It is difficult to overstate the impact of what began as the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. It has far-reaching implications for police, politicians, and press.
The stickiness of the Murdoch web has clearly corrupted sections of the Metropolitan Police. Officers charged with the protection of the Queen have sold reporters secret information about the royal family, potentially jeopardising the safety of the monarch — something a previous age would have called treason. An assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard failed properly to investigate the 11,000 pages of notes seized from a private investigator working for the News of the World. MPs have now called for him to resign for “repeatedly lying” to the House of Commons.
Politicians have been exposed as cowardly or complicit, for fear that Murdoch firepower be loosed on them personally. Rupert Murdoch’s political influence seems unparalleled, and the Prime Minister’s reputation has been damaged by his hiring of a former Murdoch lieutenant, Andy Coulson. After months of denying phone-hacking, Mr Coulson has been arrested in connection with allegations of corruption and phone-hacking.
The scale of the debasement of British politics has been laid bare, with Lord Mandelson admitting: “We simply chose to be cowed because we were too fearful to do otherwise. And David Cameron took up where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown left off.” The revelations clearly are not over yet.
The inadequacy of the toothless Press Complaints Commission, self-serving as well as self-regulating, has been exposed: funded by an optional levy from newspapers, its board members include Mr Murdoch’s right-hand man, Les Hinton, and its code of practice is determined by a committee chaired by the editor of the frequently offending Daily Mail.
But bent coppers and compromised politicians have been side-issues compared with what the public has learned of the press — hacking the phones of a murdered schoolgirl, the victims of terrorism, and the families of dead soldiers. The closure of the biggest selling newspaper in the English language will not draw a line under that. Mr Murdoch’s desperate damage-limitation strategy has been undermined by claims that two of his other newspapers, The Sun, and, more seriously, The Sunday Times, have been engaging in newsroom malpractices, illegally obtaining the medical records of a prime minister’s unwell baby, and employing a conman to dupe information from his bank, solicitor, and accountant.
The relentless stream of allegations of wrongdoing reveals an ethic at News International in which “what can I get away with” has replaced “what is in the public interest” as a working consideration. That takes us to the heart of the question of what is meant by “a fit and proper person” — the judgement which OfCom and the Office of Fair Trading have now been asked to make about those in the Murdoch corporation who are bidding to buy the 61 per cent of BSkyB that his News Corporation does not already own.
That judgement could have an impact on whether Mr Murdoch should be allowed to retain his existing 29.9-per-cent BSkyB stake — and also whether he will be allowed to replace the News of the World with a Sun on Sunday. An ethical verdict might suggest not. A strategic verdict might also worry about how Mr Murdoch wants full control of Sky as what the Financial Times has called “a hard-line low-rent vehicle to crush the BBC”. Mr Murdoch is clearly a man who puts profits before principles. He has too much power already.
Paul Vallely is associate editor of The Independent.