Hack Read online

  I looked around and felt the walls crowding in. The News of the World newsroom was adorned with intimidating illuminated light boxes showing off former front pages. Battle honours and scalps. ‘Tory Boss Archer Pays Off Vice Girl’ from 1987. Another displayed huge snatch pictures of Princess Diana and a shifty-looking Will Carling sharing a secret tryst. The effect of these adverts was like being screamed at by a regimental sergeant major letting me know exactly what’s expected of me in conference. From 1910, there was a whole front page dedicated to the capture of Dr Crippen. Next to a six-foot-tall bus shelter-style hoarding with the headline: ‘Confessions of Christine,’ about the hooker at the centre of the Profumo scandal from 1963. ‘Di’s Cranky Phone Calls to Married Tycoon’ – another headline framed in a smaller picture. Like natural light, no art or painting was allowed into the newsroom. Brainwashing tabloid propaganda was the only form of visual stimulation. On closer inspection, the strip-lights inside were littered with dead flies.

  I followed a long line of depressed reporters past the rows of filing cabinets that I’d sneaked through on the way to my ‘job interview’. Ray let us stew outside of the locked meeting room like a group of sixth formers waiting to sit an A-Level physics exam. Over the next few months I watched grown men turn white with fear at this point. One female reporter burst into tears. And that was even before the roastings kicked off.

  A features writer called Dominic Mohan nodded a hello to me. Mohan had an Oasis-style bowl haircut. Before getting a job at the News of the World, he had been the youngest ever Editor of a national newspaper, when aged 21, he had taken over the Sunday Sport. Porn king David Sullivan had given him the top job based on Mohan’s record of bagging big exclusives such as ‘Monkey Lands Plane’. Mohan didn’t seem to be arsed about the pressure of conference. Seconds earlier I’d watched him repeatedly replay a tape recording out loud on his office cassette machine. It contained the words ‘electrical pylon’ many times. It was either part of a taped interview, or a phone message that had been left by a ‘nutter’ over the weekend. ‘Nutters’ are readers that write illiterate letters to newspapers, or obsessively phone up about Elvis sightings and conspiracy theories. Mohan’s looped taped recording of cranks had a surreal, comical effect in the black atmosphere before conference. He went on to become editor of the Sun.

  I noticed that there were several veterans from the Sunday Sport. A sardonic, laid-back loner called Paul ‘Mucky’ McMullan took the piss out of my green woollen suit – even though he was much scruffier than me. Paul was a typical NoW reporter – an oddball-outsider defined by a kind of rootlessness found in army kids that moved around a lot during childhood. I don’t know whether he was an army kid, but Mucky was completely straightforward about the absurdity of the job. He went on to become a phone hacking advocate and TV pundit made famous by his on-screen clashes about tabloid ethics with comedian Steve Coogan and Hacked Off film fop Hugh Grant.

  To kill time, as I waited outside in the corridor, I looked back into the newsroom through the slits in the blinds. Over the no-man’s-land of the back bench, I could make out the news department digging in for the week. Their top boys were confident and relaxed. Jimmy ‘the whisperer’ Weatherup, talking with his hand over mouth in case his colleagues could lip read. The Ukrainians Greg Miskiw and Alex Marunchak. Greg later left his wife and kids for a fitter, younger freelancer called Terenia Taras. Alex set up a company to import vodka from the mother country but later said that the business didn’t take off. A Today refugee called Ian Edmondson. Neville Thurlbeck and Clive Goodman were deep in conversation. A tall, vivacious red-head interrupted them and I could see the body-language of the men smarm into servility at once.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I asked McMullan.

  ‘Rebekah.’ No one ever used her surname. She had it all – power, looks and she was still only my age. A real-life Lois Lane. Marunchak would later describe the news team I was looking at through the window as the best he’d ever seen at News of the World – a gilded generation. All of them would later be arrested on suspicion of phone hacking – including Greg’s racy new bird.

  Back to reality. Ray arrived for conference, grinning sadistically, his shark-like grin matching his pressed white shirt. About ten reporters squashed in around a bleak pine table in a cold room. Plastic jugs of tea and coffee were served by an African woman. Ray put a custard cream between his teeth before looking around for his first victim.

  ‘OK who wants to start?’ he boomed. No takers.

