Hack Attack (34 page)

On 9 March, we disclosed that the Murdoch company had agreed to pay Clifford more than £1 million. Some of this was to cover his legal costs. Most of it was in the form of guaranteed income for stories which he would sell them over the next three years. This meant that it could be presented as something other than the payment of damages. Nobody was fooled. But it was clever. Our biggest gun was spiked and broken and, at least for now, we were beaten.

On Twitter, the comedian Stephen Fry reacted by asking for a definition of ‘countryside’ and providing the cryptic but aggressive answer – ‘murdering Max Clifford’.

9. The mogul and his governments

Based on interviews with government officials and ministers; political biographies; and evidence disclosed to the Leveson Inquiry.

When he first arrived in the United Kingdom in January 1969, to buy the
News of the World
, Rupert Murdoch had no significant political muscle.

In the eyes of the UK establishment he was a young (aged thirty-seven), slightly plump, socially ill-at-ease businessman who had one supremely attractive characteristic: he was not Robert Maxwell, the ego-driven and corrupt millionaire whose lust for power was as subtle as snakebite and who had been closing in fast on the
News of the World
. Murdoch slipped in, offered a bigger buck and was warmly welcomed as the new owner.

For a couple of years, the worst that was said of him was that he was, well, a touch vulgar. The
News of the World
had never been acceptable in polite society. It specialised in the bawdy, a bit like the best kind of working man’s pub – warm and cheerful, good for a laugh, with a flash of stocking top too. It picked up on obscure court cases, especially the ones where a doctor or a country parson was accused of fumbling with the undercarriage of some local widow. Murdoch soon started to push the boundaries.

Within months of taking over, he serialised the memoirs of Christine Keeler, the elegant young woman who had caused huge scandal by wrapping her long, slim legs around the then Secretary of State for war, the Conservative MP John Profumo, who had not only enjoyed an exciting affair with her but then lied to Parliament about it. This had all happened six years earlier: Profumo had resigned; the government had been disgraced. This was simply the inside story of what had gone on between the sheets. But it was good for sales.

A few years later, he did far more of the same when his journalists joined in exposing the Conservative peer Lord Lambton, who had found another elegant young call girl, Norma Levy, to play with, while a
News of the World
photographer peeked through a hole in the wall and captured the whole sweaty business on film. More sales, more money.

Even after he bought the
Sun
, later in 1969, he was still no kind of power-monger in the UK. He rescued a newspaper that was tottering towards the grave and once again increased its sales, with brash headlines, sensational stories and all the nudes that were fit to print.
The Times
observed that ‘Mr Murdoch has not invented sex but he does show a remarkable enthusiasm for its benefits to circulation.’

Still, the formula worked. By 1978, the
Sun
had become the most popular daily paper in the UK, and Murdoch finally began to become a serious player. Noisily, his two papers backed Margaret Thatcher all the way to Downing Street in April 1979 – and the great game of power began.

*   *   *

In 1981, two years after Mrs Thatcher became prime minister, Murdoch set out to buy
The Times
and the
Sunday Times
. The Thatcher government generously opened the way for him, choosing not to refer his bid to the regulator, the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, who would have had good grounds to block it. Government records that were finally released thirty-one years later, in 2012, disclosed that Murdoch secretly met Mrs Thatcher for a Sunday lunch at Chequers just as the deal was being put together. Murdoch and the government pretended that the two newspapers were exempt from monopoly law because they were on the verge of financial collapse. It wasn’t true.

There was outrage in Parliament and bitter comment from rival newspapers, but Murdoch got what he wanted and, with that deal, established himself as the biggest newspaper proprietor in the UK, a man whom politicians now certainly wished to please.

So it was that in 1986, when Murdoch wanted to stop Robert Maxwell buying the
Today
newspaper, the Thatcher government referred Maxwell’s bid to the Monopolies Commission, which blocked it; and in 1987 when he himself wanted to buy
Today
the government reversed its position and chose not to involve the Monopolies Commission, so he bought it; and in 1990, when he was nurturing his new satellite TV company, Sky, while Mrs Thatcher’s government was passing a communications bill with a new framework of regulation for television, Sky was exempted from almost all of it.

