An ITV drama about the Guardian’s role in breaking the phone-hacking scandal that closed the News of the World will be aired later this year starring Toby Jones from Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
The seven-part series will follow both the work of the Guardian journalist Nick Davies, played by David Tennant, and the police investigation into the unsolved murder of the private investigator Daniel Morgan.
Jones, whose performance last year portraying the campaigner Alan Bates helped trigger a national outcry over the treatment of victims of the Post Office scandal, will play the part of the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger.
Davies was responsible for uncovering the widespread use of phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch’s the News of the World, including the revelations of unlawful accessing of the mobile phone voicemail of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Cara Theobold, who starred as Ivy Stuart in the ITV drama Downton Abbey, is playing the role of Guardian reporter Amelia Hill, who worked with Davies on the paper’s investigation.
The News of the World closed in July 2011 and the Sunday tabloid’s former editor Andy Coulson was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2014 but the hacking scandal continues to dog Murdoch’s media empire.
Last week the the Duke of Sussex and the former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson accepted a costs and damages settlement of more than £10m from Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers (NGN), which owns the Sun.
Harry also received “a full and unequivocal apology” over “the phone hacking, surveillance and misuse of private information by journalists and private investigators instructed by them” at the News of the World.
NGN also admitted and apologised to Harry for “the serious intrusion by the Sun between 1996 and 2011 into his private life, including incidents of unlawful activities carried out by private investigators working for the Sun”, in the first admission of unlawful behaviour at the group’s flagship newspaper in the UK.
Murdoch’s parent company in the UK, News UK, also owns the Times and the Sunday Times.
The drama series, titled The Hack, is set between 2002 and 2012 and will interweave how the hacking scandal was uncovered by Davies with the repeatedly botched police investigations into the murder of Morgan.
On 10 March 1987, Morgan, 37, was found dead in the car park of the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south London, with an axe embedded in his head. He was a private detective based in south London who, with his business partner, Jonathan Rees, ran an agency called Southern Investigations. Rees would go on to carry out extensive work for the News of the World.
The agency was said to be a “hub of corruption” through which police officers were paid for stories. The Met announced in 2007 that the motive for Morgan’s murder was probably that he “was about to expose a south London drugs network possibly involving corrupt police officers”.
The Met commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, admitted in 2023 that “corruption” and “professional incompetence” had marred investigations into the case.
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Robert Carlyle will play the role of the former Met DCS Dave Cook, who was described by the Morgan family as the only police officer they could trust. He ran the fifth and final investigation in 2006 into Morgan’s murder. It collapsed in court in 2011 because of claims around the police handling of “supergrass” witnesses.
The Hack was filmed last year and will air later this year on ITV and STV and be available for streaming on ITVX and STV Player.
The Hack’s executive producer, Patrick Spence, who was also behind Mr Bates vs the Post Office, said: “It’s clear that several questions remain unanswered. This drama is our contribution to that conversation.”
The series is being written by the Bafta-winning screenwriter Jack Thorne, whose previous works include the 2019 series His Dark Materials. Thorne said: “This is a strange and deceptive piece of our recent history. One with so many layers to it. I thought, as someone who is interested in politics, I understood everything that happened. I did not.
“It’s a fight for the truth that really shocked me. That is why it matters to tell this story now in an age where the truth seems more in danger than ever.”
ITV Studios is the producer and co-financier of the drama along with Stan in Australia.
A spokesperson for News UK declined to comment.
