Published by the Guardian
July 22 2011
with David Leigh
Tom Crone and Colin Myler must have been well aware yesterday that the statement they were about to make could prove fatal to James Murdoch.
When the Guardian pointed out in the wake of his parliamentary testimony that Murdoch’s son had sought to blame them for concealment, a friend of the two men said: “To contradict James will be as good as coming out and calling him a liar.”
Myler and Crone, the News of the World’s then editor and News International’s top newspaper lawyer, both of whom have lost their jobs in the wake of the phone-hacking affair, subsequently spent the day debating what to do.
If their statement of last night is correct, then Rupert’s son will have proved to have misled parliament. It will also have destroyed the Murdoch family’s last line of defence against the scandal: that they knew nothing, and had been betrayed by those underlings they trusted.
News Corporation insisted in a statement last night that James Murdoch stood by his testimony. But both sides cannot be correct.
Myler and Crone are, in effect, jointly accusing James Murdoch of being part of the cover-up, one in which the company’s executives vainly twisted and turned to conceal the truth about phone hacking and blame it on a single “rogue reporter”.
James Murdoch’s crucial claim to the committee was that although he had personally agreed to a massive payout, of pounds 700,000 to hacking victim Gordon Taylor, he had done so in ignorance of the true facts. He said Crone and Myler had told him the payout was legally necessary.
The Labour MP Tom Watson, one of the affair’s most persistent investigators, then extracted from Murdoch what has now proved to be an incendiary claim.
Murdoch claimed that Crone and Myler had concealed from him the crucial piece of evidence in the case: that an email had come to light with a voicemail hacking transcript, marked “for Neville” [Neville Thurlbeck, the News of the World's chief reporter].
The existence of this email, had it been made public at the time, would have exploded the “rogue reporter” defence and begun to implicate the rest of the NoW newsroom. It was, and is, the smoking gun in the whole hacking case.
This was the exchange:
Watson: “James – sorry, if I may call you James, to differentiate – when you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the full Neville email, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?”
James Murdoch: “No, I was not aware of that at the time.”
Watson may have been slightly mistranscribed: he may have said the “for Neville” email.
However, James Murdoch’s response contained no slip of the tongue. When the Guardian subsequently queried his version of events with his office, they provided a written statement repeating it. It said: “In June 2008 James Murdoch had given verbal approval to settle the case, following legal advice. He did this without knowledge of the ‘for Neville’ email.”
John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture sport and media select committee, said last night: “We regarded the ‘for Neville’ email as one of the most critical pieces of evidence in the whole inquiry. We will be asking James Murdoch to respond and ask him to clarify.”
In police inquiries, the most sensitive moment is generally considered to be when those involved start to turn on one another. James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks had turned on Crone and Myler in their testimony.
James told the MPs that Brooks had removed Crone from his job. Brooks then testified that Crone was apparently the only former NoW employee for whom there would be no new job found after the sudden closure of the title.
By adding that the Murdoch family had been kept in ignorance of the “for Neville” email, James was pointing the finger at the two men as, in effect, sole architects of a cover-up.
Before Crone and Myler threw down their challenge to the testimony of Rupert Murdoch’s son, analysis of James’ parliamentary evidence had already revealed inconsistencies.
James claimed to the MPs that he had accepted legal advice that Gordon Taylor’s lawsuit was worth pounds 250,000 in damages. But he failed to explain why the company went on to pay the hacking victim almost twice as much: pounds 425,000, plus costs.
The News of the World executives had originally rejected Taylor’s claim for damages altogether.
But in May 2008, they changed their tune abruptly, when Taylor’s lawyers got hold of the “For Neville” email. They offered pounds 50,000, then pounds 150,000, if Taylor would drop the case. In June 2008, when Crone and Myler went to get permission from James Murdoch for an even bigger payout, the offer went up to pounds 350,000, then pounds 400,000.
According to earlier testimony from Taylor’s lawyer, the NoW team demanded a special confidentiality clause: that the court file would be sealed and Taylor was not to reveal that a confidential settlement of any kind had been made. This served to hush up the existence of the deal. James tried to persuade the MPs that such a deal was perfectly normal.
In a scandal where, it had seemed, the stakes could go no higher, Crone and Myler’s statement has raised them to
