Drama in the House?
So it's finally here: the day I never thought I would see. Around 2.30 BST Rupert and James Murdoch will appear before the Culture Select Committee to answer questions on the hacking and corruption charges now facing Newscorp, followed by Rebekah Brooks an hour later. Live House of Commons Coverage here and apparently this will also be covered by C-Span.
HOC CULTURE, MEDIA AND SPORT COMMITTEE Tuesday 19 July
Wilson Room
Meeting starts at 2.30pm
Phone-hacking
Witnesses
Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News Corporation, and James Murdoch, Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, International News Corporation
Rebekah Brooks, former Chief Executive Officer, News International Ltd
Photo: Murdoch arriving Whitehall earlier today: as Michael Wolff tweets:
A bit Day of the Locust like, crowds descending on Rupert
As everyone is warning, it might be disappointing theatrically: Brooks and the Murdoch's will both be heavily lawyered up and PR air brushed; expect no killer blows or sudden confessions; MPs are not trained examiners either. As Tom Watson, the courageous MP who along with Chris Bryant doggedly pursued the hacking allegations despite being ignored, ridiculed and then threatened has said:
"There is not going to be a killer blow on Tuesday. Expectations are way too high," [Watson] told the Guardian. "We will get the symbolism of parliament holding these people to account for the first time. We will look for facts, and not just offer rhetoric. This story has been like slicing a cucumber, you just get a little bit closer to the truth each time."
Chris Bryant himself has just reiterated on the BBC:
The theatre of [today's appearance] is irrelevant. In the end we've got to get to the bottom of what is a very murky pool. And I tell you Rebekah Brooks was right. We're only half way into that pool at the moment.
However, earlier there is another committee - the Home Affairs committee - could be just as relevant as the two senior policemen who resigned in the last two days are to be quizzed by MPs. There actually could be more fireworks here, since Sir Paul Stephenson has already lobbed a passing shot at the Prime Minister David Cameron over his associations with News International. Live Parliamentary coverage here.
HOC HOME AFFAIRS COMMITTEE Tuesday 19 July
Grimond Room
Meeting starts at 12pm
Unauthorised tapping into or hacking of mobile communications
Witnesses
Sir Paul Stephenson, Commissioner, Metropolitan Police
Dick Fedorcio OBE, Director of Public Affairs and Internal Communication, Metropolitan Police
Assistant Commissioner John Yates, Specialist Operations, Metropolitan Police
However, whatever happens, it IS a momentous day for another reason
Holding Unaccountable Power to Account: It's A Wonderful Life
I actually find this quite moving, and a Panorama documentary about Murdoch actually bought me to tears last night. This will always be a significant day, because after 42 years, the man who was rumoured to be, and now revealed to be, the most powerful man in Britain is finally having to face its elected representatives.
Murdoch faced a closed, untelevised session of a Lords Committee years ago, which moved to New York for his benefit: but this is completely different occasion. Having suffered, like all of us, four decades of Murdoch's tabloid menace and broadsheet right wing ideology, MPs who previous ran scared of Murdoch (because he could make or break their careers) are now going to face him without fear or favour. As Charlie Brooker put it hilariously, it's like Losing God:
A few weeks ago, Murdoch, or rather the more savage tendencies of the press as a whole, represented God. Fear of God isn't always a bad thing in itself, if it keeps you on the straight and narrow – but politicians behaved like medieval villagers who didn't just believe in Him, but quaked at the mere suggestion of a glimmer of a whisper of His name. You must never anger God. God wields immense power. God can hear everything you say. You must worship God, and please Him, or He will destroy you. For God controls the sun, which may shine upon you, or singe you to a Kinnock. Soon he will control the entire sky....
But then suddenly everything changed. The revelations over the hacking of grieving relatives' voicemails were the equivalent of a tornado ripping through an orphanage. "What kind of God would allow such a thing?" asked the villagers, wading through the aftermath. And they started to suspect He didn't exist.
They thought about the hours and days they'd spent in church, saying their prayers, rocking on their knees, whipping themselves with knotted rope, or flying round the world to address one of God's conferences, and they grew angry.
One by one they stood up to decry God. "He's a sod," said one. "No he's not, he's a monster," said another. Eventually they formed the consensus view that he was a sodmonster.
