Nick Davies on what drove him to expose phone hacking scandal in UK

INSPIRATION-GATE I left (Oxford) University with no idea of what I wanted to do. I spent two years working on building sites, working on the railways as a guard and in a racing stable, exercising racehorses. I learnt to build relationships. The experience of not being stuck in some middle-class bubble taught me things that being at university hadn’t. During that period, two journalists (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) brought down (United States president Richard) Nixon in the Watergate scandal. The idea that two people who were armed with only notebooks and pens could bring down the most powerful politician in the world for corruption was magnetic.

HACK PSYCHE If you get to know the reporters who specialise in long investigations, you’ll find that often they’re driven by some deep, emotional need. I know one guy who hates secrets because he grew up in a secretive family. Another reporter worked incredibly hard, I think, because he was running away from his sexuality. In my case, I got hit a lot by bullies when I was a child and so I naturally bristle against anybody who abuses power. And that seems to make me rather persistent when it comes to exposing the abuse of power. Reporters have to use their imagination, really put themselves in the shoes of the person they want to interview. Let’s suppose you’re sent to interview a man whose wife’s just been killed in a train crash. All he wants to do is sit in the dark and feel miserable. If you want to persuade this man to talk to you, you’ve got to understand how he feels. Finding a genuine human connection is difficult but interesting.

RED RAGS AND THE BULL The newspapers at the dark end of Fleet Street (the British media) have for years treated the subjects of their stories with breathtaking cruelty, showing a cynical willingness to destroy lives, if that’s what’s needed to deliver a good story. They broke the law and broke the rules. There was a great hypocrisy about all this: talking to Rupert Murdoch journalists, I found a lot of them had been happily engaging in precisely the kind of drug-taking and sexual adventures they exposed and condemned in the lives of those they wanted to write about. Murdoch’s power had a lot to do with the fear of his newspapers (in Britain, The Sun, The Times and the News of the World, until it closed in 2011). When multinational corporations own news outlets, as, of course, (Murdoch’s company) News Corp does, they have (an extra) source of power.

DAVID AND GOLIATH The phone hacking story was a classic case of small guys getting into a fight with a big guy and somehow managing to win. You could have looked at the group of us who were involved in trying to expose News International publications phone hacking celebrities’ voicemails – a handful of politicians, lawyers, journalists – and said that we had no chance of beating Murdoch’s company, particularly with the support he had from the London Metropolitan Police and the British government (former prime minister Tony Blair is godfather to one of Murdoch’s daughters). But we did it in spite of various threats and obstacles that were thrown in our path. That’s what movies are made of – the good guys beating the bad guys.

HERE BE MONSTERS If you become the British tabloid press’ enemy, they can do what’s called “monstoring” – in particular, they like to go after people’s sex lives, which can be terribly painful and humiliating. Those of us involved in uncovering the scandal were very aware of this threat. We now know some of the others (involved in the phone hacking story) were followed and secretly videoed by a specialist private investigator who works for the Murdoch newspapers in Britain. I woke up on a Saturday morning a few months ago to find out that The Daily Mail had devoted three full pages to attacking me. (The newspaper claimed Davies was “consumed by unreasonable hates” and had tried to weaken the British press by exposing phone hacking, which led to the Leveson inquiry into press freedom). I read through the story with a notebook and listed the negative accusations, about a dozen of them in total. Not one was true. This was an attempt to smear and damage my reputation so people could say, “Oh well, we can ignore his work because he’s not reliable.” All you can do is live with it. It doesn’t have much impact because people look at stuff like that and say, “Typical Daily Mail”.