2010. August the 21st, 2010, the story broke that two women in Sweden had accused him of sexually assaulting them, and I’m back on the phone hacking story. That’s not my problem as to how to handle it. A few months later, by which time that had become a big, big tale, uh, I’m working on the phone hacking story. It’s early December, somebody I knew a little bit got in touch and says, I have just obtained a file of documents collected by the Swedish police dealing with the two women.

1:32:43 Would you like it? All right, what does it say? I don’t know, and he said, I don’t know, it’s in Swedish. So I got it translated and spoke to the editor and wrote a story about it, and the story was quite interesting, because by this time Julian was saying, this is all, and Julian’s supporters were saying this is all a conspiracy by the Americans. And one of the things that was quite striking was that the file contained a lengthy transcript of Julian’s interview with the Swedish police in Stockholm, and never once did he say to them, look, this is all a put-up job by the Americans.

1:33:21 And his supporters were insisting that this was the case. He certainly wasn’t denying it. From memory, he had put out a tweet or two or a public comment or two on August the 21st to encourage that, but he hadn’t himself even begun to claim it to the police. That seemed quite significant. And the other thing was that the women’s statements were in there, and there were some people out there on the internet who were saying, Julian Assange is being attacked by the Swedish police because he had sex with a woman without a condom.

1:33:49 And it was clear that the allegation, I, I’m not, I have no idea whether the allegations are true, but the allegation was not you had sex without a condom. It was you had sex without consent. And so we published this story, and they put the Guardian in a difficult position, because they were still trying to preserve the relationship with Julian. This was during the period when the relationship was disintegrating, and there was all sorts of conflict, and so the paper went out of their way to make the story as mild as possible, so as not to aggravate Julian.

1:34:25 So they waited for four days while his then London lawyer, Mark Stevens, consulted with him and came back with hundreds of words of rebuttal from Julian, and they removed hundreds of words from the original story and put in Julian’s stuff, even though in the office they thought some of that was false, so that the story was balanced in a way that I don’t particularly like. I don’t think you should balance. Is that even an appropriate journalism to do that?

1:34:52 Well, it’s that balance rule is very, very common in mainstream journalism. It was a very difficult situation. The Guardian, to their credit, were trying to publish it. Most newspapers wouldn’t have done, for fear of alienating, but I think they were out of their way to do it in a way that was least likely to irritate him. And when it went into the paper, I mean, it was quite a scoop to have this police stuff on such a big story, but it was put on page four, not on the front, and on the website, there was a big headline about, I think, Julian had come out of, he temporarily been in custody, and he was giving some press conference saying that the CIA were trying to kill him, and that was the headline then, underneath it.

1:35:29 So, oh, this is what the Swedish police say. But it was extraordinary, the reaction to that, because Assange’s supporters went berserk, attacking the Guardian for daring to reproduce any of this stuff, and it, it was just, I mean, it’s an example of the kind of madness that goes on on the internet, is that people are not interested in facts. They start with their prejudice, they express it aggressively, anonymously, and regardless of fact. So my position on this has always been, I have no idea whether Julian has committed a crime.

1:36:00 I wouldn’t dare to begin to say, and the people who are out there saying that those two women are liars or CIA agents or feminists, which they use as an insult, are completely out of order. They have no right to accuse those women of being liars any more than anybody has the right to accuse Julian Assange of being guilty. They don’t know what went on in those bedrooms. Back off. But what, what I think is clear, in many different ways, is that there is no evidence to support the idea that the Americans created that situation in Sweden, a honey trap, or that once it had happened they exploited it to try and get hold of Julian Assange.

1:36:42 I’ve never seen any evidence to support that. I’ve seen endless s*** from crazy tweeters. And what I have also seen, sadly, is some people who want to support Julian putting out evidence which is definitely false to try to stand that theory up. So if the Americans are behind it, I’ve never ever seen any reason to believe that. What do you, sorry, what do you make of Julian in the last three years, you know, watching him at the embassy in London and you know his health degrade, and watching WikiLeaks?

