Hack Attack (28 page)

In practical terms, this comes down to a repeated demand to be freed from regulation. He and his senior journalists all sing from the same song sheet on the virtues of deregulated free markets, in the UK and the US and Australia, wherever Murdoch owns outlets: theirs is the world’s loudest voice calling for the state to be cut back to make way for private enterprise. They do this as though it were simply a point of political philosophy. Clearly, however, it is a matter of overwhelming commercial interest for a businessman who wants to expand, to beat competitors, to dominate the very markets whose freedom he so often proclaims. Democratic governments across the world create regulators to speak up for the public interest – to protect their markets against the power of dominant corporations, to stop them crushing the competition or setting unfair prices or otherwise abusing their position. Repeatedly Murdoch has had to find ways to beat them, to sideline the public interest in order to advance his own. Legal fences obstruct him – so he looks to friendly politicians to quietly open gates and wave him through.

The outsiders may assume that this involves striking a deal. The insiders again say it is more subtle than that – not so much a deal (finite, static, a conscious agreement) as a somewhat cynical relationship (each side pretending friendship but seeking advantage, both offering a little more than they hope finally to give, neither side ever quite sure of the outcome). And that special relationship, they say, is born and brought up and free to flourish in places like this wedding.

Here, by the side of this lake, Murdoch and his executives and his senior journalists enjoy the first privilege of power: that they are given for free the kind of access for which unscrupulous lobbyists will pay fat packets of cash. The prime minister, his likely successor and their respective followers queue up to hear his views, to pick up the signals, to understand what he wants, to send him their own signals, to bond. Some 46 million voters in the United Kingdom might like that kind of access to their leaders, but it is this foreign billionaire – who does not even have the right to vote in the UK – who enjoys it and the special relationship with governments which it brings.

So he moves among the wedding guests, casual and relaxed, chatting quietly. He does not display his power in any overt way – no bodyguards, no sitting apart and holding court like some silver-screen godfather. There is no hint of threat or enforcement. Effortlessly, and with some charm, he harvests the respect of those around him. But …

Ultimately, of course, there is something else at work here. It is not respect. It is fear. It is a curious fact that Murdoch holds no fear for ordinary people: most could not care less about him; the few who do care, tend to hold him in contempt as a model of avarice with his seven homes around the globe and his annual income touching $22 million. Yet among those who play the power game, certainly, beneath the courtesy and the conversation, there is a quiet fear.

That, in turn, is a little to do with his character. He can show his charm, he can tell a blue joke to the lads, but the truth is that many of those who shake his hand can see the snarl behind his smile. An Australian associate recalls what happened one day when he suggested to Murdoch that he might like to rebuild bridges with a businessman with whom he had argued and who had since seen his business empire collapse. As he remembers it, the snarl pounced out as Murdoch explained: ‘I didn’t like talking to that cunt when he had money, and now he’s broke, he can get fucked.’ One member of this powerful gathering recalls a much gentler but equally revealing comment from the Queen, who asked about Rupert’s son, James, and then added sotto voce: ‘The father is awful.’

The man’s character in turn is at the heart of his approach to business. Rupert Murdoch is a man who will crush an opponent like a beetle beneath his boot, and he will do it for one simple reason – for News Corp. One of the guests who is closest to him says: ‘Rupert does not discriminate – he does not care about anybody more than he cares about the business. That includes himself, his kids, his political allies. The business comes first. His plan is “kill or be killed”. Every single corporate battle that he’s fought over the last fifty years, he’s gone head to head to win. You have to win. You don’t acknowledge that politics is a higher power. You don’t yield to the law of the land. You don’t submit to any higher code than your own.’

Notoriously, in 1975, Murdoch abused his position as a newspaper owner to support a plot which ousted the democratically elected prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, who had dared to wander away from the mogul’s path. Murdoch is the man who threw 6,000 men out of work when he broke away from the printing unions in London; who dumped his own citizenship as an Australian in order to become an American so that he could own more than 25% of a TV network; who pushed the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Independent
to the edge of destruction in a UK price-cutting war which doubled the circulation of
The Times
; who adopted Christianity like a new suit and then dumped it when he tired of it.

