Apologise to Charlotte Church and Jacqui Hames, Mr Murdoch
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When Hacked Off arranged for Charlotte Church and Jacqui Hames to form part of our delegation to meet the Prime Minister last week, neither we nor they could have expected that they would be called scumbags on Twitter by a global media tycoon with almost 350,000 followers.
Rupert Murdoch now says he didn’t mean them, but how else were they supposed to construe this?
Church and Hames were there because they are victims of press abuses, in both cases by Murdoch’s papers. For at least ten years papers trampled over Church’s private life and the lives of those closest to her, and last year News International apologised and paid her substantial damages in relation to no fewer than 33 stories in the News of the World acquired by phone hacking. Among those alleged to have been hacked is the family’s parish priest. Read her evidence to the Leveson inquiry here.
As for Jacqui Hames, a former police officer who was once a presenter on Crimewatch, she and her family were the targets of one of the most vicious of all the campaigns of harassment and intrusion by Murdoch’s paper and her evidence to the Leveson inquiry was among the most distressing. Read it here.
The News Corp boss, who a year ago told the world how humbled he felt by the hacking scandal, has no right to call these women scumbags, and both have asked him to apologise.
Murdoch went on to claim, however, that he didn’t mean them. So who was he referring to? In a cowardly and no less disgraceful tweet he implied but did not say that it was Hugh Grant. Grant was indeed at the meeting with the Prime Minister, but his presence was not announced and he was there as a member of the Hacked Off board.
Murdoch has now apologised to Grant for false allegations in the second tweet, but he has still not apologised to Church and Hames, and despite his protestations the plain meaning of the words of his tweet – ‘scumbag celebrities’ – can only be taken to include them. No one else meeting David Cameron in that Birmingham hotel room last week could remotely be described as a celebrity.
Hacked Off calls on Rupert Murdoch to make the necessary apology without delay. We invited both women to join us at this meeting and we are appalled to see them treated in this way.
Incidentally, Murdoch is also factually wrong about the objectives of Hacked Off. We are not ‘pushing for even more privacy laws’; we are asking for effective press regulation that is independent of both the industry and politicians.
Brian Cathcart is director of Hacked Off. He tweets at @BrianCathcart.