News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, who looked frail and weak, and his son James apologised to Britons for phone hacking at the hearing of the House of Commons select committee on culture, media and sport on Tuesday afternoon.
“Can I first say how sorry I am, and how sorry we are, to the victims of illegal phone hacking. It is a matter of great regret and these actions do not live up to the standards of our company,” James Cameron said before his reply to the first question, only to be interrupted by his father.
“This is the most humble day of my life,” the 80-year-old chairman of News Corp. said.
The hearing was interrupted and suspended for 15 minutes as an unidentified man in checked shirt rushed towards and attempted to assault Rupert Murdoch.
Labour MP Chris Bryant, who was in the committee room attending the hearing, told the BBC that a plate of shaving foam was shoved at Rupert Murdoch, whose wife Wendi seemed to rush to his defence. The person hit Rupert Murdoch on his shoulder and face and Wendi Deng quickly shoved the plate on the assaulter’s face.
The police has arrested the man, who has not been formally identified as yet, but a lot of news outlets are pointing to a Twitter user @JonnieMarbles as being the likely perpetrator.
The testimony of the Murdochs, which was supposed to be for one hour, lasted for three hours as the testimony of former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, who was due to give evidence at 3.30 pm, was delayed.
The Commons home affairs select committee grilled three senior officers of the Metropolitan Police, including former commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and John Yates, who resigned over the phone hacking scandal.
The two officers defended the Met police decision to hire former News of the World journalist Neil Wallis as a consultant, putting pressure in their testimony to the home affairs committee, led by Indian-origin Labour MP Keith Vaz, on Prime Minister David Cameron.
Mr Cameron, who will make a statement to the House of Commons on the phone-hacking scandal on Wednesday, is returning to London Tuesday night after cutting short his trip to Africa. “Parts of the media committed dreadful, illegal acts. The police have serious questions to answer about potential corruption and about a failed investigation. Politicians have been too close to media owners,” Mr Cameron said in Lagos on Tuesday.
The phone hacking scandal has led to disillusionment about the police and the media among Britons. The Populas survey for the Times on Tuesday revealed that a majority of Britons think worse of Rupert Murdoch after the phone hacking scandal broke. Fifty-seven per cent of Britons think less of the News Corp chairman, 31 per cent less of the Met police and a third think less about the media.
Labour MP Chris Bryant, who has been at the forefront of raising the phone-hacking issue in Parliament, told the BBC on Tuesday that more damaging revelations would soon come out. “The theatre is irrelevant. In the end we’ve got to get to the bottom of what is a very murky pool. And I tell you Rebekah Brooks was right. We’re only halfway into that pool at the moment. There’s stuff about the Surrey police as well, and other things that are still to come out,” Mr Bryant said.
Details emerged on Tuesday that a laptop computer allegedly belonging to Rebekah Brooks’ husband Charlie, who is a horse trainer, was found dumped in a dustbin near their London flat along with some papers. The laptop was then handed over to the police.
However, Ms Brooks’ spokesperson Dave Wilson said on Tuesday: “There is absolutely nothing relevant to the inquiry, nothing there that is the property of Rebekah. It’s purely Charlie’s personal material. Hopefully they (the police) will return it. They have to look at it to make sure it isn’t part of their investigation,” Mr Wilson said.
The public interest in the Murdoch appearance was high in London as people started queuing up before 7 am on Tuesday.
Rupert Murdoch, who kept banging on the table to emphasise his answers, on Tuesday refused to accept that he was responsible for the wrongdoing at the News of the World. He said that he was not responsible, adding that in his opinion that particular responsibility rested with “the people who I employed, or maybe the people they employed”.
Murdoch Senior said he has not considered resigning in order accept responsibility for the phone-hacking scandal. “People I trusted let me down,” he said, adding: “I’m the best person to clean this up.”
He said he had accepted News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks’ resignation after refusing it the first time because of her “extreme anguish”.
“Because I believe in her and I trust her,” Rupert Murdoch said when asked why he had refused Ms Brooks’ resignation the first time. He accepted it the second time “because she insisted. She was in a state of extreme anguish”.
Rupert Murdoch, who looked every inch an old man, was glowing in his reference to his close aide Les Hinton, who resigned last week. “I worked with Les Hinton for 52 years and I would trust him with my life.”
Rupert Murdoch, whose wife Wendi Deng was in the audience at the committee room, said he had no knowledge of the settlement payments made by the News of the World and was not informed about these by the editor. “Sometimes I would ring the editor of the News of the World on the Saturday night and ask if there was any news and that was just to keep in touch. I would ring the editor of the Sunday Times nearly every Saturday. Not to influence what he had to say at all, I am very careful to promise any remark I made it to say I am just inquiring. I am not really in touch,” he said, insisting that News of The World was just about one per cent of News Corp, which employs 53,000 staff.
Both the Murdochs made it clear that News International is not immediately thinking of starting a new Sunday tabloid. “No, no decision on that. There are no plans to have a News International title coming out on Sunday in the tabloid market,” Rupert Murdoch said.
However, James Murdoch immediately qualified it with “immediate”. He said: “No immediate plans for that... That is not the company’s priority now. The company has to move forward on all these other actions and really get to grips with the facts of these allegations and get to grips with them as best we can.”
James Murdoch, answering a question put by MP Louise Mensch, the last member of the committee to put questions to the Murdochs, said he was unaware of any attempt by the News of the World journalist to hack the phones of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
“It is just appalling to think that anyone associated with one of our papers would have done something like that. I am aware of no evidence of that. We have only seen the evidence in the press,” he said.
The Crown Prosecution Service’s Keir Starmer, the current director of public prosecutions, and his predecessor Lord Macdonald will give evidence to the home affairs committee after Rebekah Brooks’ evidence. Mark Lewis, the solicitor representing the Milly Dowler family, will give evidence to the home affairs committee after that.