For my generation (born in the 60s) not only has Murdoch dominated our entire adult lives in terms of news, but his model of the media has disfigured politics. Of my college friends in the 80s, many got siphoned off into the financial services to earn lots of money in entirely unproductive asset bubbles. But a large number also got sucked into journalism, PR, media. I know my journalists - the mother of my children was a very senior BBC News executive - and while all of them were excellent, clever, committed people: I knew something was wrong.
I'd often ask TV presenters or news investigators why, given their passions and interest in politics, they didn't go into politics themselves, and become and MP. Generally, the answers were awkward. They couldn't say it, but they knew they would earn less money, and the route - being selected and then elected by the people - would be long, arduous and unpredictable. But one senior figure was bluntly honest with me:
Why would I become an MP, Peter. They have no power.
So that's part of the problem here, a system dysfunction that goes beyond the Newscorp empire to the wider world of the blogosphere. Pundits and opinion writers make much more noise, more money, and an easier route to political influence than the normal political careers. I have no problem with it as such - except this one anomaly. Politicians are ultimately accountable for their power - at the ballot box. As former Home Secretary Jack Straw has just said
Parliament should be the cockpit of the nation and not the newspapers
Today it looks like it will be.
So let's celebrate today whatever happens. The people's representatives are finally confronting the unaccountable 'state within a state' which Newscorp is. Whatever the outcome, I can't help think of It's A Wonderful Life and the way George Bailey stands up to Henry F Potter. The confrontation isn't direct. Indeed, at the end of the movie, the grasping monopolist - who would have turned Baileys hometown into a sleazy tabloid Pottterville - basically just disappears. The collective goodness of the community, which saves Bailey, makes Potter irrelevant. He keeps his riches. There is no denouement. Potter just fades away into moral oblivion and narrative insignificance.
This is how I guess the Murdochs will eventually depart, not with a bang but a whimper.
Below the fold I'll sketch the key dramatis personae in the hour before the Culture Committee, and also - using the UPDATE system to they're all timestamped - I'll be blogging as much as beneath that about what is sure to be another rollercoaster day in the Fall of the House of Murdoch Saga. But for quicker updates, and a much more comprehensive coverage, do go to the Guardian Live Blog, or - for a slightly different perspective - the Telegraph
Do share you own links, pimp your own diaries (I'm ignoring the US developments today: the Anomaly has already been following up the scandals at the Newscorp subsidiary NewsAmerica) and generally share your thoughts in what Chris Bryant has called:
One of the biggest scandals that we've known in British political history for the last 75 years.
Ok a brief background on some of the dramatis personae:
Rebekah Brooks (nee Wade)
This is the one major figure in today's showdown who I have met personally. I recounted that anecdote a few days back on Motley Moose.
It was at the Hay on Wye book festival, attended by many celebrities including Clinton and Gore, where I met her one night in 2006. Everyone was very drunk at this late night venue, but we started dancing and chatting, and kind of hung out in a corner, occasionally attended to by one of her quite merciless suspicious minions.
But the thing about Rebekah was that she displayed quite a ineluctable mix of flirtation, vulnerability and intimacy. She didn't know me from Adam, but she was soon telling me all about the split from her husband. She also felt people 'hated' her at the very liberal leftie event that book festival actually is. But her one moment of passion - though we kind of had our arms around each other shoulders for some unfathomable reason (i.e. alcohol) - was when she told me how, after her night in prison, Rupert was waiting for her in the car outside.
The evening went on - it was already around midnight when it started - and we carried on chatting for a while. I think we exchanged numbers, I can't frankly remember much else, except that impression of vulnerability and openness.
But one passing moment made me realise. Rebekah was alerted by her merciless minion that a photographer had been taking snaps of us together. Rebekah said she was worried for my sake ("Ross will kill you") and walked over to the photographer and chatted with him. A minute later she returned with a smile and the photographers whole memory card. I asked her what she said, and she just smiled.
It was only the next morning, less befuddled, that I worked it out: she either said to the photographer "Give me that card and you'll never work again/have to worry about work again." Indeed, such was the monopoly power she and Rupert exerted on Fleet Street, the two statements are almost the same.
So there you have it. As many have pointed out here, Murdoch has already sacrificed the world's biggest English language newspaper to 'protect Rebekah': he may even give up the whole of News International for his quasi daughter (if the family and shareholders will let him). Maybe this vignette gives an insight why...
