The Guardian is a good newspaper, and an adornment of British political and cultural life. Long may it remain so.
But the Left-wing organ is also an unhappy place torn by divisions and arguments. During the past few years there have been internal storms over slavery, trans issues and the sale of its sister paper, the Observer.
The latest ruckus concerns an extraordinary new seven-part series on ITVX, the first episode of which was aired on Wednesday evening. The Hack tells the story of the Guardian’s investigation into phone hacking that started over 15 years ago and finally led to the closure of the News of the World and countless court cases.
As a close observer of the Press over the years, I think I can say with confidence that no broadcaster has ever before devoted seven hours of prime-time television to a single British newspaper. It remains to be seen what ITV audiences will make of an exhausting marathon.
To judge by the first episode, the Guardian is going to be portrayed in heroic terms, and its former reporter Nick Davies, played by David Tennant, is intended to emerge as a saint. Other journalists, particularly those working for newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, will be painted in very dark colours.
One might therefore have expected the Guardian’s current editor, Katharine Viner, to roll out the red carpet for the drama, which comes from the pen of well-known screenwriter Jack Thorne. Not a bit of it.
Far from there being a celebration of the dramatisation of the Guardian’s historic coup, yesterday’s edition ran an astonishingly negative review by Lucy Mangan, who has been writing for the paper for over 20 years. The drama received a measly two stars out of five.
The headline, which accurately reflected the review, declared that ‘the astonishing story of phone hacking makes for remarkably dull TV’. In the standfirst below, we read about ‘Jack Thorne’s lacklustre script – full of cringe-making lines, strange dream-like sequences and a recurring dung beetle’.
The Hack tells the story of the Guardian’s investigation into phone hacking that started over 15 years ago and finally led to the closure of the News of the World
One might therefore have expected the Guardian’s current editor, Katharine Viner, to roll out the red carpet for the drama
Lucy Mangan’s piece notes that Davies is depicted as ‘a saint whose violent childhood has given him a deep-seated urge to hit back against anyone who takes power and abuses it and whose ex-wife still tells the children they have “an impressive dad” while making them watch and read everything he does’.
The Guardian’s editor during the phone hacking scandal was Alan Rusbridger, who is played by Toby Jones, the much praised star of ITV’s Mr Bates v the Post Office. Efforts have been made to make Jones look like Rusbridger but it’s uphill work since Jones is short and full of energy whereas Rusbridger is tall and languid.
Mangan – who is at pains in her piece to emphasise that she has only fleetingly once met Alan Rusbridger, who stepped down as editor in 2015 – complains that his mouth is full of ‘cringe-makingly heroic lines such as “My life? This is bigger than me”.’
Unlike most of the rest of us, Lucy has evidently waded through all seven episodes, and her enthusiasm plainly didn’t mount as they went on. ‘The problem is that stitching together a sprawling story as [Nick] Davies did [in his book] is, in televisual terms, very boring – especially when played out across a very indulgent seven-hour run.’
In the review (I should say that I agreed with almost every word), The Hack was deemed, if not exactly a turkey, at least a big disappointment. Neither David Tennant nor Toby Jones will be over the moon. Jack Thorne, who is used to praise, is probably actively cross.
As for the real-life close friends Alan Rusbridger and Nick Davies, while doubtless gratified that they are bathed in such an heroic light, they must be bewildered that the dramatisation of their exploits should be rubbished in the newspaper for which they both worked so long.
There is another person who must be incandescent. The chief executive of ITV is Carolyn McCall, who fulfilled the same role at the Guardian when Nick Davies began his investigation. The broadcaster must have invested millions in The Hack, and Ms McCall won’t be overjoyed to see the series lambasted in the paper she once ran.
What is going on? Some sources have suggested to me that Lucy Mangan independently took against The Hack, and decided off her own bat to give it a hard time. According to this theory, no one put her up to it.
The Guardian’s editor during the phone hacking scandal was Alan Rusbridger, who is played by Toby Jones
Nick Davies is portrayed in The Hack as a saint and a hero, and is played by David Tennant
This may well be true. Even so, given that in Guardian folklore Nick Davies’s phone hacking investigation is one of the newspaper’s greatest historic achievements, it is odd that the present editor, Katharine Viner, should not have peered over Lucy Mangan’s shoulder and asked her to tone down the piece a bit.
Ms Viner knows how pleased Rusbridger and Davies are with their feats of derring-do, and it would have been a friendly act for her to rein in Lucy. Or should we look forward to a second piece in the Guardian lauding The Hack as a work of unparalleled genius?
All newspapers have their rows and divisions, as does every human institution, but the Guardian is in a class of its own. This citadel of high-mindedness and self-proclaimed virtue may appear serene and unruffled from the outside, but close students know that it can resemble a nest of vipers.
Let’s just say that Alan Rusbridger does not stand outside Katharine Viner’s window singing serenades. In 2016 he announced that he wasn’t going to take up the chairmanship of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian.
This was an agreeable sinecure he had set up for himself when he stood down as editor of the newspaper, which he had sometimes treated as his personal fiefdom. However, he was blocked by Viner and the Guardian’s then-chief executive.