  ‘OK, then let’s kick off with you, Roger – what you got, Rog?’

  Roger Insall was a professional paedophile-hunter. Short, perma-tannned and a teddy boy’s quiff toned-down for the office. The middle-aged former-People reporter spent his working days posing as a nonce in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia and Goa, entrapping Big Fat Westerners who liked to have sex with pre-teen ‘beach boys’.

  ‘I’ve got a good dogging story,’ Roger began, before going into the details of his next sting. Roger the Dodger, as he was known, was a one-man vice search engine, whose water-cooler conversations were cluster-bombed with references to orgies, swinging parties and tarts. He spoke non-stop about snuff movies, gunrunners and kiddie porn as though it was normal, in the same way a mother would talk about her kids’ schools or one of the lads would go on about last night’s footie. But his seedy fanaticism paid off – he repeatedly broke big exclusives and was credited with coming up with idea of the Fake Sheik.

  As part of his cover story, Roger had successfully morphed into looking a bit like the degenerate predators he exposed. He was dripping with sleaze and gold trinkets. But tabloid journalism had not only taken a toll on his appearance – it seemed he’d paid a heavy price on the inside too. There was something dark in his soul, not in criminal way, but it was clear he’d seen too much of the demonic side of humanity and some of the residue had seeped in. Roger finished off with a couple of fillers, before Ray said, ‘The dogging story sounds good – speak to me later.’ Sensitive material was always dealt with one-to-one in Ray’s office afterwards.

  It wasn’t long before it was my turn.

  ‘OK, Halloween’s coming up,’ I said. ‘What about a Halloween brothel story? There’s a massage parlour in Bristol that’s got a special offer for the 31st October. The girls dress up as witches. They decorate the rooms with turnips with candles in, that kind of thing . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Ray, cutting me off.

  ‘Fuck,’ I thought. That was a banker – a straightforward vice exposé. News of the World bread and butter. I’d scanned the small ads of the local papers to find that one – and if that particular massage parlour didn’t work out I’d planned on bunging my hooker snout Gina a few quid to get one of her mates to mock it up, just to make sure of my debut piece.

  ‘Next,’ Ray said.

  I hit him with my next three ideas, which I had saved up and secretly squirrelled away during my last weeks at the agency. With each ‘no/next’ the anxiety increased. I couldn’t understand why – all of them were decent stories. I even put up a Royal belter about Camilla that I’d got off my posh antiques dealer. I later realised that Ray knocked this one back because of politics – he was careful not to tread on Royal reporter Clive Goodman’s toes. Further down the line I had to drop my Royal contacts altogether so as not to upset Clive. Like most NoW reporters, Clive was territorial. He believed that empire-building offered protection. Ten years later, Clive was the first reporter to be jailed over phone hacking after he listened to Prince William’s advisor’s messages. Conference was devastating – it turned out my ideas were good daily stories that would have waltzed into the Sun or the Mirror, but they just didn’t have the depth of a decent Sunday tale. I knew I’d have to get it together fast or it was back to the regions in disgrace.

  I didn’t get a bollocking – even Ray would have looked bad kicking the puppy round the room on its first day out of the pet shop, despite the baying crowd of News hoodies egging him on. But he was certainl
y snarling at me a bit. Later, I walked past his open door. He was sat there in his office, his face half in shadow, like a crazed Clockwork Orange droog. Head tilted into his chest, so that his face was almost in the horizontal plane. Eyes glaring at me through his brows, mouth open. He looked like an electro-shocked Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I could tell what he was thinking: ‘What a fucking let-down. You talked a good game in the interview, giving it all the nuclear news Jedi stuff, but on the day of reckoning, you crumbled in the ring like a big girl.’

  I was harder still on myself. I began to doubt my abilities. Was I really any good at this job? Or was I just another, ‘I have recently merchant. ‘I have recently’ merchants were the journeymen offspring of Britain’s media-obsessed middle class, who bombarded news editors with CV cover letters that almost always began with the phrase ‘I have recently . . .’ Take your pick, as to what followed – ‘finished my internship at the Guardian/come back from my gap year teaching windsurfing on the Nile/got a first in PPE at Oxbridge.’ All of this meaningless over-achievement drew howls of derision from the talentless eccentrics who hacked out a living in the newsroom. Consequently, the 100g vellum cream-laid paperwork upon which the CVs had been obsequiously typed, got binned immediately. Such-like Fleet Street failures inevitably faced a life of humiliation and despair – they often ended up working for the BBC.

