For those of us who are looking to sink our teeth into an unmissable true-crime drama now the evenings are getting colder, look no further than The Hack.
The story follows two seemingly disparate narratives looking at tabloid corruption, which ultimately culminates in the death of one of the world’s most infamous newspapers, The News of the World – and prison time for those involved.
The man who doggedly chased this story – even when others doubted whether it would cut through to the British public, was Nick Davies. An investigative journalist who was previously scathing of the state of British media in his book Flat Earth News, Davies’s years-long reporting is the beating heart of The Hack’s drama.
While he is played by David Tennant in the series, what is the real Nick Davies up to now? Cosmopolitan UK has everything you need to know…
Who is Nick Davies?
Having graduated with a degree from Oxford University in 1974, Davies started working as a journalist. He reported for papers including the Sunday People and The Evening Standard, before going freelance in 1989 but regularly contributing to The Guardian.
He won numerous awards for his work, and 2008 he authored Flat Earth News, which looked at malpractice in journalism and how commercialisation is killing an already floundering industry.
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How did Nick Davies uncover the phone hacking scandal?
It was all thanks to an anonymous tip off from 2008. While senior leaders and editors at News International had previously dismissed Clive Goodman – a journalist jailed 2007 for phone hacking – as a ‘rogue reporter’, the rebuttals irked someone Davies only refers to as ‘Mr Apollo’ (who remains anonymous to this day), who served as an informant. Mr Apollo told Davies that phone hacking was widespread and there was more to uncover, which saw Davies persuaded into chasing the story.
Davies realised if Mr Apollo’s accusations were true, it would mean Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor who was by that point the director of communications for then-Prime Minister, David Cameron, would also have been embroiled in possible criminality.
While Davies knew the story was huge when he started publishing stories about phone hacking in The Guardian, many were sceptical about how widespread it was. As we see in Hacks, Davies was forced to speak in front of the select committee in 2009 with then-The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger to defend the story.
As Davies continued to report and work with various sources to uncover the truth, it became blindingly obvious that News of the World journalists were repeatedly instructed to hack the voicemails of celebrities, such as Sienna Miller and Jude Law, members of the royal family, and other high profile figures.
However, what really caused the investigation to cut through from Fleet Street to mainstream audiences, was when the news broke that the News of the World had also hacked into the voicemail messages of murdered schoolgirl Millie Dowler.
The news caused such a widespread wave of revulsion against News International, the publisher for News of the World, that it was the catalyst for causing the News of the World newspaper to close.
It also led to the Leveson Inquiry, which was a public inquiry into the culture, ethics and practices around British newspapers that took place in 2011 and 2012.
Speaking about the phone hacking scandal in 2014, Davies told the Press Gazette: “Hacking voicemail is a long way from the most serious of crimes, but I think ruining people’s lives, it isn’t against the law, but it’s a very, very horrible, cruel thing to do.
“That willingness of the News of the World to just go out and ruin people for the sake of selling newspapers is so repulsive and so wrong.”
Where is Nick Davies now?
In 2014, Davies wrote Hack Attack: How the truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch, which looks at how the phone hacking transpired (for those not in the know, Murdoch was the media mogul in charge of News International’s parent company, News Corp, at the time).
He also worked on other investigations with The Guardian, including working as part of a wider team on the masses of material leaked by Edward Snowden about the UK government’s involvement in the mass surveillance of communications.
In 2016, Davies retired from investigative journalism in order to travel. In a somewhat joking inclusion on his personal website, it is claimed ‘he was last seen somewhere between a meditation retreat in northern Thailand and an inner city suburb of Medellin, Colombia’.
Speaking about his exposé, Davies said in 2014: “The bad guys hate me… but most journalists are decent people and are glad I exposed phone-hacking.”
Kimberley Bond is a Multiplatform Writer for Harper’s Bazaar, focusing on the arts, culture, careers and lifestyle. She previously worked as a Features Writer for Cosmopolitan UK, and has bylines at The Telegraph, The Independent and British Vogue among countless others.
