香港國際論壇

2 Top Deputies Resign as Crisis Isolates Murdoch
By JOHN F. BURNS and JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: July 15, 2011

LONDON — The crisis rattling Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire claimed the two highest-level

executives yet on Friday after days of mounting pressure from politicians and investors on two

continents.

Les Hinton, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal since 2007, who oversaw Mr. Murdoch’s British

newspaper subsidiary when voice mail hacking by journalists was rampant, and Rebekah Brooks, who has

run the British papers since 2009 and become the target of unrelenting public outrage, both resigned in

the latest blow to the News Corporation and its besieged chairman.

At first incensed by the assault on his company’s reputation, Mr. Murdoch insisted as late as Thursday

that the executives had performed “excellently” in dealing with the crisis since it erupted two weeks

ago. He was said to be loath to lose either of them, and became convinced that they had to leave only

over the last several days, as executives and outside advisers flew in to help manage the crisis from

the company’s gleaming granite and glass offices in Wapping, East London.

In arriving at the final decision, Mr. Murdoch was joined by his two sons, James and Lachlan, and Joel

I. Klein, a senior News Corporation executive and former New York City Schools chancellor.

The resignations came on a day when Mr. Murdoch made a series of public mea culpas. He wrote a letter

to be published in all British newspapers over the weekend acknowledging that the company did not

address its problems soon enough. “We are sorry,” it begins.

He also visited the family of a murdered 13-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, whose voice mail was hacked by

reporters at The News of the World while she was still listed as missing. According to the Dowler

family’s lawyer, Mark Lewis, Mr. Murdoch held his head in his hands and apologized for the actions of

his employees, who deleted phone messages after the girl’s mailbox had been filled so they could

collect more new messages.

Mr. Lewis said that Mr. Murdoch apologized “many times,” and that he was “very humbled, he was very

shaken and he was very sincere.”

Whether these actions will do anything to quiet the backlash against the News Corporation is unclear.

Mr. Murdoch, Ms. Brooks and James Murdoch, the company’s deputy chief operating officer and Rupert’s

younger son, are set to testify next week before Parliament, where they will face questions from

politicians who have become suddenly unafraid to publicly condemn the man whose favor they once saw as

a key to political success.

Mr. Murdoch has become an increasingly isolated figure, not only in Britain but within his own company.

The departure in recent years of top executives who often provided a counterweight to his famous

irascibility and stubbornness has left him surrounded by fewer people who can effectively question his

decisions. He initially rejected Ms. Brooks’s offer to resign from News International, his British

subsidiary, despite advice to accept it from senior News Corporation executives, said people briefed on

the company’s discussions.

Ms. Brooks, who was editor of The News of the World when the abuses began in 2002, repeatedly told the

Murdochs that she knew nothing of the hacking and that she would be exonerated when all the facts came

out.

In her farewell message, Ms. Brooks acknowledged that she had become a distraction. “The reputation of

the company we love so much, as well as the press freedoms we value so highly, are all at risk,” she

wrote. “As chief executive of the company, I feel a deep sense of responsibility for the people we

have hurt and I want to reiterate how sorry I am for what we now know to have taken place.”

On Friday, former staff members at The News of the World questioned why Ms. Brooks did not resign

earlier. “Our paper was sacrificed to save her career, and now she’s gone as well,” one former

employee said, requesting anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his position in severance

negotiations. “Who knows why they’ve chosen to do it now, as she’ll have to appear before the select

committee anyway.”

Until Friday, Mr. Hinton had been largely an offstage figure in the scandal. But questions grew about

what he knew about the improper practices going on at the newspapers under his watch, even though he

has testified twice before Parliament saying that he believed the hacking was limited to one rogue

journalist and a private investigator employed by The News of the World.

Letting Mr. Hinton go was an especially fraught decision for Mr. Murdoch. The two had worked together

for 52 years, since Mr. Hinton joined Mr. Murdoch’s first paper, The News of Adelaide in South

Australia, when he was 15. Moreover, Mr. Hinton ran The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Murdoch’s most

cherished American newspaper.

In a note to his employees, Mr. Hinton said Friday was “a deeply, deeply sad day for me.”

Employees at The Journal had mixed reactions to Mr. Hinton’s departure. Alan Murray, a deputy managing

editor, wrote on Twitter: “Les Hinton was a great leader, and did much to support the advancement of

WSJ in print and digital platforms. He will be much missed.”