1:37:11 I don’t know, is it becoming less relevant? Well, is relevant? Well, it’s a hell of a mess. Uh, it’s a shame, because I’ve said before I can’t imagine anybody else could have done what Julian did in creating WikiLeaks. It was brilliant, brilliant on the technical side, about getting the website.

1:37:29 I mean, that he, he hired other people to do it, but to get the website so that you could send material to it anonymously, brilliant. To get people to start contributing secrets to it, brilliant. To raise its profile. But there was a point there where WikiLeaks became very, very marginal, because a lot of people, uh, walked out. He’s, a lot of his closest advisers and helpers in WikiLeaks walked out in that period August to September 2010.

1:37:56 Partly it was because they hadn’t been consulted about the cooperation with the Guardian and the New York Times. Partly it was because of the, the two women in Sweden and the way in which Julian was handling that. Partly it was just because they felt that his attitude to them was rather dictatorial, but that reduced WikiLeaks to a very, very small staff, and when those people walked out, they took with them the kind of reservoir of unpublished secrets. So he was left with very few people and very little information.

1:38:27 He doesn’t give up easily, and he’s kept WikiLeaks alive even within the restrained circumstances of being in that embassy, but it’s an awful screw-up, just to, to, to, I mean, he’s been in that embassy now for more than three years. It restricts his movement. It restricts his ability to do what he wants to do, and I, I wish he’d just come out and gone back to Sweden and faced it, and, and, and I, I, you know, like, if you compare this to Ed Snowden. Ed Snowden surfaced in Hong Kong and was identified clearly as the source of those leaks, which the Guardian and others were publishing within days.

1:39:04 The Americans had an international arrest warrant to the Hong Kong authorities, and there was a little glitch in the spelling of his name, and he used the space time available to get out. Whatever it is, now it’s more than five years isn’t it, since we published that stuff? It was May 2010, so it’s five and a half years since the Americans discovered that Bradley Manning, as he was then called, had given this stuff to Julian. There’s no warrant. Where is it?

1:39:29 Why isn’t there a warrant? Why didn’t they arrest? Why didn’t they release the arrest warrant when Julian was in the UK for several years, when he was actually under arrest, and they knew his address? Why not? Why not try and get him?

1:39:44 I, I just wish he’d gone back to Sweden and dealt with the two women, in what, what, with whatever outcome that had had. If they’d found him guilty, he wasn’t going to get anything very heavy, because the, the allegations of that kind go, they weren’t of the most serious. It, it was basically about, they call it sexual molestation, okay, and he says he’s innocent, and he may be, go back, get rid of the bloody thing, but to lock himself up for three years and more in an embassy.

1:40:12 I just, I don’t know. It just seems to have been terribly badly handled, and there’s a very tragic result, I mean, for him as a person and for his organisation, which has not been able to function as powerfully as it could have done. And you gave credit to WikiLeaks. I mean, it’s obviously, it was never a news organisation, but you saw the power of having that information and the way they did it, and you gave them credit for the way that they handled that whole piece.

1:40:37 Yeah. No, I think he, he was, it was brilliant what he did, and, but it started at WikiLeaks, and then it became about Julian, maybe to an extent, yes, in the way that we’ve described. But, um, I think, uh, there was a point there, let’s say July, August 2010, before the Swedish thing broke, when he was in an incredibly powerful position. He was right up there as a global figure, which meant that more and more people were going to be encouraged to send in secrets.

1:41:06 He’d got this brilliant structure established, you know. He’s a very clever guy, and I was full of admiration. I mean, I still do. I still admire him, and I still like him, but I think it’s such a damn shame that he has to behave in this, sometimes he just does crazy, stupid things. He shouldn’t have gone off to these other news organisations.