It was a blow to Rusbridger, who was forced to direct all his energies to his new job as Principal of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. After a few years he tired of that, as perhaps did the college fellows, and returned to London and the comparative obscurity of the editorship of Prospect magazine.
Katharine Viner has shown that she is a formidable adversary on other occasions. In 2021 Annette Thomas left the Guardian Media Group as chief executive following a bitter tussle with Ms Viner over the publisher’s finances and strategy. The pair had once been friendly.
Whoever was in the right over that power struggle, it can’t be said that the paper’s finances immediately improved. It continued to lose money, though in the year to March 2025 it did manage to cut its annual losses to £25million from £37million.
Fortunately for the Guardian, it is sitting on a cash pile of £1.3billion, the result of prudent investments made long ago, which is gradually diminishing. Though it is perennially haemorrhaging cash, its managers are sometimes as red in tooth and claw as the uber capitalists the paper berates.
In the Guardian review, The Hack was deemed, if not exactly a turkey, at least a big disappointment
It was justly accused of hypocrisy when it emerged that in 2007 it had used an offshore tax shelter in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying tax on the £302 million profit it had realised on the sale of some of its shares in Auto Trader magazine. On that occasion Messrs Rusbridger and Davies stayed schtum.
To return to Ms Viner and a succession of Guardian spats. The most recent one occurred at the end of last year, and concerned the offloading of the Observer in apparent contravention of previous guarantees. Journalists at both papers went on strike, the Observer was sold, and the journalists went back to work.
However, Viner had been booed by staff. Heated criticism of her persisted with rows over the growing use of Artificial Intelligence and a new website design, which journalists claimed was deterring readers.
Perhaps the most explosive recent issue at the Guardian was the transgender debate. Several female journalists have left the newspaper after, as they see it, receiving scant support from Katharine Viner.
Most notably, Hadley Freeman resigned in 2022 after 22 years on the paper. In a letter to Viner, she criticised the Guardian for abandoning a sense of balance in its discussion of trans issues. She also complained of being ‘repeatedly warned off’ from writing about Corbyn’s Labour Party from her ‘perspective as a Jew’.
In 2020, columnist Suzanne Moore left the paper. Eight months earlier, 338 Guardian staff (many of them working in Australia or America) had written a letter to Viner in response to a column by Moore which they had deemed anti-trans.
One of the chief persecutors of both Moore and Freeman was another of the newspaper’s columnists, Owen Jones. He also attacked Guardian journalist Sarah Ditum, whom he described on Twitter as ‘an unpleasant weird person’ and an ‘anti-trans activist’.
Viner commissioned an independent investigator to look at the language used by Jones. Although the report was critical of the incendiary hard Left columnist’s words, he publicly crowed that he had been cleared of bullying. Unrebuked by Viner, he continues to write for the Guardian.
A divided house, indeed. Journalists who openly attack their editor and dispute amongst themselves in the most unfriendly manner. And this in a paper that, more than any other in Britain, lays down the law from on high.
That brings me back to Nick Davies. Portrayed in The Hack as a saint and a hero, he was, according to contemporaries to whom I have spoken, anything but. He is described by one as an ‘arrogant outsider’ who was not widely liked – except by Alan Rusbridger.
I have written in these pages before about Nick Davies, praising the stamina and forensic skills that he displayed during the phone hacking scandal but bemoaning his hatred of the Press and his scornful dismissal of many decent and scrupulous journalists who don’t happen to share his Leftist view of the world.
Here is a man who described newspaper proprietor Rupert Murdoch as ‘a brutal and unscrupulous bully’. In my book, Murdoch is very far from being a saint but by standing up to destructive printers in the mid-1980s he gave Fleet Street – and the free Press – a new lease of life.
Davies has described the Sun newspaper as ‘a source of repulsively dishonest journalism’. This is the language of the extremist and bigot. Wasn’t it the Sun that recently published emails demonstrating just how close Peter Mandelson had been to the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein?
The Guardian complains that Rusbridger’s mouth is full of ‘cringe-makingly heroic lines such as “My life? This is bigger than me”’
Nor were the Guardian and Davies eager to admit a crucial mistake he made during his phone hacking inquiry. In 2011 he accused the News of the World of deleting the voicemails of missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and giving her parents ‘false hope that she was still alive’.
This momentous allegation ignited public anger, and led directly to the Leveson inquiry into the Press. In fact, although the News of the World had (of course disgracefully) listened to Milly Dowler’s voicemails it had not deleted them. This was ‘probably’ done by Surrey police.
Five months later, the Guardian briefly acknowledged the error. I’m not aware that Nick Davies has ever made a fulsome apology. I don’t imagine that The Hack will dwell on the issue.
Davies is certainly no saint. If he is a hero, he is a very flawed one. The Guardian is a good but imperfect newspaper, beset with rancorous divisions, yet ever reluctant to descend from its pulpit.
I am glad that it exists – but, unlike Davies and his prescriptive ilk, even gladder that we still live in a free society in which there are other voices.