But a Journal employee who did not want to be identified criticizing his employer expressed anger over

the companywide e-mail from Robert Thomson, the paper’s editor, extolling Mr. Hinton. “It’s enraging

that the first thing our editor says to us about this whole mess is that as journalists we owe a debt

of gratitude to the guy who had to resign because he was at the helm of the papers that did this stuff,

” this person said.

The scandal also seemed poised to claim other prominent heads outside the Murdoch domain, with the

gravest immediate threat falling on Sir Paul Stephenson, the chief of Scotland Yard. His position — he

is formally known as the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police — has been one of the most

prestigious in the country, but in the past 48 hours, he too has fallen under the cloud of suspicion

that the scandal has thrown over the interlinked worlds of Britain’s press, politicians and police.

The country was shocked this week by the seemingly unrepentant performance of three top Scotland Yard

figures, two now retired, who oversaw the earlier, largely toothless, investigations of The News of the

World. A new inquiry begun this year has resulted so far in seven arrests, including that of Prime

Minister David Cameron’s former media chief, Andy Coulson, who succeeded Ms. Brooks as editor of The

News of the World in 2003.

But the police chief’s problems worsened sharply when reports began circulating on Thursday —

confirmed in a Scotland Yard statement — that Sir Paul had approved nearly $40,000 in payments in 2009

and 2010 to a personal media consultant who had been the second-ranking editor at The News of the World

when much of the hacking took place under the editorships of Ms. Brooks and Mr. Coulson. That man, Neil

Wallis, was arrested on Thursday, and held, like Mr. Coulson, for hours of questioning before being

released on bail.

Scotland Yard acknowledged having paid Mr. Wallis $1,600 a day, and said that Sir Paul had dined on

eight occasions with News of the World editors — five of those with Mr. Wallis — while Scotland Yard

officers were investigating the paper. Reports in British newspapers said that the commissioner had

made no mention of the dinners, or of the subsequent media consultancy contract with Mr. Wallis, when

he met Mr. Cameron. That led to an outraged statement from Downing Street, where a Cameron spokesman,

speaking on the condition of anonymity, said on Friday that Sir Paul had “urgent questions to answer.

”

Ms. Brooks’s resignation had seemed ever more likely when late Thursday, BBC television broadcast an

interview with Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, the News Corporation’s second-largest

shareholder, in which he said that if Ms. Brooks was involved in wrongdoing, “for sure she has to go.

”

She was replaced by Tom Mockridge, the head of Sky Italia, the News Corporation’s Italian satellite

broadcaster.

Ms. Brooks said she would focus on “correcting the distortions and rebutting the allegations” against

the company and herself, and would cooperate with the police inquiry into phone hacking and payments to

corrupt police officers. She also praised Mr. Murdoch’s “wisdom, kindness and incisive advice” and

his son James’s “great loyalty and friendship.”

After she quit, James Murdoch praised her as “one of the outstanding editors of her generation.” And

he took the occasion to say that while the company “has made mistakes,” and accepted the need for

public scrutiny, it intended to answer “unfair attacks by setting the record straight.”

But Ms. Brooks’s removal could make James the next in the firing line over News International’s

erratic responses to the scandal. Attention at next week’s parliamentary grilling is likely to center

on his testimony to Parliament at an early stage of the scandal dismissing the abuse at The News of the

World as rogue and isolated episodes and on his action in approving a secret $1.1 million settlement to

one of the phone hacking victims.

James’s role has also caused strains within the Murdoch clan, particularly with his sister Elisabeth,

according to one person who has done business with the family but did not want to be identified

discussing internal matters. But whatever their differences, the Murdoch children pull together in

times of crisis.

“They’re still brother and sister,” this person said. “They just play in this big world. It’s a

sibling rivalry kind of thing, but it’s still blood. And they both know the company is their fortune.

Stain From Tabloids Rubs Off on a Cozy Scotland Yard
July 16, 2011

LONDON — For nearly four years they lay piled in a Scotland Yard evidence room, six overstuffed plastic bags gathering dust and little else.

Inside was a treasure-trove of evidence: 11,000 pages of handwritten notes listing nearly 4,000 celebrities, politicians, sports stars, police officials and crime victims whose phones may have been hacked by The News of the World, a now defunct British tabloid newspaper.

Yet from August 2006, when the items were seized, until the autumn of 2010, no one at the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly referred to as Scotland Yard, bothered to sort through all the material and catalog every page, said former and current senior police officials.