But above all, the fear is generated by the people he hires to work for him. ‘He loves thugs,’ as one of his senior executives puts it. Roger Ailes at Fox TV; Kelvin MacKenzie at the
Sun
; Col Allan at the
New York Post
; Sam Chisholm at Sky TV: they all came out of the same box, marked ‘bully’. And when Murdoch’s men bully, their victims really feel it. All these members of the power elite have seen what Murdoch’s news outlets can do, using their stories in the same way that muggers in back alleys use their boots, to kick a victim to pulp. ‘Monstering’, they call it – a savage and prolonged public attack on a target’s life, often aimed at the most private and sensitive part of their existence, their sexual behaviour, inflicting maximum pain, maximum humiliation.

Very often, this will have nothing to do with Murdoch’s own manoeuvres; it will simply be a matter of filling news space at the expense of some hapless individual who has caught the tabloid eye. Most journalists will refuse to do it, just as most men would refuse to be torturers. But some of those who carry press cards are like the droogs in Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange
: they kick their victims because they love it. It sells newspapers, it pays well, it’s fun.

A monstering from Murdoch’s droogs is a terrible experience. If the damage they did were physical – visible – courts could jail them for years. As it is, they inflict grievous emotional harm, the kind of injury from which some victims simply never recover. Indeed, there are some who have been left suicidal by the experience. It can come out of nowhere, picking on some off-the-cuff statement or some tiny detail which has caught nobody else’s eye, least of all the victim’s, and suddenly the violence begins. It can be completely arbitrary in its choice of target. If Miss Muffet abandons her tuffet because of the approaching spider, the droogs can choose to attack her for cowardice; or to attack the spider for indecency and threatening behaviour.

Once it starts, the monstering cannot be stopped by the victim. If the spider says he meant no harm, he was simply looking for somewhere to sit, then ‘an unrepentant spider last night threatened to spread his regime of fear’. Apologising will not work – ‘a humiliating climbdown’. Nor will refusing to apologise – ‘an increasingly isolated spider’. There is no end to the potential angles. The droogs will call everybody who ever sat next to the spider until they find somebody else who didn’t like him. They will comb through arachnophobes everywhere, in search of alarmist quotes and calls for action. They can keep it going for days. A little distortion here, some fabrication there. The fact of the focus is itself a distortion: the relentless return to the same victim, the desire to destroy that corrupts normal editorial judgement. Often, other newspapers and broadcast bulletins will join in, so that simple commercial competition encourages the hunt for a new angle. The spider is helpless – if he speaks out, he fuels the story; if he stays quiet, the story tramples him.

Eventually, the monstering stops, usually because some new target has arrived; or because the target has been destroyed. Sometimes, even destruction is not enough. In his diary, Alastair Campbell recalls the ferocious monstering which was given to the then Transport Secretary Stephen Byers, in the spring of 2002, which continued even after he had resigned: ‘It’s like they get a corpse but then are disappointed there is nothing left to try and kill, so they kill the dead body too.’

And the fear of this monstering generates power far beyond the relatively small number of victims who are attacked. All those in the power elite are prone to fear Murdoch because none can be sure that they will not be next to be kicked by the tabloid boot. They all saw what happened to the former Labour minister Clare Short. Several times she criticised the
Sun
’s use of topless women to sell the paper and found herself denounced to millions as ‘killjoy Clare … fat … jealous … ugly … Short on looks … Short on brains’. At various points, the paper offered readers free car stickers (‘Stop Crazy Clare’); sent half-naked women to her home; and ran a beauty contest to ask their readers whether they would prefer to see her face or the back of a bus. Separately, the
News of the World
ran two bogus stories suggesting she was involved with pornography; tried to buy old photographs of her as a twenty-year-old in a nightdress; and published a smear story which attempted to link her to a West Indian gangster.

