Murdoch Man Spills The Beans

After the Lord Mayor’s parade, so the saying goes, comes the man who sweeps the streets. Right now, Mark Hanna will know all about that: as head of security to the twinkle-toed yet domestically combative Rebekah Brooks, he was part of the team that cleared up after Creepy Uncle Rupe’s favourite. But after he got involved in the Hacking Trial, it stopped just being a job - suddenly and literally.

Mark Hanna

Because he was put on trial along with Ms Brooks and husband Charlie, Hanna was taken off his duties to go through the whole process of organising his defence, then undergoing all that time in the dock. Then he was told to take some leave. Followed by more leave. And then he was summoned to an ominously formal meeting at which he was told he was “at risk of redundancy”. He was paid just £30,000 when made redundant.

That might not have been such a bad thing had it not been for two later events, the first of which was that he discovered having the Hacking Trial on his CV made potential employers treat him as a pariah. Hanna made scores of job applications; he secured not one job. Now he is living on benefits. And then came the second of those two events, the reappointment of Ms Brooks as News UK’s CEO.

For Hanna, who had already decided to take his former employers to an employment tribunal, this was the last straw. Ms Brooks had resigned - nobody pushed her - and was gifted £14 million to ease her journey into a world of comfortable leisure. Now she was being re-hired after basing her defence on being so incompetent that she did not know her top selling title was being run as a borderline criminal enterprise.

The shallow hypocrisy of the Murdoch press would be hilarious, were it not so real in Hanna’s case: here he was, a former soldier, thrown on the scrapheap by a media empire so ready to dress itself up in the flag and pretend that it’s the Armed Forces’ Friend. Some friend it has been to him. He owed them nothing; they had cut him loose. And so it has come to pass that Mark Hanna announced he would tell all.

In a YouTube video (watch it HERE), he gives a flavour of what kinds of beans he will be spilling. Notes were taken of conversations in the dock at the trial. From the start of his time at News International, there had been intrusive surveillance operations, “unclear payments”, and other potentially illegal activity. News UK, he concludes, “must be one of the most hated organisations in the UK”.

The Murdochs and their inner circle can initially shrug this off: Ms Brooks was found Not Guilty, they will say. The problem here is the implicit assumption that Hanna will be the only one spilling the beans. After all those hacks that got sent down the road with the closure of the Screws, the informants who got shopped and therefore screwed over, and anyone else the Murdoch empire shat on, that’s a mightily risky assumption.

Murdoch and his empire in its pomp was for a time, but not for all time.