During that same time, senior Scotland Yard officials assured Parliament, judges, lawyers, potential hacking victims, the news media and the public that there was no evidence of widespread hacking by the tabloid. They steadfastly maintained that their original inquiry, which led to the conviction of one reporter and one private investigator, had put an end to what they called an isolated incident.

After the past week, that assertion has been reduced to tatters, torn apart by a spectacular avalanche of contradictory evidence, admissions by News International executives that hacking was more widespread, and a reversal by police officials who now admit to mishandling the case.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates of the Metropolitan Police Service publicly acknowledged that he had not actually gone through the evidence. “I’m not going to go down and look at bin bags,” Mr. Yates said, using the British term for trash bags.

At best, former Scotland Yard senior officers acknowledged in interviews, the police have been lazy, incompetent and too cozy with the people they should have regarded as suspects. At worst, they said, some officers might be guilty of crimes themselves.

“It’s embarrassing, and it’s tragic,” said a retired Scotland Yard veteran. “This has badly damaged the reputation of a really good investigative organization. And there is a major crisis now in the leadership of the Yard.”

The testimony and evidence that emerged last week, as well as interviews with current and former officials, indicate that the police agency and News International, the British subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and the publisher of The News of the World, became so intertwined that they wound up sharing the goal of containing the investigation.

Members of Parliament said in interviews that they were troubled by a “revolving door” between the police and News International, which included a former top editor at The News of the World at the time of the hacking who went on to work as a media strategist for Scotland Yard.

On Friday, The New York Times learned that the former editor, Neil Wallis, was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.

Executives and others at the company also enjoyed close social ties to Scotland Yard’s top officials. Since the hacking scandal began in 2006, Mr. Yates and others regularly dined with editors from News International papers, records show. Sir Paul Stephenson, the police commissioner, met for meals 18 times with company executives and editors during the investigation, including on eight occasions with Mr. Wallis while he was still working at The News of the World.

Senior police officials declined several requests to be interviewed for this article.

The police have continually asserted that the original investigation was limited because the counterterrorism unit, which was in charge of the case, was preoccupied with more pressing demands. At the parliamentary committee hearing last week, the three officials said they were working on 70 terrorist investigations.

Yet the Metropolitan Police unit that deals with special crimes, and which had more resources and time available, could have taken over the case, said four former senior investigators. One said it was “utter nonsense” to argue that the department did not have enough resources.Interviews with current and former officials show that instead of examining all the evidence, investigators primarily limited their inquiry to 36 names that the private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, mentioned in one list.

As a result, Scotland Yard notified only a small number of the people whose phones were hacked by The News of the World. Other people who suspected foul play had to approach the police to see if their names were in Mr. Mulcaire’s files.

“It’s one thing to decide not to investigate,” said Jeremy Reed, one of the lawyers who represents numerous phone-hacking victims. “But it’s quite another thing not to tell the victims. That’s just mind-blowing.”

Among the possible victims was former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who asked the police last year to look into suspicions that his phones were hacked. In response, Scotland Yard sent him a form letter saying it was unclear whether the tabloid had eavesdropped on his conversations, people with knowledge of the request said.

The police assigned a new team to the hacking allegations in September after The New York Times published a magazine article that showed that the practice was far more widespread and which raised questions about Scotland Yard’s handling of the case.

Shortly after, the police finally reopened those “bin bags.” Now, the police are enduring the painstaking and humiliating exercise of notifying nearly 4,000 angry people listed in the documents that they may have been targets of what now appears to be industrial-strength hacking by The News of the World. The chore is likely to take years.

A Series of Inquiries

Scotland Yard’s new inquiry, dubbed Operation Weeting, has led to the arrests of a total of nine reporters and editors, with more expected. And the police have opened another inquiry into allegations that some officers were paid for confidential information by reporters at The News of the World and elsewhere.

The Metropolitan Police itself is now the subject of a judicial inquiry into what went wrong with their initial case, as well as into the ties between the department’s top officers and executives and reporters for News International.

At a parliamentary committee hearing last week, three current and former officials who ran the case were openly mocked. One member of Parliament dubbed an investigator “more Clouseau than Colombo.”

At the hearing, the senior investigator in charge of the day-to-day inquiry, Peter Clarke, blamed The News of the World’s “complete lack of cooperation” for the shortcomings in the department’s initial investigation.