But though a stellar networker, there are now multifarious pieces on what a useless editor she was. According to Paul McMullan, she knew little about writing a story, was distant and vindictive with staff. She could also be merciless against opponent. Chris Bryant MP was one of her early targets when he spoke up against The News of the World, and her paper published photos of him in his underwear. Several years later, when they passed each other one evening Rebekah noted the time and suggested Bryant should be "out on Clapham Common" - a notorious cruising spot. Her husband at the time, the actor Ross Kemp, retorted
Shut up you homophobic cow.
James Murdoch
I have no personal anecdotes to add about James, and there are plenty of profiles in the papers about the family dynamics in the Murdoch dynasty. Two things however - he's next in the frame for a possible arrest for 'perverting the course of justice' and is the 'smoking gun' that leads directly from the corruption and law breaking at News International (the UK papers) to the heart of Newscorp in the US.
The second thing is his intellectual arrogance. I was first alerted to his right wing libertarian agenda two years ago, when he gave a stunningly pompous lecture about how the BBC needed to be shrunk, and that Newscorp - that arch monopoly - would bring competition and innovation to the 'market in news'. As I called him in a previous diary, James is the Rand Paul of the Media:
Unlike his father (who was merely the son of a millionaire) and was an outsider with an Australian twang when he came to the snooty UK newspaper scene of the late 60s, James Murdoch is the son of a billionaire, speaks with a horrible Blair-like transatlantic twinge, and has the smug permatan look of the new apparatchiks - the MBA/McKinsey/Davos set who run the world without roots in any particular county.
The following year I met NI journalists and Tory apparatchiks at a conference who repeated this libertarian tosh almost word for word: here's some of the hyperbole from his Edinburgh Speech:
For hundreds of years people have fought for the right to publish what they think. Yet today the threat to independent news provision is serious and imminent....
Sixty years ago George Orwell published 1984. Its message is more relevant now than ever. As Orwell foretold, to let the state enjoy a near-monopoly of information is to guarantee manipulation and distortion.
We must have a plurality of voices and they must be independent. Yet we have a system in which state-sponsored media - the BBC in particular - grow ever more dominant. That process has to be reversed.
His idea of 'reversing the process' was getting the Tories he supported to reduce the BBC (they did that in 2010) and to push for a cross platform monopoly with 100% ownership of our monopoly pay per view TV, and bigger than the BBC in terms of revenue, BSkyB. And this from a company which already owned 37 per cent of the UK press.
Plurality and independence? James is clearly a great dissembler. We don't know yet whether or how he's deceived Parliament. He may be yet be proved to be a liar, or maybe even something worse - maybe he has even deceived himself.
But let's remember how close James was to both Rebekah and David Cameron: and let's not forget: until this time last week the BSkyB deal was going to go through.
Rupert Murdoch
What can I say here that has not already been said? Ever since his arrival here in 1969 to take over the News of the World and The Sun, and then his courtship of Thatcher to allow him both to break competition rules and take over The Times stable of papers and then base Sky offshore, he's been the bane of my life. I had a tough adolescence, with years spent on a council estate thanks to family bankruptcy, and one of the things that keep me going through my teens - a shard of cultural light which saved me from the brink and gave me a taste for writing and culture was The Sunday Times, then edited by Tina Brown's husband Harold Evans. It was an amazing paper, full of investigative journalism, great columnists, great accessible coverage of theatre, books, TV reviews. When Murdoch took it over it became of pompous unreadable mass of supplements, with no clear editorial direction: right wing politics and ignorant cultural snootiness. (Though I think I did appear in it in 1983 thanks to the surviving theatre critic, James Fenton, reviewing one of my plays).
His influence carried on spreading throughout my life, both politically and professionally. His newspaper standards brought down ALL the broadsheet papers. He constantly attacked the BBC, which often cavilled under his blows. And of course, after the deal done with Thatcher, he constantly promoted an anti Europe, laissez faire, Thatcherite agenda. One of my heroes, the dramatist Dennis Potter, called the cancer that would kill him 'Rupert'.
I briefly worked for one of his subsidiaries in the 90s, and though all his organisations are staffed with excellent people, ideologically and managerially, this was a culture of control, power, hierarchy, dynasty and monopoly: despite all of Rupert's avowed belief in 'free markets' and 'meritocracy' and his pretence that he is anti-elites.
