Hack Attack (27 page)

‘So what do you make of all this?’ one asks quietly.

‘It is a statement,’ says the other, in an equally discreet whisper, ‘of power.’

At first sight, the power appears to rest with the guests. The man who wants to know what he should make of all this is a senior member of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, one of a small group of ministers who are scattered through the gathering. Alongside them is a group of other senior politicians from the Conservative opposition, including its leader, David Cameron. The other man in the whispered conversation is a famously aggressive national newspaper editor, a creator of storms, a destroyer of reputations – and just one of a substantial collection of editors, former editors, political editors, political consultants, newspaper executives, TV presenters, political lobbyists, political PR specialists, political correspondents, all now pressed together by the lakeside. This is a gathering of the country’s power elite, and yet the power which is being stated here is not that of the guests.

As the Christian wedding blessing begins, there is an extraordinary interruption. A large car with dark windows arrives at the top of the slope which leads down through the trees to the lake and, instead of halting there with all of the Bentleys and Mercedes (and the chauffeurs slowly baking in the sun), it ploughs on down the hill, its engine horribly loud, its presence horribly wrong, and when several hundred heads turn to understand the commotion, they see the doors of the intruding vehicle open to reveal the familiar form of the prime minister, Gordon Brown, arriving late.

Brown starts to move among the guests, but his body language screams his discomfort. He shakes hands, offers a rictus smile and moves on, obviously ill at ease and out of place. Other guests watch and conclude that he simply does not want to be here. He has just attended the Trooping of the Colour ceremony. He is due back in London to meet President Bush. But the fact is that he had to be here, to show respect.

An alien intruder would assume naturally that this respect is being shown to the bride and groom. The groom is Charlie Brooks – easy-going, clubbable, a trainer of racehorses and a liver of the good life, a man who only a few weeks earlier had explained to the posh socialites’ magazine,
Tatler
, that he liked nothing better than to wake up in the morning in his two-bedroomed, taupe-painted converted barn, with his bride-to-be by his side, and for the two of them to fly off to Venice, for lunch at Harry’s Bar, followed by some sightseeing and shopping by the canals, and then to fly back to London, for dinner in the famously elegant surroundings of Wilton’s oyster bar in Jermyn Street. A perfect day. Charlie is from old English money – nothing flash, nothing vulgar, just solid, comfortable, horse-loving, Home Counties country folk.

But, for the most part, it is not the amiable Charlie who catches the eye in this gathering. His bride captures far more attention. Rebekah is beautiful, with her red hair falling in crazy corkscrews around her elfin face. She is also charming – really quite famous (among this power elite) for her ability to make anybody feel that she is their special friend, that she is part of their team, always ready with a favour, always willing to confide. She is particularly good with men, her fingers resting gently on their forearm and her gaze resting direct on their eyes. Not quite sexual, not quite romantic but so intimate that a well-married, conservative kind of man, several decades older than her, reflects that sometimes he finds himself sighing and wondering whether ‘maybe, if things had been a little different, maybe we would have been together’.

This is Rebekah who was so close to Tony Blair when he was prime minister that Downing Street aides recall Blair’s wife, Cherie, finding her in their flat and hissing privately ‘Is she still here? When is she going?’; Rebekah who then effortlessly transferred her affection to the next prime minister, Blair’s great political rival Gordon Brown, who showed his own affection for her by allowing his official country residence, Chequers, to be used one night last summer for an all-girls pyjama party and sleepover to mark her fortieth birthday; Rebekah who now spends her weekends swapping canapés and gossip with Brown’s newest political rival, David Cameron, who could possibly be prime minister within a year and who is said to sign off his notes to her with the words ‘Love, Dave’. Everybody (who is anybody) is Rebekah’s friend.

There are those who say that this is not entirely natural, that they have seen her, for example, on the eve of an important dinner, studying the table plan like a schoolgirl actress with her script, spending several hours revising until she knows all the names and the partners’ names and the children’s names and the personal interests and the important topics; and then she goes out and performs. And everybody feels so special. Some say that, in truth, Rebekah has no friends at all, only contacts; that all these charming conversations she holds with all these guests are really nothing more than transactions; that all of her relationships are simply a means calculated to attain an end for ‘the World’s Number One Networker’. Her obvious and immediate end would be journalistic. She is the editor of the
Sun
, the biggest-selling daily newspaper in the country, and, of course, she wants contacts, to give her the stories which she needs to succeed. So, in these transactions which pass as conversations, clearly she has more than her charm to offer. She also has power – the power to make and break a reputation; quite an incentive for those who are offered her friendship.

And she will break as well as make: she is famous not only for her charm but also for her temper like a tornado. Some at the
Sun
remember the morning when she woke up to discover the rival
Daily Mirror
had beaten them to a particular story and how she expressed her feelings by walking into the office and targeting the news desk with a well-aimed missile, hastily identified as a heavy glass ashtray. One of the guests at this wedding, who has been close to her for years, says that here in Oxfordshire, Rebekah is a country wife, riding horses and organising shooting parties, but that, in London, where the real transactions take place, she is ‘the beating heart of the Devil’.

The word that follows Rebekah around is ‘ambitious’. Most of the journalists who have worked for her love her. In the language of Fleet Street, she has earned the highest accolade – she is ‘an operator’. When she wants a story, nothing will stand in her way. Years ago at the
News of the World
, she once dressed up as a cleaning lady to infiltrate the office of the
Sunday Times
and steal their story. But some of those who know her say that it is not really journalism that moves her – that she knows exactly how it works and exactly how to pull in a story and turn out a headline, but that she has no real love of it, no pulse of excitement at the very idea of it. They say that, for Rebekah, journalism is simply a ladder reaching from her not-particularly-well-off middle-class origins in a village in Cheshire, up through her first humble jobs in various newsrooms, then rapidly over the next few rungs to the editor’s office at the
News of the World
, and then to the editor’s office at the
Sun
– and then higher and higher, as far as the eye of her ambition can see. This summer day in 2009, she is still only forty-one, still climbing. For her, they say, the power of an editor is simply a mechanism for acquiring still more power. ‘Where there is power,’ says one of those who acts as her friend, ‘there is Rebekah.’

