@Walter Hinteler,
Brilliant profile on Tom Watson in today's Grauniad
Tom Watson: tireless campaigner gears up for Murdoch showdownLabour MP on culture committee gets his day after two years seeking answers from News International
Share168 reddit this Patrick Wintour, Political editor guardian.co.uk, Sunday 17 July 2011 20.46 BST Article history
Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, has spent two years seeking answers about one of the most powerful news organisations in the world. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Tom Watson, Labour MP for West Bromwich East, Commons tormentor-in-chief of Rupert Murdoch, joined the culture, media and sport select committee two years ago to downsize his politics.
On Tuesday, after many hours pursuing the world's most powerful news organisation, this emotionally complex man comes face to face with the mighty Murdoch, his son James, and Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International.
Watson denies Murdoch will meet his nemesis, saying the session is unlikely to meet advance billing.
"There is not going to be a killer blow on Tuesday. Expectations are way too high," he said in an interview with 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."
At times Watson has appeared like an isolated conspiracy obsessive. If Hansard permitted, some of his interventions would be printed in green ink. But with the Murdoch empire in freefall, the son of a union convenor in Sheffield looks vindicated. Even the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, last week praised his tireless campaigning.
Watson recalls how he stumbled into his role in 2009, after a "very tough time" during the Damian McBride affair.
Watson was falsely accused by a number of newspapers, especially the Sun, of being part of a Labour group involving McBride planning to set up a website to smear Tory MPs. "The Damian story broke on a Friday," he recalls. "Iain Dale got commissioned to write a piece in the Mail on Sunday saying I had been involved; on Monday the media went crazy, and by Tuesday most media recognised a mistake had been made.
"But the Sun had me on the front page, and then on Wednesday and Thursday four people started going through the bins at my family's home, and my neighbour's bin bags. They climbed a 6ft gate and were in the garage. A neighbour saw them off. I do not know where they were from."
He told the Guardian: "I took a quality of life decision. I didn't want to be part of this any more. It was taking too much toll. I had an interest in sport and the arts, so told Gordon [Brown] that at the next reshuffle I wanted to stand down as a minister.
"On the day I stood down in March 2009, the Sun printed a retraction, roughly six months after the original story. Serendipitously, a slot appeared on the culture select committee, and I won that in an internal election. The committee told me they were just completing a report on press standards, and about to start another one.
"Two days later Nick Davies broke the story in the Guardian on the extent of the phone hacking, and John Whittingdale, the culture select committee chairman, to his credit, extended the inquiry."
At his very first hearing, on 21 July 2009, Watson found his presence on the select committee challenged by Tom Crone, legal manager on News Group Newspapers, on the grounds he was in litigation with News Group. Speaker's Counsel effectively told the Murdoch group to get lost.
"What was clear from the first hour of evidence given that day was that the executives were incredibly nervous. The interplay between Crone and the News of the World editor Colin Myler was curious. I was just trying to find out whether they'd told Rupert Murdoch about the payments, to silence people like Gordon Taylor with a £700,000 payment. They went defensive and said they had never told Rupert.
"But then they admitted that James Murdoch had authorised the payment, and from that moment I knew there was much more to this than met the eye. As soon as Myler said that, Crone looked very tense and suddenly realised a body blow had been delivered.
"The media attention was on Andy Coulson [former editor of the News of the World, subsequently David Cameron's communications director] that day, for obvious reasons, due to his role in the Conservative party, but I was not particularly interested in him. I was interested in how the company operated."
Watson admits now: "We made mistakes as a committee. We let Les Hinton, the former executive chairman of News International, be interviewed on a video from New York. We could not eyeball him, and did not get far. We could have ordered private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to give evidence, but there was a sense on the committee he was a tiny cog, and had to be concerned with their privacy. We nearly took a vote on whether to compel Rebekah Brooks to give evidence, but in the interests of keeping the committee together we dropped it.
"I realised then that the final select committee report's findings were going to be inadequate. We would have to find media moments after the election to keep the pressure up." Since then, he says, he has probably worked on some aspect of the inquiry every day for two years, sometimes 12 hours a day.
"Some lawyers started to give me hints. Slowly whistleblowers and victims started talking to me. And that is how I got a better understanding of what went wrong. Some stories were harrowing. That is when I realised I could not let go.
"I also realised some of the lawyers were in competition with one another seeking clients, and I did a bit to bring them together to agree common responses.
"The Met were in total closedown, but I had a breakthrough where one insider told me how the company was structured and where things might get hidden. I started asking questions about a second secret server. And at the perjury trial for Tommy Sheridan, News International claimed they had lost an archive of emails covering 2005 and 2006 and that they had been lost in a transfer to Mumbai.
"I wrote to the information commissioner saying there had been a breach of the Data Protection Act since there was a failure to report a loss of personal data. In January News International admitted to the information commissioner the emails had been found. The idea was to put their data storage under massive scrutiny, and get the police to wise up to what they were doing."
Watson is quick to praise other MPs such as Chris Bryant, Paul Farrelly, Adrian Sanders, Mark Reckless and Julian Huppert, but he adds: "The person who has not been recognised is the Speaker. He gave us a platform to apply pressure on the government by allowing urgent questions to be asked, and the Standing Order 24 [a rule allowing an MP to ask the Speaker for an emergency debate]. Without being able to use the chamber as a way of applying pressure, I don't think we would have got there.
"It helped open up the media, and I knew that once this became no longer about celebrity tittle tattle, but instead victims of crime, the public would have a very different view on this. I thought the media explosion would be about the Soham family. I raised it with Yates right at the end of a session on 25 March. but in a very low key way. I knew that once it was confirmed it would genuinely shock people."
He concludes that the mess that the Murdochs find themselves in "is of their own making, in both conducting the hacking, and then failing to clear it up. Their response until the middle of last week has been dumb insolence, but they are now in freefall. I don't think they have a strategy. They are just slashing and burning everything, and anyone who was there at the time. The difficulty they have is James Murdoch was there at the time, and we know he authorised the payments to buy the silence of a victim of crime.
"It is still hard to believe what has happened over the past 10 days. It is just beginning to sink in what together we may have found out."
