In early 1967, the News of the World, the British tabloid that recently closed down because of the phone hacking scandal, reported that Mick Jagger had taken LSD. He had also consumed six Benzedrine tablets in front of reporters, the paper said, and shown off a lump of hashish.
The story was entirely false. It was just possible that the News of the World’s reporters had seen Brian Jones, another Rolling Stone who had a serious drug problem, consume the drugs and had confused him with Jagger. In 1967, Fleet Street reporters could not always tell long-haired pop stars apart.
Jagger, who had never taken LSD, went on TV to condemn the News of the World and filed a libel suit.
This was the cue for a systematic campaign of harassment and surveillance. An unmarked van was parked in the road behind Jagger’s flat at odd hours. His phone sounded tapped. And he had the sense that someone was watching him.
The surveillance came to a head one weekend when Jagger, Marianne Faithful, his then girlfriend, and various other friends were at Keith Richards’ country house, Redlands. As the gang hung around listening to Bob Dylan on the stereo, the police burst in. They had information that there were drugs on the premises, they declared, and proceeded to conduct a raid while Dylan blared on the stereo: “Everybody must get stoned….”
They found nothing on Jagger but Robert Fraser, a friend of the Stones, was found to have 24 government-issue Spanish heroin tablets on his person. “They are insulin tablets”, he said straight-faced. “Right” said the policemen and returned them while continuing to look for evidence of drug use by the Stones. Another friend, who had a bag full of acid, escaped detection because he told the police that the bag contained valuable exposed film and could not be opened. “Okay sir,” said the officers and moved on.
All they found to tie Jagger to drugs were a few speed pills, legal on the Continent, but which had been outlawed in England a year before. They belonged to Marianne but Jagger gallantly said they were his so that she would not be arrested.
The Stones were charged with drug possession and Jagger sentenced to a year in prison (the maximum sentence for possession of speed). The police said they had received a tip about drug use at Redlands and sure enough, the tip came from the News of the World.
Later it was discovered that many policeman (and one inspector in particular who also launched a campaign of persecution against John Lennon) had been paid off by the News of the World. Corrupt links between the police and the paper ran deep. And the rule of thumb was: if you sued the News of the World, it would send the cops to get you.
I dredge up this ancient history (and it is really ancient but also a little ironic – who would have thought, in 1967, that the Stones would outlast the News of the World which was already a century old then?) to put the current News of the World controversy in perspective.
It has frequently been suggested that the recent phone hacking scandal marked a new low in British tabloid journalism or even, that things were fine till Rupert Murdoch came along. In fact, as the story of the Stones bust demonstrates, the News of the World — and much of Britain’s tabloid press—- has been doing this sort of thing for several decades now.
Illegal surveillance has been part of the tabloid press’s journalistic repertoire for as long as I can remember. And while there is shock and horror over the suggestion that the News of the World paid off Scotland Yard officers in the last few years, the truth is that police corruption in Britain is actually less prevalent today than it was in the Sixties when cops were in bed with gangsters, ran porn rackets and raided anybody that Fleet Street wanted them to harass.
Moreover, the Murdochs did not own the News of the World in 1967 so to suggest that great British journalistic traditions were compromised by Australian intervention is just silly. This is the sort of thing that a section of Fleet Street has always indulged in.
If you’ve missed the controversy, here’s what happened: a steady stream of revelations over the last few years suggest that reporters at the News of the World illegally hacked into the phones of upto 4,000 people, checking on their voice-mails and perhaps, listening to their conversations. The list of those whose phones were hacked (often by private detectives working on behalf of the paper) included politicians, sports stars, actors, other journalists and anybody else who happened to be in the news at the time.
Though the revelations have been emerging for five or six years now, they had little impact on the News of the World or the Murdoch empire because the paper was able to claim that they were the work of a few rogue reporters. Some heads did roll but all those sacked soon found work elsewhere. A former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, actually went on to became David Cameron’s press advisor.
The public mood only changed when it was revealed that a) the News of the World paid off policemen investigating the affair and b) that among the phones hacked was one belonging to a murdered schoolgirl. The great British public, which had been largely unperturbed by the revelations that celebrities had their phones hacked, promptly jumped up in outrage when the hacking was shown to have extended to murder victims.
As the public mood changed, the political class, which had always feared the power of the Murdoch press, suddenly saw an opportunity to hit back. And that’s the mess the Murdochs find themselves in.
Like everybody else I think that what the News of the World did was inexcusable. But I also believe that it would be quite wrong to act as though these practices are new (as the Stones saga demonstrates) or restricted to one paper.
My suspicion is that they extend to all Fleet Street, including sections of the quality press. David Cameron’s decision to call for a judicial inquiry into the press may have been cynical and opportunistic but there are many valid questions to be asked about journalistic practices.
If it is wrong to hack or tap phones or carry transcripts of the private conversations (as the current mood of outrage suggests) then let’s also accept that this is a fairly common and widespread practice. Reporters often tap phones or secretly tape conversations. Newspapers hack into computers and obtain access to bank data and personal financial information. They carry taped conversations without verifying their accuracy or testing the tapes for evidence of tampering. (Though as our own Bhushan tape saga demonstrates, this can be difficult to do when audio labs differ).
In Britain, there is also a little discussed kind of journalism called the ‘dark arts’ in which journos hire actors to impersonate people on the phone to obtain information or pretend to be somebody else to con people into talking to them.
It is not my case that all of these practices are necessarily bad or that they are necessarily right. But I do believe that the press is at the stage where there is no clear dividing line between right and wrong. Too much is left to the discretion of individual journalists and when something like the News of the World scandal breaks, journos act as though they have never ever done anything like phone hacking themselves even though we know that the rest of the tabloid press is not exactly blameless.
So yes, I am happy that they’ve busted the News of the World for hacking. I shed no tears for the paper which always seemed to me to epitomize all that was loathsome about British tabloid journalism. And I am glad that arrests have been made.
But it would be a pity if it all stopped there. These are practices that date back several decades and are much more widespread than the current uproar would lead us to believe.
Just ask Mick Jagger.
