Introduction

On 4 July 2011, it was reported by The Guardian that journalists working for the News of the World had hired private investigators to hack into missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler's voicemail inbox shortly after her disappearance in March 2002. It was alleged that they had deleted some messages, giving false hope to police and to Dowler's family, who thought that she might have deleted the messages and therefore might still be alive, and also potentially destroying valuable evidence both about her abduction and against a potential abductor and murderer. Two days later, the Daily Telegraph reported that the voicemail accounts of some relatives of British soldiers killed in action in Iraq since 2003 and Afghanistan since 2001 had been listened to by employees of the News of the World.

On 8 July, Rupert Murdoch took the decision to close down the News of the World, sacking over 200 employees. However, over the coming days, senior MPS officers also came under scrutiny, with allegations in the press of inappropriate relations between the MPS and members of News International and suggestions that these senior MPS officers had known about the practice of phone hacking for some time but had failed to act on warnings of media misconduct. In the coming weeks and months, over 250 journalists were arrested and/or interviewed under caution. Forty-five journalists and public servants were charged and convicted, including Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor and the media advisor to the then British Prime Minister, David Cameron. The Commissioner of the MPS, Sir Paul Stephenson, and his Deputy Commissioner, John Yates, also resigned as a result of the scandal. There were estimated to be over 5,000 victims of the phone-hacking scandal.

In Chapter 2, I described how the start of my research coincided with these events and how I found it extremely difficult initially to make contact with journalists or MPS press officers. Through speaking to a number of former national crime journalists and former MPS officers, however, I was able to gain introductions to journalists and press officers who were currently in post – and in the case of two journalists, to whom I am extremely grateful, introductions to their ‘unofficial’ police contacts within the MPS.