One of the biggest scandals to engulf the British press since princess Diana’s death began with a trivial bit of gossip about her eldest son. In late 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid News of the World ran a story about Prince William’s plans to meet with Tom Bradby, a well-known television reporter and trusted confidant of the prince’s. Bradby was supposed to help William patch together a film from footage William had collected during his gap year, between high school and university, when he camped in a hammock in the jungles of Belize and lived on army rations. Only four people—Bradby, William, and two royal aides—were supposed to know about the plan, so seeing it splashed across News of the World’s pages raised some troubling questions.
The day after the story appeared, Bradby turned up at the Prince of Wales’s palace, portable editing gear tucked under his arm, and was ushered into William’s private chambers. The two discussed the leak and how it might have happened. Bradby shared his suspicions, based on some “jaw-dropping” things he had learned while working as a royal reporter a few years earlier. “At the time,” he recalls, “I had heard that people were regularly breaking into voicemails. The practice was colossally widespread, and I suggested that might be what was going on.”
After the meeting, the royal family enlisted a retired British spy to investigate Bradby’s hunch, then called in Scotland Yard, which assigned an antiterrorism team to the case. Months later, in August 2006, police arrested Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s royal editor, and a private investigator named Glenn “Trigger” Mulcaire. The pair was accused of hacking into the voicemail of top royal aides more than six hundred times. Mulcaire, who had worked at the paper since 1997 and...
Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.