1:41:26 That was stupid, and he couldn’t, he didn’t need to complicate the relationship with those media organisations that he was working with, and he could have made much better decisions about these Swedish women. So it’s, at the end of the day, I still like him, I still admire him, but I just think he should treat people better. Will he be back? Will WikiLeaks be back? I, I don’t know, but I also, I think it’s worth noting there’ll be people who watch this who go, “W, bloody Nick Davies,” but you, they need to think about those two Swedish women and they need to look at the trolling which those two women have suffered, which is just about the worst I’ve ever seen inflicted on anybody, and just reflect on the fact they aren’t CIA agents.

1:42:07 Those two women were supporters of WikiLeaks, and they adored Julian, and all they have done is to complain about somebody’s sexual conduct, and they may be right or they may be wrong, but that trolling is wrong, and for people who would like to pretend to be left-wing, to behave like that towards those women is disgusting, and they need to just back off. And at the end of the day, Julian was originally in Sweden because their record on human rights and civil liberties was particularly good, better than the UK’s. He made a speech when he was there in that first week making that point, and that point is valid, and the only solution to that mess is to let some judicial systems sort it out, and this is just chaos, and in the meantime back off and stop attacking people who don’t deserve to be attacked just because you have a prejudice which you can’t control.

1:43:00 You’re very passionate about the truth. Yeah, I think it counts for something. I mean, and that is the upbringing of, you had as a journalist. I mean, even when it comes to, you’re talking about Rupert Murdoch, you’re very objective about him, and you’re, you say okay, he’s this, but he’s actually not this, whereas you could just throw it all in and say he is a Satan, and just by now you’re saying okay, these are the facts. Yeah, and Julian’s a complicated character.

1:43:24 I think some of what he’s done is really DED, and some of what he’s did is brilliant, but people are complicated, and, and it’s, it can be quite difficult if what you’re trying to do is to describe the real world. The real world is very complicated, and it can be hard to keep up with it, and that’s part of my complaint about the trolls and tweeters and bloggers, is that they will not admit the complexity of things. They just grab the nearest prejudice and start hitting somebody over their head with it, and then wonder why nobody pays them any attention.

1:43:49 And are you a part of a dying breed? As in, as journalism becomes, journalism, do the people that really focus on the truth start dying off? No, I think one of the few encouraging things about journalism at the moment, I mean, from a sort of structural point of view, is that it continues to attract bright, idealistic young people who want to try and tell the truth, whether it’s about the political world or music or sport or anything. It attracts well-meaning people who want to tell the truth.

1:44:20 The question is whether or not we can give them structures which will allow them the time and the resources to do that. And I was really lucky, in fact I was talking to journalists earlier today about it, that we came up through the industry at a point when there was plenty of money around in newspapers and in television, so that you, you really were allowed to do the job. It’s only in the last five to 10 years that we’ve started to get throttled. And it’s tough for those young people coming through now to get the time to do the job properly, but there’s no shortage of people who would like to tell the truth and who bothered to go off and get themselves trained.

1:44:54 They can do it if only people will give them the chance, the time. What kind of advice can you give to people watching, that that are kind of that up-and-coming journalist? And do you remember, was there a time, like in your 20s or in your 30s, where you, you made a big break, or you finally started getting noticed, or you changed something about the way you reported that, that made you stand out from the rest? Or are there any kind of just secret ideas of being like a proper journalist, and what makes those, you know, those journalists great, that you can share?

1:45:26 What makes, well? Uh, it’s, it’s a funny thing about the successful quote investigative journalists. Uh, are funny creatures, because if you ask any of them why do you do what you do, they can come up with a perfectly reasonable intellectual explanation. Oh well, it’s about exposing abuse of power, it’s about holding government to account, and that would be the truth, but yet not the whole truth, because it, it, it tends to be the case that the successful investigative types also have some hidden drive to quite a deep-seated level.