Later that same year, Mrs Thatcher delivered one particularly graceful favour. Eighteen months after its launch, Sky TV was wallowing in failure, beaming four channels from the Astra satellite to the UK where just about nobody owned a dish to receive them, and losing some £2 million a week in the process. Murdoch wanted to save the company by merging with its only competitor, British Satellite Broadcasting, which was failing on an even grander scale but, as ever, this plan was clearly likely to run into trouble with the regulator, in this case the Independent Television Commission, which would object to the creation of a monopoly.

However, it so happened that the government was in the process of closing down the ITC and replacing it with a new regulator, to be known as the Independent Broadcasting Authority. There was a five-day gap between the death of the ITC and the birth of the IBA when there was simply no regulator in existence, and it so happened that during this brief moment of total non-regulation, the government looked away and quietly waved the merger through the legal fence: Murdoch was allowed to create BSkyB, with News Corp effectively controlling its board, owning 50% of the company (later reduced to 39% by a share flotation).

*   *   *

As ever, this was not the result of a formal deal. There was a natural and easy relationship between Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher. They saw the world through the same hardline neoliberal eyes – unfettered capitalism, deregulated markets, privatised everything. His subsequent relationship with Tony Blair, from 1994, when he became Labour leader, was more awkward. Blair was arguably the most conservative leader in the history of the Labour Party, but nonetheless, he and his closest advisers embraced Rupert Murdoch the way a trainer embraces a tiger, with great care and genuine anxiety.

Some of Blair’s closest advisers privately looked on Murdoch and his crew with deep discomfort. Alastair Campbell once compared a lunch with senior Murdoch journalists to a meeting of the far-right British National Party. Certainly, they did not want to be pushed around by Murdoch; but Blair had seen how the
Sun
in 1992 had monstered the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock in order to help hand power to Murdoch’s chosen candidate, the Conservative John Major. He had seen, too, how Murdoch had then lost faith in Major, reaching the point where the
Sun
’s then editor, Kelvin MacKenzie, claimed to have answered an inquiry from Major about the following day’s coverage by telling him: ‘I’ve got a large bucket of shit on my desk and tomorrow morning, I’m going to pour it all over your head.’ (In some versions of the story, Major replied weakly: ‘Oh, Kelvin, you are a wag.’)

With the simple aim of neutralising the threat, Blair and his advisers set out to finesse the relationship. Some of those involved say that their theory was that they would make no policy concession to Murdoch, but they would deliver three things: they would give his journalists stories; they would give him personal flattery and attention; and, every so often, when there was a policy which they themselves had chosen but which they knew would please him, they would wrap it up with a red ribbon and present it to him as though it were a gift. These same sources agree that it didn’t work.

From the outset, they compromised. When Blair returned to London from his first bonding with Murdoch at News Corp’s annual gathering, at Hayman Island, Australia, in 1995, one of his party’s first acts was to change their media policy in Murdoch’s favour – killing off their commitment for an urgent inquiry into foreign ownership of the news media, and withdrawing their plan to bring in a privacy law, to protect the victims of tabloid intrusion. It was not that Murdoch had threatened to monster them if they stuck to their policy, simply that they feared that he might and thought it prudent to send a signal which might placate him (although Blair continues to insist he had his own independent reasons for the change).

But this was a complicated relationship, and Blair’s people did try to stand up to Murdoch. He wanted to buy Manchester United, and they stopped him. He didn’t want them to create the new TV regulator, Ofcom, but they did. He didn’t want them to give the BBC new channels or to increase the licence fee, but they did both. However, the longer the game went on, the harder it was to keep the tiger in its place.

A senior figure who worked in Blair’s Downing Street, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the obsessive preoccupation with what newspapers were saying and, in particular, with the
Sun
. The
Daily Mail
was important, and so was
The Times
, but it was the
Sun
which really mattered. The
Sun
journalists knew it and, according to several officials, learned to treat the government with a bullying contempt.