Yet, any intruder who imagines that it is the power of Rebekah Brooks which is being stated here today has entirely missed the point. She is merely an avatar. It may not be immediately obvious but the man with the real power is the elderly gentleman, aged seventy-eight, with the avuncular smile and the clumsily dyed orange hair, chatting quietly in the crowd. He is entirely undistinguished in this gathering, but it is he who has raised Rebekah up the ladder of her ambition, and it is his presence which makes the simple, central statement to the members of this power elite: ‘You need to be here.’ He is one of the small global group who have reached that special position where they are commonly identified simply by a first name. It may be Rebekah’s wedding, but this is Rupert’s day.

*   *   *

Since 1979, no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch. Between then and this wedding, all those who have been prime minister – Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown – have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what passed between them). It is certain that other national leaders have done the same, in Beijing and Washington and Canberra and in numerous capitals across the planet. This is the current state of the democratic deal: each man has one vote; this man has power.

The fact of the power is clear. Even here, at the wedding, it colours every move around him. At one point, for example, Tony Blair’s former media adviser, Alastair Campbell, strolls up to David Cameron and tells him that, although naturally he hopes Cameron will lose the general election which is due next year, he would support the Conservative leader if, on winning office, he tried to do something about the press. Campbell starts to unwind a well-rehearsed speech about the mendacity and negativity of so much political coverage, and Cameron focuses and is in the process of saying that he does think that newspaper behaviour has got even worse, when suddenly he catches his breath and freezes, like a schoolboy spotted by the teacher, as Rupert materialises at his shoulder, smiling. When Murdoch smiles, respectable politicians burst with appreciation.

Why? That is less clear.

Outsiders often misunderstand the power of a man like Rupert Murdoch. They look at him and they see the very model of a media megalomaniac. Certainly, by fair means and foul, with cleverness and cunning, he has built a vast media organisation – News Corp – which has more than 800 subsidiaries and total assets worth some $60 billion. He and his family trust directly own 12% of the shares (although a subtle legal manoeuvre means that they control 39.7% of the votes). This day in June 2009, News Corp owns one of the world’s Big Six film studios, Twentieth Century Fox; one of the world’s twenty biggest book publishers, HarperCollins; what was once the world’s most visited social networking site, MySpace; but, most important of all, News Corp owns TV channels and newspapers.

Murdoch creates media triangles. Country by country, he has bought a downmarket tabloid (the
Sun
in the UK, the
New York Post
in the US, the
Herald Sun
and the
Telegraph
in Australia); then he has found himself a quality title (the London
Times
, the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Australian
); and alongside them, he has locked in a TV network (BSkyB, Fox in the US, Foxtel in Australia). Each triangle in its own way is the foundation of great wealth and political power.

News Corp’s reach is enormous. Through News International, it owns the four titles which together capture 37% of Britain’s newspaper readers; plus 39.1% of the BSkyB satellite TV business, beaming movies and sports and the Sky News channel into 10 million homes in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It supplies 60% of Australia’s daily papers and 70% on Sundays. Its TV holdings have spread across Europe (west and east), across southern Africa and into Latin America. Its Asian TV network, Star, reaches all of India and all of China, most of the rest of Asia and now, through Star Select, the Middle East too. News Corp’s TV channels broadcast movies which are made by its own studios and then reviewed by its own journalists in any of its hundreds of magazines. News Corp broadcasts sports whose rights it owns, played by sportsmen whose teams it owns, in games whose results are published by newspapers it owns.

Seeing how Murdoch has hoarded media outlets like a miser gathers gold, outsiders often imagine that he behaves like a caricature media boss, who jabs a finger in the face of the dependent politician and dictates how things are gonna be if they wanna stay healthy. On this version of events, the mogul forces the government to cut a deal: he agrees not to attack the government’s policies (and not to expose the grubby personal secrets of its members); in return, the government agrees to reshape its policies to suit the mogul’s ideology; the mogul then whips his compliant reporters into line, and they produce the political propaganda he requires; the government rewards the mogul with lucrative favours for his business.

And yet government ministers and special advisers and civil servants who have dealt with Murdoch, and executives and editors and journalists who have worked for him, tell a different story. The difference between the two stories is itself a clue to one part of the mogul’s method. Those who know him say that this is a man who loves information: he uses his journalists as a network of listeners; he taps up every contact for the inside story; he collects political gossip; he is given secret briefings by intelligence agencies; and he has made a fortune out of selling news. Yet, with his own life and particularly with his business life, he is well-walled and secretive: the outsiders are there to be misled.

The insiders say that his use of power is far more subtle than the outsiders imagine. They say first of all that there is something very deep which drives him very hard – maybe, some suggest, that he grew up believing that he could never be good enough for his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, a towering patriarch who built businesses and broke opponents, and so, all his life, his son has been compelled to make his own business bigger and bigger, as though one day his dead father might finally signal that it was enough. With that in mind, they say that his primary interest in politicians is not political; it’s commercial. He may be a highly political animal, they say – obsessed with the detail of life in the corridors of power and personally possessed of some extremely right-wing opinions – but what he most wants from politicians is favours for his business. He’ll betray his own principles, he’ll embrace politicians for whom he has very little respect, just as long as they have the power to help the company get bigger.