1:46:01 So I mentioned in Hack Attack that there’s one very successful journalist who, well, at least he was successful for years, because he couldn’t come to terms with his own own sexual identity, and it was as if he was running away from it and poured his energy and his time into his work, and, and once he relaxed and admitted he was gay, he was a much, much happier person and a much less successful successful journalist. There’s another good friend of mine who talked to me once about the fact that he grew up in a house where there was a secret, and he always knew there was a secret. When he was in his late teens he decided to find out what the hell it was, and he established that his, his father was Jewish and his mother was not, and since they had got married soon after the Second World War, when it was physically dangerous to be a Jew in Europe, and furthermore, when there was prejudice, so that neither community wanted them to marry out of it, they had moved to a city where nobody knew them and established a new life and told nobody, not even their own children, and that guy doesn’t like secrets, for that reason, as an emotional level, and then spent the next 40 or 50 years exposing secrets of government, intelligence agencies, corporations.

1:47:12 And with me, I wrote about this a little bit in the book. I grew up in a household which was very violent. My mother used to hit us a lot, and I was a bit lucky because I got taken out of the family. I was the oldest boy and sent to a boarding school where, I, when I was eight, and the difference, they, they used to hit us in those days. There was a lot of corporal punishment, but the difference was it was predictable, and after a year or two I discovered that I could do this little trick, and do well in class, and so instead of hitting me they gave me a prize at the end of the year.

1:47:44 I was still kind of unruly, but the point I’m trying to make is that I signed up to be a reporter off the back of the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s, and I’d been working for a reporter for about 20 years before I looked back and saw how over and over again I tried to do stories which attacked people who abused power, particularly people who abused power by punishing people for things they hadn’t done, miscarriages of justice, particularly people who punished or attacked or hurt children. And you could see how without understanding it at all, I was being driven, along just as these other guys were. So this doesn’t enable me to say anything very helpful to young people who are trying to do it, but I think maybe if you take the idea of the emotional drive pushing people, you, you could convert that into a thought.

1:48:34 In fact, there was once upon a time when I was very depressed about my work, and my daughter, who was then about 10, did rather a nice drawing of herself which I still have pinned next to my desk, because underneath it she wrote three words, never give up, and that’s the other end of the emotional drive. If you, if you don’t have, you happen to be slightly crazed. If you just bear that in mind, because it will be difficult for the young journalists to get the job they want.

1:49:00 They’ll have to go through doing some work which is boring, you know, for some tiny trade magazine or some little local paper. Well, you stick with it, and then you can move up a gear, and you can get to work for the BBC or the Guardian or some big news organisation, and still you’re going to have to do ordinary news, but after a while if you do that for long enough you can begin to specialise, and you can become the music correspondent or the investigative hack or the columnist, and then you can start to do the things you really want to do. But it will not be easy.

1:49:29 So just don’t give up, and in a way there’s a kind of natural selection at work here. Some people will give up, and that’s because they’re not really, really addicted to it. Well, okay, right, but the people who are addicted will survive, who are really determined to do it, and they’ll be good. You mentioned Watergate when you’re telling your story about the phone hacking scandal. I think of Woodward and Bernstein, and I think of this narrative that they caught some people breaking into this campaign headquarters, and they started following the money, and then all of a sudden they’re taking down a president.

1:49:58 When you’re in the middle of what happened here, which these seemingly unrelated events now kind of bring Rupert to this commission. Did that ever come to your mind? This was very similar. What was obvious, that I mentioned before, was that it was very worrying that the Andy Coulson who’d edited the paper when all this was going on was moving into this very powerful position at David Cameron’s right hand. And I think it was a conscious effort, that that really was wrong, and that he ought to resign.

1:50:27 Beyond that I didn’t have any imaginings about what might happen. The scale was almost scary, and there are, you get bad results. The closure of the News of the World was a disaster for those 200 people, not something that we wanted. A bad result. Leveson Inquiry, wonderful result.