Michael Wolff, Murdoch's biographer, and someone who has spent over 60 hours with the man, is still the best independent source of insight into Rupert's character. What he says about today's select committee appearance could be a useful guide to what might happen today:
He will handle it very poorly. This is something that Rupert doesn’t know how to do, has never done, has resisted doing and frankly can’t do. Rupert is – on top of everything else – an incredibly shy man and he is also a very inarticulate man and he is also a man who, I don’t think he is going to know what to do with the fact that he will be confronted here. It is very likely he will get angry. He will say things that people should not say in public. I know they are drilling him and rehearsing him over and over and over and over again and they are saying to him ‘do not say anything, just answer the questions in as few words as possible’. Whether he absorbs that lesson or not…actually I can’t imagine that he will or that he has.
Meanwhile, I will post all developments as updates beneath this line:
5:24 AM PT: Some early reactions from Paul Stephenson's testimony from people I trust:
Steve Richards
His arguments are contradictory and do not stack up.
Alan Rusbridger
Question is why Stephenson didn't pay heed to our warnings to him about seriousness of the story in Dec 09
5:37 AM PT: An amazing thought from Michael Wolff, which I think might have some merit
Beginning to think it quite possible Keith Rupert Murdoch will resign as CEO when he is before the committee
One thing you have to say about Rupert - he loves setting the agenda with disruptive wilful tactics. It's been his whole business strategy. What's the odds on this?
5:51 AM PT: CNN have said News corp have rebuffed the rumour above:
BREAKING: News Corp DENIES Rupert Murdoch out: "Suggestions that a plan is currently being accelerated or implemented are inaccurate.”
6:17 AM PT: If you want a contentious pie fight AND a live blog, the Spectator could be a great site. They're a right wing weekly in the UK, but usually smart and witty
http://www.spectator.co.uk/...
6:20 AM PT: Murdoch is now in House of Commons: the most powerful person in the UK finally has to face the People's Parliament
6:30 AM PT: On the former assistant commissioner's testimony: it seems that Ed Llewellyn - another NI stooge high up in Cameron's administration - didn't want to hear about 'nuances' of hacking investigation.
This is putting intolerable pressure on another of the PMs senior aides
6:36 AM PT: James looks nervous. Rupert old and deaf. They have NOT been allowed to make a opening statement. Hooray. James protests. To no avail
6:42 AM PT: James days 'Sorry". Rupert says "This is the most humbled day of my life"
Scripted, headline grabbing - just shows you what good PR can buy
6:44 AM PT: Whittingdale asks - "Who was lying?" James equivocates. "The company relied on the police (40 percent of whose press officers used to work for NI!), the PCC (a toothless set of self regulators!)
Whittingdale asks: "Who knew?" James answers "I do not have that knowledge"
6:53 AM PT: James on Brooks and Hinton: "I have no knowledge of their knowledge... there's no evidence I have seen..."
Rupert challenged by heroic Tom Watson: one word answers. Who lied to you Rupert. You acknowledge you were misled.
Then back to 2003 - were you aware Rebekah admitted to paying police?
Did anyone investigate it? Rupert: No. Let me just say something. This is not an excuse but an explanation of my laxity....
Watson: were you aware of interceptiing voice mails in 2006. What did you do over Goodman and Mulcaire?
Rupert: hired lawyers.
Watson: What did you personally do?
Rupert: I spoke to Mr Hinton?
In 2008, why did you not dismiss someone after another case, and Judge made clear one of the journalists tried to blackmail someone
Rupert: Maybe my son knew....
Watson: So no one in your company brought this to you attention? Maybe because you wouldn't care?
ONE WORD ANSWERS FROM MURDOCH: No, no, no. Murdoch looks daft
6:57 AM PT: Big pause: Rupert can't remember why he said Harbottle and Lewis had made a mistake in the WSJ.
He looks lost. Completely lost. Inarticulate. James tries to intervene...
Watson: I want to talk to your father. He's responsible for Corporate Governance.....who told you about the emails.
Rupert: I was in daily contact with my son and Rebekah
6:58 AM PT: WATSON: At what point did you find out criminality was endemic at the News of the World?
RUPERT: Endemic is a very strong word....
7:00 AM PT: WATSON: a Parliamentary inquiry said your executives guilty of collective amnesia. And no one brought it to your attention?
Rupert looks on the ropes. Further questions "I forget the date".
7:07 AM PT: Tom Watson's probing was a masterclass.
Now a question abou going in the back door of Number Ten after the last election. Great image. And worth reminding us all. It was two days after David Cameron took residence?
7:08 AM PT: iRUPERT: I was invited through the back door. Cameron wanted to thank me for my support during the election.
OK. So now we know.