While editors were not sharing any information, they were frequently breaking bread with police officers. Andy Hayman, who as chief of the counterterrorism unit was running the investigation, also attended four dinners, lunches and receptions with News of the World editors, including a dinner on April 25, 2006, while his officers were gathering evidence in the case, records show. He told Parliament he never discussed the investigation with editors.

Mr. Hayman left the Metropolitan Police in December 2007 and was soon hired to write a column for The Times of London, a News International paper. He defended the inquiry that he led, writing in his column in July 2009 that his detectives had “left no stone unturned.”

Three months later, Mr. Wallis, the former deputy editor of The News of the World, was hired by Scotland Yard to provide strategic media advice on phone-hacking matters to the police commissioner, among others. Scotland Yard confirmed last week that the commissioner, Sir Paul, had personally approved nearly $40,000 in payments to Mr. Wallis for his work.

But when Mr. Wallis was interviewed in April by a New York Times reporter working on a story about the hacking, he did not disclose his new media role at Scotland Yard. In the interview, Mr. Wallis defended both the newspaper and the vigor of Scotland Yard’s initial investigation.

A person familiar with the hacking investigation said on Friday that Mr. Wallis had also informed Rebekah Brooks about The New York Times’s reporting. Ms. Brooks, who resigned on Friday as chief executive officer of News International, has maintained that she was unaware of the hacking.
Another senior investigator said officials saw the inquiry as being in “safe hands” at the counterterrorism unit.
A News International spokeswoman said the company was reviewing whether it had paid Mr. Wallis at the same time.

It is unclear whether Scotland Yard knew about Mr. Wallis’s activities. While The New York Times was working on its article last year, Scotland Yard was refusing to answer most of the detailed questions that The Times submitted to it in a freedom of information request.

It was not until Thursday night that Scotland Yard revealed that Mr. Wallis had worked for it for a year. That revelation came about 10 hours after he was arrested at his west London home in connection with the phone hacking.

“This is stunning,” a senior Scotland Yard official who retired within the past few years said when informed about Mr. Wallis’s secret dual role. “It appears to be collusion. It has left a terrible odor around the Yard.”

Sky News raised further questions about a possible link between Sir Paul and Mr. Wallis on Saturday night. Just after Christmas last year Sir Paul recovered from surgery at a Champneys Spa in Hertfordshire, and his $19,000 bill was paid by a friend, the spa’s managing partner, Sky News reported. Sir Paul learned Saturday that Mr. Wallis had worked as a public-relations consultant for the spa, a police spokesperson said, adding that “Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson is not considering his position.” Mr. Stephenson had declared the stay on a gifts list, Sky reported.

A lawyer for Mr. Wallis said there was no connection between Sir Paul’s stay at the spa and Mr. Wallis. Mr. Wallis did not return calls seeking comment.

He had worked as second in command at the tabloid under Andy Coulson, who left the paper in 2007 after the private investigator and the reporter were found guilty of hacking into the phones of members of the royal family and their staff.

Shortly after, Mr. Coulson was hired by the Conservative Party to lead its communications team. Last year, when David Cameron became prime minister, he brought Mr. Coulson to 10 Downing Street. But Mr. Coulson could never escape the hacking controversy. Once Scotland Yard decided to reopen the case, he resigned and was arrested on July 8.

It was not until last autumn that the police were forced to confront their own mistakes. By then, they were facing an escalating stream of requests by people who suspected that their phones might have been hacked. Two dozen people had also brought civil cases against News International, and that compelled the police to release information from Mr. Mulcaire’s files.

The documents were seized on Aug. 8, 2006, from Mr. Mulcaire’s home in Cheam, south of London. Mr. Mulcaire, a 40-year-old former soccer player whose nickname was “the Trigger,” was nothing if not a meticulous note-keeper. On each page of the 11,000 documents, in the upper-left-hand corner, he wrote the name of the reporter or editor whom he was helping to hack phones.

Also seized from his home was “a target list” of the names of a total of eight members of the royal family and their staff, and 28 others, which Scotland Yard’s investigators used as their first road map of Mr. Mulcaire’s activities.

‘A Mutual Trust’

From the beginning, Scotland Yard investigators treated The News of the World with deference, searching a single desk in its newsroom and counting on the staff’s future cooperation. “A mutual trust” is how one police investigator described the relationship.

Leaders of the Metropolitan Police decided not to pursue a wide-ranging “cleanup of the British media,” as one senior investigator put it. Mr. Hayman, the investigator in charge, said in testimony before Parliament last Tuesday that the inquiry was viewed as “not a big deal” at the time.

