This is the humblest day of my life,  declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee on 19 July 2011.

A repost from 30 September 2025

This was at the height of what the newspaper historian Roy Greenslade called “the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped upon daily shock”.

These dramatic events are now the subject of  a series on Stan. Journalist Nick Davies recounted them in his 2014 book,  Hack Attack: How the Truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch. That book has now been reissued with a new afterword, exploring the developments and revelations over the last decade. I have read the new chapter, and it casts yet more light on the Murdoch company’s extraordinary behaviour.

It began on 5 July 2011, when Davies published an article in the Guardian saying Murdoch’s Sunday paper, the News of the World, had tapped teenage murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone. The scandal had been building — very slowly and far from surely — for almost five years, since August 2006, when a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were arrested for having tapped the phones of Princes William and Harry, and their entourages.

The investigative work of Davies and the editorial courage of the Guardian bore little immediate fruit during those years. But the dam wall broke when they published the story of a cynical newspaper tapping the phone of a teenage murder victim.

Politicians competed with each other in the ferocity of their denunciations. News International  closed the _News of the World_, and in the face of opposition from all three major political parties, Murdoch  abandoned his attempt to raise his ownership of satellite broadcaster BSkyB from 39% to 100%, which would have been the largest deal in his history. On successive days,  London’s chief police officer and  one of his deputies resigned because of their close relations with Murdoch papers. Rupert and James were forced to appear before a parliamentary committee, televised live.

Last, but far from least, Prime Minister David Cameron launched an inquiry, to be directed by Lord Leveson, to examine the scandal and the issues it raised. The ensuing Leveson Inquiry, which ran over 2011 and 2012, was the biggest inquiry ever held into the British press.

It held oral hearings for about nine months, starting in November 2011, and heard from 337 witnesses, including then prime minister Cameron, former prime ministers Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir John Major, future prime ministers Theresa May and  Keir Starmer, and other political and media figures, before publishing a 2000-page report in November 2012.

The police also sprang into action. Operation Weeting was a police taskforce set up to investigate phone hacking at the News of the World, from January 2011. In June,  Operation Elveden was set up to investigate bribes by the paper to police, while  Operation Tuletta was set up to investigate computer hacking.

An unfolding scandal

The original scandal revealed that Murdoch’s London tabloid papers engaged in phone tapping on an industrial scale, bribed police and engaged in a systematic cover-up, in which many senior executives lied.

Most scandals dissipate. The intensity of publicity at their peak is not a good guide to their long-term effects. Murdoch gradually reasserted his power. The first major step came with the end of what was the longest-running  concluded criminal trial in British history, from October 2013 to June 2014.

Most of Murdoch’s employees, including the highest profile one, Rebekah Brooks, were  found not guilty. However, former News of the World editor  Andy Coulson was found guilty of a conspiracy to hack into phones and was jailed for 18 months.

In many ways, the defence’s most important victory came before the trial began. Brooks’ team insisted that to hear just one trial against her would generate so much prejudicial publicity it would make it impossible for a fair trial in the others. Some of her charges involved other people. So when the trial eventually began in October 2013, 

© Pearls and Irritations