Did a mistake in the Guardian's Milly Dowler story cause the closure of the News of the World?
The last 72 hours has seen a string of complaints that Rupert Murdoch's decision to shut down the 168-year-old title in July stemmed from a solitary fact: that it was initially reported, wrongly, by this newspaper that the NoW was responsible for deleting voicemail messages on the phone of the schoolgirl, messages that gave her family false hope that she was in fact alive.
As fresh evidence has emerged, it is now understood that this was not the case. The false hope moment came before Glenn Mulcaire, the hacking specialist employed by the News of the World, was tasked with targeting Milly's phone.
The result has been a volley of criticism, in part from past and present News International employees, that without that aspect of the story the NoW would still be open today and 200 people who had been promised redeployment would not have lost their jobs.
Richard Caseby, managing editor of the Sun, summed up the response to a Lords committee, protesting about the "twist of the knife".
He said "the Guardian's statement of fact" regarding the deletions "turned what was natural condemnation into a wave of such public revulsion that the News of the World could not really function as a going concern any more and it had to be shut down".
Others have latched on to the argument. The Leveson inquiry was told that this week a journalist from the Daily Mail called up to ask the Dowlers' lawyer, Mark Lewis, if the family would be "giving their money back". (The family received £2m in relation to its phone-hacking claims.)
There remains no dispute that Milly's phone was hacked into and messages left for her were listened to in April 2002. Journalists from the NoW approached Surrey police, who were searching for Milly, with transcripts of messages left on her phone.
The Guardian's story about the hacking of Milly's phone was published on the afternoon of Monday 4 July. The decision to close was announced on the afternoon of Thursday 7 July. It stunned everybody at the time. Nobody had been calling for the newspaper to close, although allegations of phone hacking were mounting.
Incredulous staff were told by former editor and the then News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks: "Worse revelations are yet to come and you will understand in a year why we closed the News of the World." Company insiders briefed that the title had become "toxic".
According to the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times, James Murdoch said to his father: "Pops, we've got to close it down. If we act now, we do it ourselves." Rupert asked some questions, paused, and uttered one word: "Yes."
The Dowler story had an enormous impact, taking the hacking scandal beyond celebrities and politicians. But it was not the only story about alleged NoW illegal activity to emerge in the three days before the Murdochs swung the axe. The Daily Telegraph followed with two influential scoops that added to the mix. On 6 July, it splashed on "Hackers 'snooped on Soham families'," and also reported that Scotland Yard was contacting the families of victims of the 7/7 bombings amid concerns that they had been targeted.
A day later, the Telegraph splashed with "Families of war dead 'hacked,'" this time reporting that bereaved relatives of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan may have been targeted and the London Evening Standard wrote that Metropolitan police officers had allegedly received £100,000 in unlawful payments from NoW journalists.
There was a wider context. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation was, at the time, close to winning approval for its highly controversial bid for BSkyB. George Brock, a former managing editor of the Times who is now a professor of journalism at City University, said: "What the Dowler story made clear was that phone hacking wasn't just aimed at celebrities and that the attempts to conceal its scope were going to fail. I'd guess that in that context, News Corp felt that only a very dramatic gesture could possibly save the bid for full control of Sky, which was the company's biggest issue at that stage."
That leads him to conclude the paper would have shut anyway, with or without the detail about deletions, although in the end the BSkyB bid also failed shortly after.
A more significant question is what made the NoW so vulnerable. In some respects, News International had been waiting for a Milly Dowler-like story to drop for months. Towards the very end of 2010, the Murdoch newspaper publisher quietly changed strategy, conceding finally that the old "rogue reporter" defence it had been using since Clive Goodman was jailed in 2007 was dead. It fell apart when a second journalist, Ian Edmondson, the news editor, was suspended after it had been alleged in court that he had ordered Mulcaire to hack into phones belonging to Sienna Miller. He was later dismissed, and has since been arrested on hacking charges.
The recognition at the Murdoch publisher prompted a wave of internal thinking. Senior insiders talked about "scenario planning" – and one such scenario was that a victim of crime would emerge as a target of phone hacking.
News International's tabloids, had, in part, been built on the elevation of the victim: Brooks and other executives well appreciated that a Dowler-like story would be a game changer.
There had been a false alarm a few weeks earlier when the Labour MP Tom Watson said the parents of the murdered Soham girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, had been contacted by the police investigating hacking. But the story did not catch fire.
NI had already endured months of pressure. The ex-NoW editor Andy Coulson had resigned in January from his job in Downing Street as the drip-drip of speculation about the amount of hacking intensified. A few days later the Met began Operation Weeting, its first serious inquiry into phone hacking since the work that had led to the prosecution of Goodman and Mulcaire.
The arrests of the current and former NoW journalists Edmondson, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup followed. The company threw in its hand on the growing number of civil actions brought by the likes of Miller and Tessa Jowell, setting up a compensation fund that it hoped would pay out no more than £20m. Two other police inquiries – Elveden, into alleged corrupt payments to police officers, and Tuleta, into computer hacking – had begun.
There has been hardly any let-up since, although there has been so much revelation that what would have once been a significant development is seen as an incremental piece of news.
Operation Weeting has concluded that 803 people were hacked over a period of about five years, which would imply a rough average of three a week – although nobody will probably ever know how much hacking was done by journalists privately without the assistance of Mulcaire, whose 11,000 pages of notes are critical to the police case. It has to be asked if the NoW could have survived all this.
Significantly, News Corporation has remained silent this week. It has allowed an outrider in the form of Richard Caseby to go on the attack, but the company is mindful of the risks of making firm statements which are undermined by subsequent events.
The expectation, indeed, had been that the publisher would act swiftly to launch a Sunday Sun – undermining the sense the company had suffered long term commercial damage – although in recent months the speculation that it would do so has receded.
It may not be the case that the paper caused the voicemail deletions that gave the Dowler family false hope that Milly was still alive in March 2002.
But there has been no shortage of other serious allegations levelled against the paper, both before its closure and after.
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