The police charged only Mr. Mulcaire and the royal affairs reporter, Clive Goodman. When the case was done, the evidence went into plastic bags in a storage locker, several officials said. It was occasionally reviewed, but a complete accounting would not be done until late 2010.
On July 9, 2009, Mr. Yates, the assistant commissioner, said, “It is important to recognize that our inquires showed that in the vast majority of cases there was insufficient evidence to show that tapping had actually been achieved.”

And then last year, he told two parliamentary committees that a full accounting of all the evidence had been done.

Mr. Yates said investigators presumed that the material in the files was for legitimate purposes since it was the job of both Mr. Mulcaire and Mr. Goodman “to gather personal data about high-profile figures.”

Yet on numerous occasions Mr. Yates assured the public that all those affected had been notified.

He said the police had “taken all proper steps to ensure that where we have evidence that people have been the subject of any form of phone tapping, or that there is any suspicion that they might have been, that they have been informed.”

The parliamentary committees declined to pursue the matter.

In the fall of 2006, Sir Ian Blair, then the police commissioner, had the option of assigning the case to the Specialist Crime Directorate, the division that handles homicides, robberies and the like. It had 3,500 detectives at its disposal and could have reviewed every document, several former officials said.

The man leading the unit, Tarique Ghaffur, was known among his colleagues for refusing to toe the line. Mr. Ghaffur had led an internal inquiry into the police harassment of a prominent black activist and concluded that the man had been the victim of “unreasonable targeting by police officers.”

It was not until July 2009, three years after the evidence was seized, that Mr. Yates ordered some of the names in Mr. Mulcaire’s files to be put into a database, former officials said. But it fell far short of a complete accounting, they said.

In one instance, the police thwarted a deeper look at their handling of the evidence.

Last autumn, four people, including John Prescott, the former deputy prime minister, and Brian Paddick, a former senior police official, sought a judicial review to determine why Scotland Yard had not notified all the hacking victims.

In response, lawyers for the police claimed that none of the four plaintiffs’ phones had been accessed.

Last February, a judge ruled against going forward with an inquiry. Within days, several plaintiffs received word from the police that their phones might have been hacked.

“The court was misled,” said Tamsin Allen, who represents four people who claim their phones were hacked. “It was pretty outrageous.”

A judge recently decided to open a new review of why Scotland Yard did not notify everyone in Mr. Mulcaire’s files.

“I still don’t think we know the extent of what the police did and did not do because we are only about halfway down into the murky pond,” said Chris Bryant, a Labour member of Parliament who is one of the four plaintiffs who applied for the judicial review.

A Toxic Atmosphere

Current and former officials said that shortly after Scotland Yard began looking into the hacking, five senior police investigators discovered that their own phones might have been broken into by The News of the World.

At last week’s hearing in Parliament, Mr. Hayman, one of the five, denied knowing if his phone had been hacked.

So far, only 170 phone-hacking victims have been notified.

A second police operation is now trying to determine how many officers were paid for information from journalists working at The News of the World and elsewhere. One of the challenges, a senior officer said, was that the journalists’ records contained pseudonyms instead of the officers’ names. There is suspicion that some pseudonyms were made up by reporters to pocket cash from their editors, the officer said.

The atmosphere at Scotland Yard has become toxic. “Everyone is rowing for the shore,” said a former senior Scotland Yard official. “Everyone is distancing themselves from this mess.”

Sue Akers, a deputy assistant commissioner who is leading both police inquiries, said the department faced a deep challenge to repair its reputation.

“I think it is everybody’s analysis that confidence has been damaged,” Ms. Akers told Parliament last week. “But I am confident that we have got an excellent team who are working tirelessly to get this right.”

She added: “I hope that I do not have to come back here in five years’ time to explain why we failed.”

Questioning Begins in British Hacking Scandal

LONDON — Sir Paul Stephenson, the outgoing head of Scotland Yard, appeared before a panel of lawmakers on Tuesday as the phone hacking scandal involving the police, politicians and the media elite broadened and some of the most powerful people in British public life, including the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, faced questioning.

Sir Paul, who resigned on Sunday, appeared in the uniform of the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, commonly known as the Met or Scotland Yard, and quoted from Shakespeare to explain that once he had decided to tender his resignation, “It were best it were done quickly.”

The decision to quit was “my decision and my decision only,” he said.