1:50:43 The Leveson report, which recommends a new kind of regulator, I personally think was very clever and could increase the freedom of the press in this country. There are other intelligent, well-meaning people who disagree with me, as it is. The debate between me and them has been completely crushed by the bad newspapers at the dark end of Fleet Street, who, and there, there is no way they want a regulator that would require them to abide by the code of conduct that they’ve written.

1:51:09 It’s, you can’t predict what’s going to happen when you’re writing these stories, so I didn’t imagine the outcome at all. You spent your time around a lot of successful people, people like Julian Assange, people like Rupert Murdoch, uh, fellow journalist. When you think of that word successful, who, who comes to mind, either from a journalist standpoint or just people you spend time around, or people you, you’re with? These success secrets are I, my editor at the paper, Alan Rusbridger, I think he’s incredibly successful, and I think a lot of people would pick him as the most successful editor of his generation.

1:52:06 And it’s got a lot to do with the decision you make when you’re leaving school or university, what am I going to try and do for a living? So I have three children, and I’ve said to them, take it slowly. Here, your 20s are for experimenting. If you can make the right decision and do something that suits you, that satisfies you, you’re in a small percentage of people, and Allan got it right. He’s he’s, people look at Alan and they say, oh, he looks like Harry Potter.

1:52:33 He looks, he looks, he does have a very boyish look and his brown spectacles, but he’s a very clever guy, is, he’s a terrifically good brain. He’s also incredibly well put together emotionally, so that I would have collapsed under the stress of his job. Every single problem in that organisation came to his desk: the huge financial problem, the legal actions, the journalist in Afghanistan who’s just been kidnapped. It all came to his desk, and he, he’s very clever, very well constructed emotionally, so he could cope with it, very calm.

1:53:04 We were all pretty pissed off, actually, with the film that Steven Spielberg made about WikiLeaks and the Guardian. Yeah, uh, had very good people working on it, but it was a rather useless film. And one of the things was that the, the key thing about Alan Rusbridger is he’s incredibly calm. I’ve never heard him swear. So in the film they have him being played by Peter Capaldi, who’s not one of the most wired-up characters you could come across, and famously wired up in the thick of it.

1:53:31 And the first thing you hear him doing when he’s playing the part of Alan Rusbridger is swearing and shouting at people. It’s wrong. Alan’s this kind of, well, he’s left now, but he was this calm centre, the be the middle of the storm. So he’s a very successful man. I think it is to do with somehow matching your personality to your work.

1:53:50 If it really fits, then you can be successful. If you’re trying to do something that contradicts your basic instincts, you’re going to get a stomach ulcer. Dropped by the way, aren’t you? And you commented on Rupert Murdoch one time. You said, and he continues with more power and more money, and sometimes you wonder what’s the point of that.

1:54:09 And you don’t see a happiness thread there. You, no, there’s something worrying and confusing about a man who’s so dedicated to, you could say, addicted to accumulation of money and power. And I mean, I’ve heard people express a theory which I mentioned in the book, that it’s something to do, this is a bit cod psychology, but it could be something to do with his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, who was I think a patriarchal character, and the theory is that he made it clear to Rupert from the earliest age that he wasn’t good enough to be his father’s son, and that that’s driving, and we’re talking about these sort of subconscious strives that people have.

1:54:50 He’s desperately trying to prove to the father that he’s good enough, and the father died years and years ago, so he can’t step out and say, enough, it’s okay, you proved the point. So there is this man who must be 84 now, still working and still accumulating and still earning and still fretting. Why do it? What that is, not what our lives are for. I’m sure it isn’t right, but he, he can’t seem to stop.

1:55:14 So it has its perks, as in attractive former models on his own, but I, I think he’s made a terrible mistake. What keeps you awake at night? Uh, insomnia. What keeps me awake? Just, I, I have an overactive mind.

1:55:28 It’s so, I, I kind of forgive it, be for behaving in this way, but I fall asleep easily, and then I get woken up at 3:00 in the morning, and it’s like a helpful neighbour banging on the door going, Nick, Nick, I’ve had a brilliant idea. Shut the f*** up, tell me at 7 o’clock. No, no, it’s too good to wait. And now I’m awake, and I keep a notebook by the side of my bed so I can write whatever it is that the brain came up with. It is strange how your brain works while you’re asleep, and how you, it’s quite amazing actually that you can go to bed with a problem.

