When a reporter from Rupert Murdoch’s British Sunday paper the News of the World was jailed, along with a private detective, in 2007 for hacking into the cellphone voicemails of aides to the royal family, the paper insisted it was a one-off — a “rogue reporter” operating without the knowledge or approval of his bosses. That assertion prompted two reactions from those in the U.K. newspaper industry: snorts of disbelief — after all, the British tabloids have a reputation for aggressive and occasionally dubious behavior when in pursuit of a story — and a creeping fear that the conviction could spread suspicion and bring the police to the door. Which is why so many were surprised, and some relieved, when Scotland Yard ended its investigation after that single case.
But on Tuesday, the News of the World’s current chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, and the paper’s former news editor, Ian Edmondson, were arrested on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, believed to be voicemail messages. The arrests are the first in a new Metropolitan Police investigation into the scandal known as Hackgate, an investigation that threatens not only to reveal how widespread the practice of phone hacking is among British papers, but also that the Met could be complicit.
Even after the case was considered closed in 2007, there were signs that it had been just the tip of the iceberg. Questions were raised by legislators over the seeming reluctance of the Met to widen the original inquiry, suggesting that the police feared a deeper probe would reveal a close relationship between the force and the News of the World, and even that officers had been paid for information by journalists — something the Met has insisted is illegal and not tolerated.
And there were the continuing allegations from celebrities, including actress Sienna Miller and comedian Steve Coogan, and politicians — former prime minister Gordon Brown and his deputy John Prescott among them — that their phones had been hacked by the News of the World and, possibly, other U.K. papers. The affair refused to die, even leading to the resignation in January of Prime Minister David Cameron’s spin doctor Andy Coulson, who had been the News of the World’s editor at the time of the original offence but always claimed to have known nothing about his reporter’s activities.
