Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson Page A
Authors: Tom Watson
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‘Michelle’ did not turn up to testify for the NoW because she was ‘feeling unwell’. (The paper had ‘renegotiated’ her fee down to £12,500 because Mosley had not in the event performed a Sieg Heil.) To the surprise of the News of the World , the other dominatrices gave evidence for Mosley.
Delivering judgment on 24 July 2008, Mr Justice Eady described Thurlbeck’s testimony as ‘erratic and changeable’ and remarked that the News of the World’ s failure to discipline him for sending an email verging on blackmail was ‘a remarkable state of affairs’. He ruled there had been no Nazi element to the orgy nor any public interest in publishing the story. On Mosley’s use of German, he noted: ‘It contained a certain amount of explicit sexual language about what the claimant [Mosley] and Woman B were planning to do to those women in the submissive role, but nothing specifically Nazi, and certainly nothing to do with concentration camps.’ He awarded Mosley £60,000 damages and his costs. However, the court later taxed down * Mosley’s costs, meaning that despite winning the case he lost £30,000.
News International’s redtops, which had long decried judgments arising from the 1998 Human Rights Act, which enshrined a right to privacy in British law, were furious . The Sun described the ruling as a ‘dark day for British freedom’ and a step towards ‘a dangerous European-style privacy law’ . The News of the World complained that the powerful should not be able to run to the courts to gag papers from publishing ‘true’ stories, adding: ‘This is all about the public’s right to know.’
Mosley began suing the News of the World in other European countries where the paper had been sold. Just as significantly, from his home in Monaco he started to take an interest in the phone hacking affair. News International had made an intelligent, tenacious and wealthy enemy.
Meanwhile, David Cameron was making friends – or, rather, one big friend: Rupert Murdoch. Socially, the Conservative leader was becoming ever closer to the American’s British newspaper editors, including James Harding (a friend of James Murdoch appointed editor of The Times in December 2007) and Rebekah Wade, the Sun ’s editor, who lived a few miles from Cameron’s wisteria-clad farmhouse in the Cotswolds hamlet of Dean. Cameron had been friends for thirty years with Wade’s new beau, an Eton contemporary, the former racehorse owner Charlie Brooks, and regularly went hacking with him in the Oxfordshire countryside, sometimes on a retired police horse, Raisa, which Wade had borrowed from the Metropolitan Police in 2008 after a lunch with the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair.
Cameron and Wade were among the most important members of a network of influential media, political and showbusiness friends living around the Cotswolds town of Chipping Norton. Other members of the Chipping Norton Set included Liz Murdoch and her PR guru husband, Matthew Freud, who owned the opulent Elizabethan manor house Burford Priory, and the celebrity BBC Top Gear presenter and Sunday Times columnist Jeremy Clarkson, who lived in the village of Churchill.
With Rebekah Wade and James Harding among his personal friends and Andy Coulson leading his media team, Cameron began to reach out to the Murdochs. On 16 August 2008, in a journey redolent of Tony Blair’s homage to Australia in 1995, the Conservative leader boarded Matthew Freud’s Gulfstream jet for Santorini in Greece, where he joined Freud’s father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch, for drinks on his yacht , Rosehearty . What they discussed remains a mystery, but from that point on the media policy of the Conservatives and the interests of the Murdochs began to converge. Three months after the meeting, in November 2008, Cameron penned a comment piece for the Sun headlined ‘Bloated BBC out of touch with the viewers’ protesting at rises in the licence fee. 9 In January 2009, his shadow Culture Minister Ed
Delivering judgment on 24 July 2008, Mr Justice Eady described Thurlbeck’s testimony as ‘erratic and changeable’ and remarked that the News of the World’ s failure to discipline him for sending an email verging on blackmail was ‘a remarkable state of affairs’. He ruled there had been no Nazi element to the orgy nor any public interest in publishing the story. On Mosley’s use of German, he noted: ‘It contained a certain amount of explicit sexual language about what the claimant [Mosley] and Woman B were planning to do to those women in the submissive role, but nothing specifically Nazi, and certainly nothing to do with concentration camps.’ He awarded Mosley £60,000 damages and his costs. However, the court later taxed down * Mosley’s costs, meaning that despite winning the case he lost £30,000.
News International’s redtops, which had long decried judgments arising from the 1998 Human Rights Act, which enshrined a right to privacy in British law, were furious . The Sun described the ruling as a ‘dark day for British freedom’ and a step towards ‘a dangerous European-style privacy law’ . The News of the World complained that the powerful should not be able to run to the courts to gag papers from publishing ‘true’ stories, adding: ‘This is all about the public’s right to know.’
Mosley began suing the News of the World in other European countries where the paper had been sold. Just as significantly, from his home in Monaco he started to take an interest in the phone hacking affair. News International had made an intelligent, tenacious and wealthy enemy.
Meanwhile, David Cameron was making friends – or, rather, one big friend: Rupert Murdoch. Socially, the Conservative leader was becoming ever closer to the American’s British newspaper editors, including James Harding (a friend of James Murdoch appointed editor of The Times in December 2007) and Rebekah Wade, the Sun ’s editor, who lived a few miles from Cameron’s wisteria-clad farmhouse in the Cotswolds hamlet of Dean. Cameron had been friends for thirty years with Wade’s new beau, an Eton contemporary, the former racehorse owner Charlie Brooks, and regularly went hacking with him in the Oxfordshire countryside, sometimes on a retired police horse, Raisa, which Wade had borrowed from the Metropolitan Police in 2008 after a lunch with the Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair.
Cameron and Wade were among the most important members of a network of influential media, political and showbusiness friends living around the Cotswolds town of Chipping Norton. Other members of the Chipping Norton Set included Liz Murdoch and her PR guru husband, Matthew Freud, who owned the opulent Elizabethan manor house Burford Priory, and the celebrity BBC Top Gear presenter and Sunday Times columnist Jeremy Clarkson, who lived in the village of Churchill.
With Rebekah Wade and James Harding among his personal friends and Andy Coulson leading his media team, Cameron began to reach out to the Murdochs. On 16 August 2008, in a journey redolent of Tony Blair’s homage to Australia in 1995, the Conservative leader boarded Matthew Freud’s Gulfstream jet for Santorini in Greece, where he joined Freud’s father-in-law, Rupert Murdoch, for drinks on his yacht , Rosehearty . What they discussed remains a mystery, but from that point on the media policy of the Conservatives and the interests of the Murdochs began to converge. Three months after the meeting, in November 2008, Cameron penned a comment piece for the Sun headlined ‘Bloated BBC out of touch with the viewers’ protesting at rises in the licence fee. 9 In January 2009, his shadow Culture Minister Ed
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