  My conference fuck-up got me thinking – was I too just another overblown twerp who would end up running around White City in a North Face jacket with a furry hood on, a pair of combat trousers and bright blue Gazelle trainers? Was I just another beautiful person who couldn’t face getting a proper job down the plastics factory? Or was I the hard news guerilla killer that I thought I was? Trained at the News of the World’s secret training camp in Libya. Behind Enemy Lines and Licensed to Thrill.

  Dep.Feat.Ed. Dan lifted my spirits. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You did all right today. Ray’s a tough operator – but he isn’t that bad compared to some of the editors I’ve worked for.’ Dan was good at telling stories – his own was pretty good. He was ‘discovered’ by former Sun Editor Kelvin MacKenzie after his plane was delayed at a Midland’s airport and Kelvin was flicking through the Coventry Evening Telegraph where he came across a showbiz exclusive written by Dan when he was a cub reporter. Dan was summoned down to the Smoke immediately to work for Bizarre.

  Dan carried on with his story to cheer me up. ‘One day, when I was on the Sun, my mate was so terrified of getting a bollocking off Kelvin that he pretended to faint in his office, hoping that Kelvin would show mercy and stop roasting him.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked

  ‘Kelvin carried on bollocking him as he dropped to the floor. Then he leaned down to get right into his face, wagging his finger at him and telling him that he’d fucked up. My mate was still laying there pretending to be unconscious.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ I laughed, buzzing off the anecdote. Everyone loved a bollocking story.

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Kelvin then stepped over his body and walked out into the newsroom, leaving my mate to be carried back to his desk. Still pretending to be out for the count.’

  4

  Stories

  Over the next few months I learned that the key to getting through conference was to have a range of different stories. From then on, in the mix, I always put in one sex story, one feature idea and one showbiz exclusive.

  Sex stories have several sub-classes. In short, they are simply excuses to get pictures of pretty girls into the paper. ‘Curtain twitchers’ are essentially minor sex-in-the-suburbs scandals. A good example of a bog-standard curtain twitcher is a story that I put up in conference headlined, ‘BMW Beauty Also Available in Blue.’ The list line is self-explanatory. ‘An elegant receptionist who greets well-heeled customers and their excited little children as they arrive to look over their latest expensive BMW cars leads a secret life as a sordid porn queen.’

  The story was no more than a vehicle to show pics of 36A-23-34 Verity Blain, 23, in ‘disgusting, tawdry’ spanking mags. Note the inherent hypocrisy of this sleight of hand. I assumed the reason behind the desire to show naughty pics was to thrill (i.e. give a semi-on) to the News of the World’s 3.64 million male readers. In 1997, 27 per cent of Britain’s population read the paper – over half of them men, the majority being C2, D and E working-class lads in their mid thirties. The NoW was straightforward wank material for others – it was the most popular paper inside prisons. To expose what was essentially this girl’s private life, a false justification always had to be shoe-horned into the story. In this case it was the risk that the receptionist might infect children coming to the showroom with her immorality. To counter the risk of the story being too down-market, I also made a reference to ‘well-heeled’ customers (respectable curtain twitchers). There was always another reason to inject posh or high-status people gratuitously into a story. As well as providing extra titillation to the cap-doffing peasant readers, newspapers were always trying to tap into a middle-market Daily Mail demographic – a lucrative golden fleece for advertisers.

  ‘Shagging stories’ mostly involve catching married celebrities out, who should not be shagging other people. Then of course there are kiss ’n’ tells. Whatever type, there is no doubt that sex stories humiliate and demean women – that is their strategic function in a male-dominated society. However, some newspapers were much more no-nonsense in their desire to mess with women’s heads and encourage sexual violence. They gorged themselves on what’s known as ‘rape stories’. The News of the World didn’t use rape to titillate their readers, but another Sunday newspaper did – shamelessly. When I was an agency reporter, before I got a job on the Screws, on most Friday nights we received a call from an obscene degenerate on a Sunday newspaper who asked, ‘Have you got any good rape stories?’ The bosses of the agency refused to take his calls because he operated at such a low level.

