Mr Murdoch vs The TV company

ITV is about to broadcast what it hopes will be this year’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office in The Hack, a series based on the book Hack Attack by the former Guardian journalist Nick Davies. To tie in, Davies is publishing a new version with a chapter in which he makes a number of fresh allegations against Rupert Murdoch’s News UK (née News International).

Which is all good news for m’learned friends, with News UK already lawyering up against a TV show nobody has yet seen. The firm’s executive vice president and general counsel, Angus McBride, has fired off a legal missive to fellow media organisations rubbishing Davies’s allegations and warning them not to publish or broadcast them without giving the firm “a full right to reply in advance and with proper notice and the opportunity to set out in detail why the claims are flawed and demonstrably wrong”.

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Rats in a Sack

The letter notes that Davies has claimed that News International “destroyed evidence, in particular emails, in the face of the police inquiry” and that employees “were involved in phone hacking between 2007-2011”, saying that “both allegations are strongly denied”. Later it more firmly says that allegations of phone hacking after 2007 are “demonstrably false”.

It also notes that “the CPS concluded in December 2015 that there was no evidence to support the suggestion that News International deliberately destroyed evidence in the face of the police investigation”, neglecting to mention that, in cases of evidence being destroyed there is very often no evidence, because the evidence has been destroyed.

Still, it appears that the lesson News UK learned from Mr Bates v The Post Office is that the best approach for the accused body to take is to lawyer up heavily and seek to silence the accusers. Rats in a Sack can’t remember exactly how that worked out for the Post Office’s top brass, but is sure it probably went well.