CEO Rebekah Brooks…a cap that doesn’t fit
Rupert laid bare: a man fit to take over BSkyB?
We shouldn’t be surprised by Newscorp’s role in the Milly Dowler case. Nor should we be surprised by the creepy hypocrisy of the press release that went out as soon as the Murdoch machine realised it had been fingered:
‘We have been co-operating fully with Operation Weeting since our voluntary disclosure in January restarted the investigation into illegal voicemail interception. This particular case is clearly a development of great concern and we will be conducting our own inquiries as a result. We will obviously co-operate fully with any police request on this should we be asked.’
It’s the standard sociopathic, lying-through-its-teeth corporate bollocks we have come to expect from Newscorp. They do not need to ‘make enquiries’ – we know this and they know this. And the ‘voluntary disclosure’ + ‘cooperate fully’ lines are wearing irritatingly thin: quite a lot of Nazis cooperated fully with the Allies at Nuremburg in 1946. It’s what monsters do once they get caught.
The ramifications of this latest predatory attack on grieving parents are obvious, but apparently not in Camerlot. Anyway, for the record:
1. It took place on Rebekah Brooks’ watch, during a campaign she had personally initiated against paedophiles, her being the Editor. She must have known about it. This woman acted as a go-between during talks between senior Newscorp executives and the Prime Minister David Cameron last Christmas….while an enquiry into the BSkyB takeover was at its height. Ms Brooks is up to her silly hair in this. She knows it, we know it, and Downing Street knows it.
2. Her Deputy Editor Andy Coulson was also at the crime scene. Coulson must have known about it. Former colleagues have him directing operations in similar cases. Coulson was the Prime Minister David Cameron’s media adviser until he was forced to resign. The man is a liar. Everyone in Fleet Street knows this, we know it, and the police know it.
3. So little effort did Newscorp make to hide their actions from the police officers on the Dowler case, one is led inexorably to the conclusion that the News of the World was about its foul business with the knowledge of detectives involved in the enquiry. They had done so before, during the so-called ‘fake sheik’ sting.
4. These (and other recent) revelations are miles outside the utterly unreal ‘inclusion zone’ of 2004-06 declared by Murdoch’s organisation. It is painfully obvious that the entire UK News International stable works on the amoral and unethical principle that they can ignore anything – the police, select committees, Courtroom evidence, the Government, MPs and the Press Council – in order to get their story and get their way. Downing Street must know this by now. Jeremy Hunt must know this by now. But still the BSkyB deal goes ahead.
From the moment of his arrival in Britain, the country he hates with an obsessive passion, Rupert Murdoch has broken promises, abused his position as a rich media owner, ignored directors put on Boards to control him, and broken the laws of privacy routinely. He has had all the last four Governments here in his pocket, as well as half the Republican Party in the US. Wherever he goes, firewalls go up, and the freedom of the internet is denied to all but those of whom he expressly approves.
Now his hobgoblins raise false hopes in a grieving family, while writing lachrymose rubbish about how evil Milly Dowler’s killer was. He, however, is insane. Brookes, Coulson and Murdoch have no such excuse. The journalists hacked into Milly’s mobile phone, confused the evidence, destroyed evidence, got exclusives from the family while posing as sympathisers, blagged BT’s confidential records, tapped detectives’ phones, and ultimately destroyed the case against Levi Bellfield in another case – the attempted killing of Surrey schoolgirl Rachel Cowles.
But the Culture Secretary thinks this the perfect organisation to introduce more ‘plurality’ into the UK’s media scene. Given the amount of double-dealing, double-cross, double-talk and double-standards we have seen from Murdoch’s cess pit over the last 174 days, then plurality is pretty clearly what we are going to get. I am left wondering if Jeremy Hunt is himself morally disabled, or just too thick to understand that spinning off (yeh, right) Sky News in any way alters the open-and-shut case against this bunch of near-necrophiliacs. No…let’s be clear – he’s just a mindless bag of cretinous ambition.
The Weeting Operation under Sue Akers found 11,000 Mulcaire papers when they took over the case. Yet two earlier Yard inquiries had failed to investigate the relevant notes in Mulcaire’s logs. And still there are senior Met officers blithely insisting that there was no cover-up, either by Met officer Andy Hayman (another of the eclectic contents of Murdoch’s grubby pocket) or anyone else.
Well, maybe that’s what Britain is in 2011: a country that doesn’t care any more, a culture quite happy to accept corrupting media owners, corrupted police, crooked banks, and a political Establishment hiding their activities as a form of self-protection. David Cameron seems oblivious to just how deeply he is mired in this; and despite everything that’s happened, the Opposition leader Ed Miliband has a press secretary (ex-Murdoch, natch) still obsessed with getting his former boss onside with the new Labour leader.
The Big Society, eh? ‘Your voice in hard times’, eh? To quote Nye Bevan, “They are lower than vermin”. Vermin do at least have spines: The British Establishment floats like a jellyfish and stings like a fly. And in its response to Hackgate, we can finally see it for what it so obviously is: an irreparable disgrace.
The Slog 