  But as a junior reporter, I was left to handle it. ‘I’m doing a ring round for hard sex stories,’ he went on. ‘Any good rapes in court this week?’ If the answer was yes, the questions that followed were appalling. ‘Where did he give her one?’ ‘What’s the girl like – is she fit?’ ‘What was she wearing at the time?’ And of course, ‘Was she asking for it?’ I read out summaries of the court reports over the phone. I always imagined him at the end line, masturbating instead of taking notes.

  Most of the reporters around the conference table had lots of pages ripped hastily from that day’s Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. This was because they wanted to pitch ‘follow-ups’ of big stories in the news that week. I was always amazed by eagle-eyed reporters who could spot an obscure name in a story of a witness to some event. The idea would be to get a full chat and a new line out of them.

  Other classic features included ‘good reads’. For instance straightforward backgrounders on famous people. Then there are thematic stories. These are exclusive stunt stories that aim to ride the news zeitgeist that particular week. For instance, I remember a film called Jerry Maguire starring Tom Cruise was all over the papers. It was a rom-com drama about a sports agent.

  This was a rare, easy steal in conference.

  ‘On the back of Jerry Maguire,’ I mused, ‘why don’t we find a real-life Jerry in Britain?’

  Ray: ‘Good idea.’

  ‘I’ll do a ring round of Britain’s top ten football agents and scrabble together some of their anecdotes – money, pressure, sex etc.’

  Ray: ‘Love it.’ Features Editors love these ideas because they are cheap, easy and non-libelous. But beware – reporters who routinely put ‘furniture’ up were considered coasters. I remember two, highly-paid, middle-aged feature writers who relied on ‘set-pieces’ to get them through conference. Ray mauled them.

  ‘No. That’s not going to work!’

  Or ‘For fuck’s sake, have you checked cuts? That’s been done . . . etc.’ Woe betide anyone who put up a story that ha
d already ‘made’. Times were changing. With their dark blue suits and shiny shoes, they looked like early retirement coppers who hadn’t solved a crime for a good long while. Looking at me with contempt – I had been brought in as a child labourer on McDonald’s wages to see them off. I looked at them back. They were like Spitfire pilots with tombstones in their eyes. They weren’t coming back from the dogfight and everyone knew it. On the other hand, I was coming back like the Red Baron with a fuselage full of stickers – lives destroyed. Including theirs. A few weeks later they had been ‘disappeared’.

  Sometimes, after conference, Ray would launch into a mass bollocking: ‘That was fucking shit. Most of your ideas are fucking rubbish. I want three more ideas off each of you before lunch time. Ring round your contacts and get some good fucking stories. I don’t know what the fuck is going on here – you’re getting lazy. If this is the best you can do . . .’ etc, etc.

  I didn’t get anything in the paper the first week. If I fucked up in the second week as well then I’d almost certainly get whacked. In Star Wars, before he strangles one of his admirals, Lord Vader tells the victim, ‘You have failed me for the last time.’ Ray Levine was less forgiving – you only had to fail him the first time, never mind a second. A few weeks later a young Welsh girl started one Tuesday. Before lunch time, on the second or third day, she had been liquidated. For being no more than a few minutes late, and ‘not taking the job seriously enough’. She explained that she’d been up all night shagging a solicitor she’d met, understandably excited to be in London for the first time. She was bundled out of the office, her hair a mess, the contents of her handbag spilling out on the way. A stony-faced junior executive called Denna Allen kept shouting after her, ‘Can you just leave the office now?’ over and over again. I winced when a pretty girl was publicly humiliated. Maybe I didn’t see that kind of thing so much because society, like their dads, tends to put little princesses on a pedestal. I suppose, in that way, in the looks stakes, the Screws was at least meritocratic. I watched many doughnut probationaries start. They were known as ‘shifters’ – young journalists from the Sunderland Bugle and the Shropshire Freesheet and so on, who’d been invited down to the Screws to do a few shifts, to see if they could cut it. Most of them turned out to be big round pieces of fried flour with a hole in the middle. Solid cats-up-trees-merchants but Factor X-less and very unstreetwise. Totally unprepared for life in the big, bad city. Consequently, most would mysteriously vanish after a few days never to be seen again. I was determined to be the sharp cookie in the cake tin and deffo not the doughnut.