7:09 AM PT: On 9/11 victims hacking and FBI investigation
RUPERT: I can't believe it happened to anyone from America.
7:11 AM PT: Who do you blame for the failure of the BskyB bid
RUPERT:Hysteria..... A lot of competitors with difference agendas... a mood stopped it going ahead.
7:12 AM PT: My take now: Rupert looks ineffective and out of touch. James is trying to take the flak with the usual PR flannel. But he looks evasive and smooth and unconvincing.
Son in the frame. Father in the basket
7:14 AM PT: Ultimately do you accept that you're responsible
RUPERT: No.
Then who is responsible
RUPERT: The people who I trusted. The people that they trusted. Les Hinton... I'd trust him with my life
And yes, you've just admitted to being an 'irresponsible' head of corporate governance, as well as throwing a 50 year long colleague under the bus
7:18 AM PT: TERESE COFFEY: Who made the decision to close NOTW.
RUPERT: My son and I... Ms Brooks....
COFFEY: Not a commercial decision
RUPERT: Far from it.
7:20 AM PT: As a Labour MP tweets
DavidLammy David Lammy
Tom Watson effectively demonstrating a failure of corporate governance by Rupert Murdoch under the Companies Act 2006.
7:25 AM PT: The committee is going hard on the financial and CORPORATE GOVERNANCE line - that stops it crossing over to the criminal investigations underway. It also puts Rupert, as head of corporate governance, bang in the frame.
7:27 AM PT: Some funny tweets
Entire six-pack of Guinness if an MP asks Murdoch why Fox ever cancelled "Firefly
The BIg Question to emerge so far: Is Rupert Murdoch a fit and proper person to run a whelk stall?
7:31 AM PT: Rupert talks about this country being better for having a competitive market (what you own 40 percent of the papers!!) and 'we're' better for it.
What we? You're a US citizen. You don't pay taxes here even
7:35 AM PT: Armando Iannucci
James is just masterbabbling now
Tom Chatfield
Suddenly, we've entered a parallel universe in which James Murdoch gets to give a speech about his passion for journalistic ethics...
7:37 AM PT: Armando Iannucci
James Murdoch drinking game. 1 shot every time he says "process" and 2 for "proactive". A Stella when Rupert says 'I've never heard of it.'
7:40 AM PT: Got to say James Murdoch is very good at blathering. I'm losing the will to live. As a stellar UK columnist and journalist says:
@steverichards14
steve richards
The Murdochs far more effective than senior police officers in not saying very much. Much better stories from the Home Affairs Committee.
7:41 AM PT: Are you familiar with the term wilful blindness? It's a term that came up with the Enron standard. You're still responsible if you're not aware.
Great point.
7:42 AM PT: RUPERT: We were not ever guilty of that (Wilful Blindness)
7:45 AM PT: Who's COACHED you today.... James looking a little on the back foot. He doesn't answer the question. Who coached them.
On MURDOCH's hands-off approach. How often would you speak to the editor to the sun? The NOTW
RUPERT.... Er.... Er.... Very seldom... Notw some sundays. Sunday Times every saturday... (He pauses) I'm not really in touch.... To say that we're hands off is wrong... I work 12 hours a day.... Perhaps I lost sight of NotW because of this... small in the general frame of our company...
If someone said you spoke to the editor of the Sun at least twice a day, would that be misleading.
RUPERT: I'd like to but No.
7:47 AM PT: Guardian journalist Paul Lewis tweets: Whittingdale needs to take command quick or the Murdochs will slip away unharmed
7:58 AM PT: Who paid the employees once they were fired.
JAMES: I don't know.
Would have been Les Hinton?
RUPERT: Could have been... On the instructions of the chief legal officer.
Rupert is more revealing in this aspect.
8:01 AM PT: Payoffs and confidentiality clauses?
JAMES: Nothing that would stop them being transparent during the investigations.... And only on the basis of no impropriety...
8:03 AM PT: steve richards
First big significant admission: NI paid money to Goodman and Mulcaire after convictions..and 'cd have been' authorised by Les Hinton.
8:06 AM PT: Have you being paying Glenn Mulcaire's legal fees during the course of the civil actions.
JAMES: Yes, certain legal fees were paid.
Why should a company wish to pay the fees of a convicted felon... if not to buy his silence?
JAMES: I'm not a lawyer.... these are serious litigiations... its important and customary to pay legal fees.
Are you still contributing to his legal fees
JAMES: I don't know the precise status of that now.