The officer was expected to answer questions about his relationships with a former Murdoch news executive, Neil Wallis. Later in the day, Mr. Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the former head of the Murdoch newspaper properties in Britain, were to testify before another panel.

The hacking scandal has mushroomed into Prime Minister David Cameron’s worst crisis since his election last year. He cut short an African trade tour to return home, bracing for a showdown before the summer recess with the opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband at an emergency session of the full Parliament on Wednesday.

The two days of hearings, testimony, spin and possible contrition reflect the extent of the scandal that has spread in two tumultuous weeks since reports emerged that The News of the World tabloid hacked into the voice mail of a 13-year abducted schoolgirl in 2002.

The hearings were on Tuesday were being held in two bland committee rooms across from the House of Commons, close to the River Thames in the Westminster area of central London

The Murdochs were to appear before the House of Commons culture, media and sport committee, starting at 2:30 p.m. London time, in the Wilson Room of Portcullis House. Ms. Brooks, who was editor of The News of the World tabloid at the time of the hacking, and who has denied knowledge of it, is to appear in the same room an hour later.

The scrutiny began when Sir Paul appeared in the Grimond Room of the same building before the home affairs select committee.

He was to be followed by John Yates, the former assistant commissioner of the police force. Sir Paul and Mr. Yates, who resigned on Monday, have both denied any wrongdoing in their relationship with Mr. Wallis, a former News of the World deputy editor who later worked as a media consultant for the police. Mr. Wallis was also a public relations executive at an upmarket health spa where Sir Paul received free hospitality earlier this year.

Sir Paul said Mr. Wallis’s role with the police was “very minor.” He also said he had no reason to suspect that Mr. Wallis was involved in phone hacking.

Mr. Yates is also under investigation by police authorities probing whether he helped Mr. Wallis’s daughter get a job with the police.

Mr. Yates in particular will be quizzed on why he refused to reopen an earlier inquiry into the phone hacking scandal at The News of the World after a police review in 2009.

As the scandal continued to convulse its senior ranks, Scotland Yard said on Tuesday that the police regulator, known as the Independent Police Complaints Commission, had been asked to investigate links between Dick Fedorcio, the London police communications director, and Mr. Wallis.

At the later hearing, given the time pressure of the interviews with Rupert and James Murdoch and Ms. Brooks, the 10 House of Commons lawmakers, drawn from the three main political parties in Parliament, are likely to put questions they have agreed on in advance. The proceedings could unfold at breakneck pace since there will be little time to cover so much ground relating to what the trio knew of both the hacking itself and subsequent attempts to prevent closer scrutiny by Parliament, the press, the police and the public.A senior member of the committee said the panel would focus its questions on the culture of the newsrooms at Murdoch newspapers; when phone hacking first started; who was involved; who sought to cover up the scandal; and why James Murdoch authorized settlement payments earlier in the scandal to well-known people whose voice mail was known to have been hacked.



The Portcullis room can seat only around 50 spectators but the proceedings have generated massive public interest and will be broadcast live. In British parliamentary hearings, the witnesses do not testify under oath. Instead, they are obliged to answer “on their honor.” The committees do not have the power to punish those it questions, but any misbehavior unearthed would deepen the opprobrium associated with those linked to the scandal.

In political terms, the weight of the hearings lies in the opportunity they offer Parliament to assert an authority weakened in recent years by a scandal over lawmakers’ expense accounts. That could nudge the balance of power toward legislators. The witnesses can choose not to answer — in American terms, plead the Fifth — if they judge their comments could be self-incriminating.

The three will most likely appear with their lawyers, to whom they can turn for whispered advice. The committee members to watch — those members of Parliament who have most aggressively denounced the hacking in the past — include Labour members Paul Farrelly and Tom Watson and the chairman, John Whittingdale, a Conservative.

The committee’s clerks will have prepared many of the specific questions — they will be on green sheets of paper before the members — but the most combative questioners are likely to go off script.

“The trick for this committee is getting comments on the record,” said Brian Cathcart, a former journalist who worked as an adviser to the committee in the past. “They don’t expect to convict and lock up their man but to get people to say things that they will have to stand by.”

The questioning of Ms. Brooks is likely to be limited by the fact that she is a subject of the police investigation into the hacking. But she is certain to face questions about a comment she made to the committee in 2003 that her newspaper had paid the police for information — a comment she later retracted. Ms. Brooks was asked to appear before the committee at its 2009 hearing but refused to do so in person and instead sent written testimony.