What happened
Phone hacking at the News of the World was first exposed in 2007, when royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed. News International maintained it was the work of "one rogue reporter". David Cameron hired the paper's editor, Andy Coulson, as his director of communications six months after Coulson resigned over those convictions — and took him into Downing Street in 2010.
The July 2011 Dowler revelation collapsed the rogue-reporter defence. Victims ultimately included murder victims' families, 7/7 survivors, bereaved military families, and hundreds of public figures. Rupert Murdoch closed the News of the World, abandoned his bid for full control of BSkyB, and appeared before Parliament to call it "the most humble day of my life".
The Leveson Inquiry (report, November 2012) found that press behaviour, "at times, can only be described as outrageous", and recommended independent self-regulation underpinned by statute. The industry instead created IPSO, a regulator on the old model, which most major publishers joined and which has never levied a significant fine. Coulson was convicted of conspiracy to intercept voicemails in June 2014 and jailed. Rebekah Brooks was acquitted and later returned as CEO of News UK.
The government side of the ledger: Cameron hired Coulson despite warnings, and successive Conservative governments declined to implement Leveson's central recommendation, cancelled Leveson Part 2 (which was to examine corporate governance and police-press relations) in 2018, and repealed its statutory lever (Section 40) in 2024. The industry that hacked a dead child's phone ended the decade regulating itself.
Evidentiary class: criminal convictions (Coulson, Mulcaire, Goodman and others), judicial public inquiry (Leveson, 2012), and civil settlements to hundreds of victims.