8:07 AM PT: Is it not time to say enough is enough? The man hacked the phone of Milly Fowler.... Do you worst... We don't what to pay.
RUPERT: I'd like to do that... Provided it's not in breach of a legal contract
8:10 AM PT: Michael Wolff
Oh this is preposterous... They would know so much more
8:13 AM PT: Michael Wolff
They would know so much more if they simply read rival papers
8:18 AM PT: Hmmm. I'm bored. Bring on Rebekah
8:29 AM PT: John Cooper QC Criminal Law & Justice Weekly texts: These are speeches not questions. Why no lawyers on the committee?
8:32 AM PT: Asked whether his editors knew about any of this
RUPERT: I can't say.... criminal inquiries... by MR HINTON supervised it.
Hinton sounds like the fall guy for Rupert.
8:36 AM PT: RM: "No-one kept me in the dark. I may have been lax. Anything seen as a crisis comes to me."
8:46 AM PT: Damian Green does a bit of brownnosing. Oddly enough I've met him and his wife several times. I won't elaborate, but I'm not surprised James called it "A very good question"
From the BBC
Conservative MP Damian Collins - the second from last MP on the committee to have a go at questioning the Murdochs - asks if it is right that people in public life can expect total privacy. Rupert Murdoch's brief reply: "Nope."
8:51 AM PT: Classic-Murdoch jokes in relation to Prime Ministers:
"I wish they would leave me alone"
.
8:56 AM PT: SITTING SUSPENDED!! Some kind of physical attack on Murdoch. What a mess! There was just going to be a killer question about settlements and confidentiality clauses.
Really this kind of direct action doesn't help anyone: and just makes Rupert look a victim
9:01 AM PT: Heather Brooke
by sarahchurchwell
Wendi Deng is living up to all expectations - she's a not-so-secret ninja.
9:06 AM PT: A DRAMATIC END: NOT SURE IF THE COMMITTEE WILL RECONVENE TODAY
I've got to go out, but will be back to sense the fallout of this in a couple of hours.
9:09 AM PT: OK. It was man with a paper plate of pie. Apparently he got Rupert with some foam. Wendi beat him several times with the plate saying "I've got him". Reconvening...
9:11 AM PT: Rupert has his jacket off and has cleaned up. Got to give him some Kudos for that. As for confidentiality clauses - James Murdoch seems to be saying there was.
I'll hold on for another 20 minutes. This overunning by a couple of hours. I won't be able to live blog Rebakah. Hopefully I can catch up with what you guys say in the thread.
9:13 AM PT: This investigator is great. Asking about hacking Jude Law's phone on US soil and the 9/11 victims.
James has prepared blather.
9:15 AM PT: James 'not aware' of any other allegations in other territories. Meanwile a funny tweet
Sarah Bowden
by casparberry
Rupert Murdoch claiming he has no direct knowledge of the custard pie attack.
9:17 AM PT: Mr Rupert Murdoch 'the buck stops with you'... you're ultimately in charge.... you say you're humbled... have you told your other editors around the globe to make sure this isn't replicated
RM: No. But I'm happy to do so.
9:20 AM PT: Louise Mensch: Is it not the truth that journalists at NOTW felt entitled to you use the methods because they were part of British culture?
Sounds like a Tory defence - it's not just Murdoch. But NI stable set the standard, and were basically a modal monopoly on Fleet St
9:22 AM PT: COULD BE IMPORTANT from Laura Keunssburg at the BBC
Away from Wendi protecting RM from the protestor, this is important info from Colin Myler, that questions the Murdoch's version of events
At end of review he conducted, Myler, last editor of NoTW, was told by head of HR Daniel Cloke, 'good news, no smoking gun'
Colin Myler says Murdoch evidence is wrong - 'contrary to what cttee been told' he had no part in Harbottle and Lewis review
9:24 AM PT: Mensch: Good point. Les HInton resigned - he was captain of the ship - what about you - have you thought of resigning
RM: No... Other people should pay. I'm needed
9:25 AM PT: WATSON: Why did you pay an astronomical sum to Taylor and Clifford. Will you release them from the confidentiality clause?
JAMES: Not worth exploring hypotheticals
WATSON: Why wouldn't you want to retain the emails
9:26 AM PT: Murdoch reads a short closing statement.... blah blah.
9:48 AM PT: Rebekah Brooks now blathering. I look forward to commentary in the thread while I'm out. CEEBS is doing a great job without me