Her fellow Labour MP, the former Anglican priest Chris Bryant, provoked the full wrath of the Murdoch papers when he trapped Rebekah Brooks into admitting that her journalists had paid police officers for information at the media select-committee hearing in March 2003. Immediately afterwards, Bryant was warned by a reporter from the
Sun
that ‘they will get you for that’. They got him a little bit a few months later when he told the House of Commons that he opposed the idea of a referendum on the new EU constitution and found the
Sun
telling its readers that he was a ‘Euro fanatic’ who thought they were too stupid to vote. They got him more severely that December when the
Mail on Sunday
exposed his sex life, complete with an embarrassing photograph of him wearing only a tight-fitting pair of briefs, and Brooks at the
Sun
and Andy Coulson at the
News of the World
joined in a vicious monstering. Brooks made it very clear that this was personal, sashaying up to Bryant at a subsequent Labour Party conference to deliver a sharp dig at his sexuality, calculated to remind him of the embarrassment of one of his former colleagues who had been accused of cruising a London park for gay sex: ‘Oh, Mr Bryant, it’s after dark. I’m surprised you’re not out on Clapham Common.’

The punishment was equally harsh for the American writer Michael Wolff. In March 2009 he found himself on the receiving end of a thorough monstering from the
New York Post
when he was working on a biography of Murdoch. By some unexplained means, the mogul’s people had laid hands on an unpublished typescript and started to send clear warnings that the boss was not happy with some its contents. Wolff recalls a senior executive calling to ask him to make changes before the book was published.

‘What will you do if I don’t?’ Wolff asked.

‘Then we will not support the book.’

‘How bad is that?’

‘It could be bad.’

And it was bad. The
New York Post
discovered that Wolff had been having an affair and ran stories on 2, 3, 6, 25 and 30 March and 3 and 9 April, publishing along the way a secondary story which accused Wolff of evicting his mother-in-law from her apartment as well as a cartoon of Wolff in bed with his lover, portraying the Jewish writer in a style which might reasonably be described as anti-Semitic.

At its worst, everybody in the power elite has heard that the punishment can amount to crude blackmail. They have all heard the stories about how Murdoch editors have safes containing dossiers of evidence about the private lives of politicians and competing businessmen; and that Murdoch and his people agree to suppress these gross embarrassments in exchange for yet more favours. There are specific rumours – about a senior figure in British sport who is said to have complied with Murdoch’s plans for TV rights when he was informed that the
Sun
was ready to tell its readers that he had had sexual relationships with young men; and about a middle-ranking Labour politician who is said to have spoken up on behalf of Murdoch’s UK newspapers after journalists obtained a video of him having sex with a prostitute while the prostitute’s husband watched. It is true that the sports administrator and the Labour politician offered their support to Murdoch. Whether they did so out of fear of the dossiers – or whether the dossiers even exist – is not so clear. The power is in the belief and in the fear which it engenders. Which is widespread.

Certainly, many have come across a gentler version of this, something more like whitemail – a favour done rather than a threat made. There are senior politicians, police officers and others who know that senior Murdoch journalists have privately put in a word for them, to help with a promotion, to defuse some threat. Most of the wedding guests know that Rebekah worked a clever piece of whitemail with the deputy prime minister John Prescott when, as editor of the
News of the World
, she got hold of the story that many years earlier Prescott’s wife, Pauline, had given up a baby for adoption. This had happened before the Prescotts had met, but now the long-lost son had made contact. Prescott pleaded with Rebekah not to publish the story until his wife and her adult son had had a chance to get to know each other. She agreed, a decent act and one which earned her a sense of indebtedness from Prescott who later, when his family were ready, opted to take the story to her at the
Sun
, where she had become editor. Favours are valuable currency in the corridors of power.