1:55:59 It might be something as simple as, I’m writing a story and I can’t get, I can’t work, make the next bit work, and suddenly the solution appears, because it’s worked it out. But I just, it doesn’t get the timetable, but that’s where your best, that’s what wakes me up, is my, my brain trying to tell me interesting ideas, which are good ideas, so often. Yeah, and I write them down, and I would have forgotten them if I hadn’t written them down. But then it can be hard to get back to sleep.

1:56:20 Why? What keeps you awake in the middle of the night? making sure that I continue to produce great content from curated guft. Oh really? I don’t believe that’s the truth.

1:56:30 It is really it’s just a professional thing. I just, you never worry about whether maybe your best friends don’t really like you. No, I know they don’t. Okay, you’re interviewing a journalist. I’m just turning the t, uh, I always ask everyone one last question when they sit here.

1:56:44 Nick, I’m gonna ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Nick Davies and give that young man a bit of advice. You mentioned kind of what you told your kids in their 20s, but if you could tell yourself something, what would be that message to him? Oh well, it wouldn’t be anything to do with work. Uh, I would tell myself to settle down with my first girlfriend and not screw up the relationship, and uh, that we were very, very well suited to each other, but I filed up the relationship because I was much too young to do it, and we’re very good friends now, and that’s cool, it’s great, but it’s a shame that I filed it up.

1:57:19 So that’s what I would tell myself. Just calm down, try and grow up. And did the 20-year-old knew, uh, you know, you wanted to be a journalist. Was that already set in stone? No, no, I was all over the place.

1:57:28 I had no idea which I was trying to do, and it took me two or three years, and I worked, uh, in racing stables looking after race horses, and then on the railways as a guard, and then on building sites doing that sort of job. I had no idea what I was trying to do, so it, it takes a while to sus it out. I think. Nick, thanks so much for your time. I think this story is fascinating.

1:57:51 I think the different facets of it are I don’t feel like the public has learned from this and I don’t feel like people really recognise the power that media has. We hear it all the time, but this whole idea of passive power is something that I don’t think people know it exists. People wouldn’t know that Cameron had these 10 meetings, and they really wouldn’t. I think piece it together in their everyday lives that it would affect foreign policy or economic policy.

1:58:16 And it’s scary to me that in 10 years there’ll be another phone hacking scandal or some equivalent of, and we’ll have to go back in and go through the same political moves of the police and all that, and again maybe nothing will change. Yes, if, if George Clooney can direct the film as he wants to, that actually might reach more people than newspapers or my book. Well, people don’t really read books, but they still go and watch movies, right? So maybe Clooney is the key, and Clooney might play you.

1:58:47 No, no, no, he’s to direct. Okay, okay, all right. So all right, you’re too good-looking to. No, that’s not the thing at all, but he’s I think he’s got a whole new part of his career opening up as a director, and he wants to do this. He’s being very determined about it, and he has a great history of making movies about journalism, in a, because his father was a journalist.

1:59:04 He wants to use his position to say important things rather than making kind of the movie equivalent of candy floss. Yeah, and that I respect, and I’m glad that he’s got his hands on the project. I think he was quoted as saying, I do one for them and one for me, and one for them and one for me, and the ones for them pay for the movie for him, because you know that black and white movie was, you know, lost for him, but, uh, yeah, but that’s a ray of hope.

1:59:29 Um, again, thanks so much for your time. I know you don’t have a great opinion of independent media, but I think we’ve told your story in a very unique way and shown people the depth to this, and showing all that, so I appreciate you telling me. Okay, thanks for, and, uh, thanks for your time. All right, take care. And now I introduce you to my mentor, the $50 billion man, Mr Dan