The Hack True Story: The Shocking Link Between Daniel Morgan and the Phone-Hacking Scandal

ITV is digging back into one of the messiest chapters in modern British media with The Hack, a new drama about how phone-hacking blew up the tabloids and tangled with a still-unsolved murder case. It is very inside baseball, and yes, it gets messy.

What the show actually covers

David Tennant plays Nick Davies, the freelance bulldog reporter whose Guardian work dragged the hacking story into daylight. Robert Carlyle is DCS David Cook, the cop who led the long, frustrating investigation into the 1987 axe murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan. Jack Thorne is the writer, and he runs the two threads mostly in parallel until they collide near the end. It is a seven-part series, so pace yourself.

Phone-hacking 101 - the short version

Reporters and private investigators were illegally breaking into the voicemails of celebrities, politicians, and plenty of other people to mine for stories. The tech was embarrassingly basic: call the number, punch in the PIN, and if the owner never changed the default code - which a lot of people didn’t - you were in. News of the World was the worst offender and shut down in disgrace, though it was not the only outlet accused.

How it finally cracked open

Davies got a tip from a source known only as Mr Apollo - reportedly a well-known British figure whose identity he has never revealed. He started publishing. What followed, according to Thorne, was almost as big a story as the hacking itself: a wall of resistance from the rest of the UK press. The Guardian took heavy fire for pushing it, and plenty of papers wanted the whole thing to die quietly.

Then-editor Alan Rusbridger stood firm, and the fight dragged on for about five years. The dam only really burst after the New York Times parachuted in, spent six months digging, and published a piece that made the scandal impossible to ignore. Rusbridger has talked about what that period revealed - the power dynamics in Britain, the sway Rupert Murdoch held, and how scared people were of crossing him. None of that is healthy in a democracy, to put it mildly.

"When I grew up, if Trevor McDonald said something on ITV News, or if someone said it on BBC One at nine o'clock, I trusted every word... And now we're living in a world where no one seems to trust anything... I don't think it's just the result of [the phone-hacking scandal]... but this was a hugely contributing factor."

The Daniel Morgan case, and why it keeps coming up

Daniel Morgan was a private investigator killed with an axe in a South London pub car park in March 1987. Decades later, no conviction. The failure to solve it has haunted - and embarrassed - the Metropolitan Police. Morgan’s family trusted DCS David Cook more than anyone else on the case, but the prosecution he built against Jonathan Rees collapsed in court, and Rees was acquitted.

The crossover - where hacking meets murder

Here’s the knot. Jonathan Rees, Morgan’s former business partner, later turned up in the phone-hacking orbit. Davies reported that Rees built a lucrative operation feeding confidential information to News of the World, allegedly by cultivating corrupt police contacts. At his peak, the paper was said to be paying him around £150,000 a year.

Rees had already done seven years for conspiring to pervert the course of justice - arranging to plant cocaine on a woman. Despite that conviction, News of the World hired him back, which became a serious headache for former editor Andy Coulson. By then, Coulson had moved into 10 Downing Street as David Cameron’s director of communications. He initially claimed he didn’t know about hacking at the paper. A judge later found he had encouraged it.

As for the murder, Rees was repeatedly investigated and went on trial for it in 2009. He was acquitted, and he has consistently denied any involvement, saying Morgan was a friend and business partner and that his death hurt him personally and financially. Years later, Rees and associates Glenn and Gary Vian won £414,000 in damages from the Met for malicious prosecution over how the Morgan case against them was handled.

Who is who and how it all connects

• Nick Davies (David Tennant) - The Guardian freelancer who doggedly reported the hacking story after a tip from a mysterious source called Mr Apollo.
• DCS David Cook (Robert Carlyle) - The detective who led the Daniel Morgan murder investigation and earned the family’s trust.
• Daniel Morgan - Private investigator murdered in 1987; case remains unsolved.
• Jonathan Rees - Morgan’s ex-business partner; accused of running a lucrative pipeline of confidential info to News of the World; previously jailed for a cocaine-planting conspiracy; rehired by the paper after prison; acquitted of Morgan’s murder; later awarded damages for malicious prosecution.
• News of the World - Sunday tabloid at the center of the hacking scandal; shut down amid the fallout.
• Andy Coulson - Former NotW editor who became the UK Prime Minister’s communications chief; a judge later found he encouraged hacking.
• New York Times - Spent six months investigating and published the piece that made the scandal impossible to ignore in the UK.

So why tell this story now?

Thorne frames The Hack as a drama about trust: how the hacking era helped grind down faith in institutions and muddied the idea of a shared fact set. Producer Joe Williams adds that the show’s privacy angle lands even harder now, with tech making intrusion easier and more seductive by the day.

Where to watch

The Hack is streaming now on ITVX and airs Wednesdays at 9pm on ITV1.