Sometimes, the officials say, the bullying would simply be a matter of the
Sun
’s high regard for its own interests. A senior adviser at the Treasury recalls: ‘We’d come out of the budget speech and do briefings with the press, and the
Sun
would stand there ostentatiously working on their calculators to find out how much extra tax Rebekah would have to pay – “How am I going to explain to my editor that she is going to have to pay all this extra money?”’

At other times, however, this behaviour became an attempt to interfere with policymaking – not simply through the legitimate journalistic activity of publishing news and comment but by bullying behind the scenes. In November 2001, Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, announced a big boost in spending for the National Health Service. It was a popular move, but the
Sun
saw it as an excuse to increase taxes and started monstering the chancellor: ‘Taxer Brown … Chancellor’s cure for the NHS is a massive gamble – using our money … Gord’s bitter pill … If Gordon returns to tax and spend and hikes taxes, we will be gunning for him.’ This evidently panicked Brown, who contacted the
Sun
and agreed to rearrange his diary so that he could go to their office that day in order to try to make peace. With his special adviser, Ed Balls, at his side, Brown sat down with the
Sun
’s outspoken right-wing political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, for an interview which, according to one of those present, rapidly became a negotiation about policy. Kavanagh insisted that Brown should accept the advice in that morning’s
Sun
for the NHS to start buying in services from private medical businesses. This was no part of Brown’s policy, but Kavanagh won.

At the end of what Kavanagh himself described as ‘a sometimes tense interview’, Brown agreed that the NHS would receive not one penny of extra funding unless the service agreed to ‘reforms’ and ‘modernisation’. The language was coded, but the meaning was clear: private health companies would be allowed into the NHS. One of Brown’s then aides said: ‘As a result, post 2001, we have Gordon held over the fire, backing “freedom hospitals”, privatising dentistry. It became a barometer for whether the
Sun
thought he was strong enough to become prime minister.’

In the same way, after the abduction and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne in July 2000, Rebekah Brooks not only used the columns of the
News of the World
to campaign for a new ‘Sarah’s Law’ but also repeatedly browbeat ministers behind the scenes, demanding that they give her newspaper a victory for which she could claim credit. She wanted a version of the American Megan’s Law, which publishes the names and home addresses of convicted sex offenders. The government – supported by police and some children’s charities – thought that was a very dangerous idea: at best, it would drive paedophiles underground, making life difficult for the police; at worst, it would provoke physical attacks on named child-abusers. They resisted. Rebekah insisted. The result was that an idea which would otherwise have been shelved was revived and finally introduced in a diluted form – more Rebekah’s law than the government’s.

Again, as editor of the
Sun
from January 2003, Brooks hectored ministers to support the newspaper’s campaign to cure overcrowding in prisons by transferring inmates to prison ships. One former official recalls: ‘Every Home Secretary she dealt with must have scars on their backs from her trying to whip them into line over prison ships. Several ministers gave in and agreed to do it, but then they’d check with officials who said “Are you off your rocker? This is a very expensive thing to do, the sums just won’t add up.”’

Beneath the recurrent effort to change government policy, some Murdoch journalists simply demanded – and received – special favours for their work. One official recalls Rebekah Brooks calling Downing Street in a rage after the
News of the World
was given a rare joint interview by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown during the 2005 election campaign. Another editor might have been fobbed off politely, but Rebekah demanded recompense.

First, Downing Street arranged for Brown to give an exclusive interview to the
Sun
’s Trevor Kavanagh, who has the brain of a fox and the strike of a viper. That ended badly when Brown refused to comply with Rebekah’s requirement that he announce tax cuts. ‘Kavanagh was looking at him with contempt – “Are you going to say anything that would make it into my paper?”’ So then Downing Street offered up an exclusive interview for Rebekah Brooks and Kavanagh with Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, during which they were required to discuss their sleeping arrangements, sex life and romantic moments.