Hack Attack (35 page)

It was not only in their dealings with Murdoch journalists that the Blair government found themselves sliding downhill. On a parallel track, they started conceding far more ground in their relationship with Murdoch himself. There are serious people who live and breathe Westminster politics who believe that Tony Blair’s decision to back the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was crucially influenced by his fear of Murdoch. On this reading, among his other motives, Blair was thinking ahead to the very real possibility that he would have to fight a referendum campaign over Europe (either joining its currency or adopting its new constitution); knew that the anti-EU Murdoch papers would throw all available ammunition at him; and calculated that he had to join forces with the US invasion to prove that he still stood by the ‘special relationship’ with Washington and had not simply fallen into the sweaty embrace of Paris and Bonn.

During March 2003, as he was poised to make the final decision to back the invasion without waiting for a UN resolution which could have made it legal, Blair made three phone calls to Rupert Murdoch, according to a disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Years later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in February 2007, Murdoch was asked whether his newspapers had succeeded in shaping the agenda on the invasion of Iraq. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he answered, before adding: ‘We tried.’

Similarly, there is some evidence that Tony Blair would have taken Britain into the euro if it had not been for the relentlessly threatening noises from Murdoch, who loathed the European Union with its thicket of regulation, and particularly loathed the idea of Britain joining the euro in case it pushed up the cost of his borrowing. In his diary, Alastair Campbell recalls Blair phoning him after a dinner with Murdoch and complaining that it was pointless trying to talk to Murdoch’s people about Europe because Murdoch was so over-the-top. ‘It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry what they thought,’ Campbell adds. Campbell’s deputy, Lance Price, has said he understood that Blair had given Murdoch an assurance that the government would not change its policy on Europe without talking to him first, which was effectively a veto. In practice, Blair opted to quietly shelve the problem simply by deciding not to decide whether or not to join the euro. That was in itself a significant shift in policy.

However, Murdoch destabilised that uneasy compromise by working on Gordon Brown. The chancellor was badly trapped: on the one hand, he wanted to be seen to be loyal to Blair and so his people briefed the press that he shared Blair’s view of the euro; on the other hand, he didn’t share Blair’s view and wanted the Eurosceptic press, including Murdoch’s papers, to know it, so his people also briefed the opposite. All of which turned into a cack-handed disaster.

In the autumn of 1997 Brown’s media adviser, Charlie Whelan, spent an evening in the Red Lion pub, just across the road from Downing Street, where he was overheard briefing journalists that the government had made a firm decision not to join the euro before the next election. That would have pleased Murdoch, but it didn’t please the prime minister, who heard what was happening on the Westminster grapevine and had to call Whelan in the pub to find out what the world was being told about his government’s policy.

The pound crashed, Downing Street was furious, there was an emergency debate in the House of Commons, and Brown was forced to find a way of pacifying his prime minister, who wanted to stick with his ‘no decision’ decision, while also pleasing Murdoch, who wanted the euro tossed into a policy dustbin. Brown came up with a brilliant device, announcing that Britain would join the euro only if it passed five tests. Since each of these tests was more or less subjective, this allowed the prime minister to say that there was still no decision and Murdoch to believe that the tests would fail. Murdoch was right. The prime minister may have been interested in joining the euro. He never came close.

*   *   *

There was a poignant and revealing incident one afternoon in November 2006.

Gordon Brown was still Chancellor of the Exchequer but clearly determined to replace Tony Blair as prime minister. Brown’s press office took a call from a reporter at the
Sun
, who announced that they had discovered that Brown’s four-month-old son, Fraser, was suffering from cystic fibrosis.

A senior aide recalled how Brown phoned his wife, Sarah, who was in the flat above his office with Fraser and their three-year-old son, John; how she came down so that the two of them could decide together what to do; and how both of them were soon close to tears of desperation. Their firstborn child, Jennifer Jane, had died nearly five years earlier, aged just ten days. Doctors had only recently confirmed that Fraser had cystic fibrosis and, since it is a genetic condition, they were waiting for all the children on both sides of their family to be tested to see whether any of them might also be afflicted.

How would those children feel if they learned they were at risk by reading about themselves in the
Sun
? How would Fraser feel if, when he was old enough to read, he came across stories on the Internet about his illness possibly meaning that he might die young? The aide recalled: ‘Gordon really was near tears. He was absolutely clear that he was not going to have his son treated as press property.’

So they came to a decision: if they could not prevent the story coming out, they could at least try to make sure that it came out on their terms and not as the property of the
Sun
; they would put out a press release describing their son’s condition for all news organisations. This was a dangerous act of defiance.

If Brown was to become prime minister, he needed Fleet Street – particularly the
Sun
– to support him. But the
Sun
, like Rupert Murdoch’s three other UK titles, backed the rival Blair camp. Brown had done his best to throw right-wing meat to the
Sun
’s attack dogs, but they were reluctant to swallow it, observing that Brown was simultaneously offering left-wing treats to the Labour MPs whose support he also needed. Now, it was horribly obvious that if the Browns gave away the
Sun
’s exclusive about Fraser’s illness, they would be slapping the
Sun
in the face just as Brown most wanted to reach out and take its hand. Nevertheless, Brown stood his ground and insisted. And then Rebekah Brooks called.

According to the senior aide: ‘She made it pretty clear that this would be a disaster for Gordon’s relationship with the
Sun
if their exclusive was spoiled. She said it would mean that in future when the
Sun
had stories about Gordon, they would publish them without checking with him. She was putting on the thumbscrews. There were three or four calls from her that afternoon – “What are you going to do? You mustn’t do this.”’

Concern for the child, or for the parents who were supposed to be her friends, does not appear to have coloured her position. Another source close to Brown claims that Rebekah also called direct to Sarah Brown that afternoon, putting pressure on her to protect their exclusive: ‘She was saying, “We do feel for you, we want to make it gentle.”’

Brown stuck to his line, but his advisers were so worried about alienating the
Sun
that they engineered a discreet compromise. One of them called the
Sun
to tell them that they would delay releasing the Browns’ statement until the early evening in order to give the
Sun
time to produce a mock-up of their next day’s front page which they could send round to TV studios, so that the early evening bulletins might present the story as their exclusive. Rebekah had to be pleased.

*   *   *

Brown never managed to bend far enough to pull off Blair’s trick of making peace with the Murdochs. Brown and Rupert Murdoch liked each other and got on well, meeting for private breakfasts at Claridge’s hotel when the mogul was in London. The problem was that Brown’s gut instincts were far more radical than Blair’s. Furthermore, he thought James Murdoch was conservative beyond comprehension and he loathed much of News International’s journalism, particularly the work of Trevor Kavanagh, who was happy to attack Brown in print and to his face for being too soft on migrants, criminals, ‘benefit scroungers’ and other
Sun
targets.

Brown spent years trying to get it right. Sometimes, his radical roots would break through. Then his fear of the
Sun
would take over and he would compromise his own beliefs. For example, in 2003, officials say he hatched a plan to impose VAT on newspaper sales to punish News International for its bullying – and then quickly saw the blood on the
Sun
’s teeth and dropped it. He was opposed on principle to Tony Blair’s ‘reform agenda’, to model public services on private businesses by giving each school and hospital a budget and making them compete for students and patients. But the
Sun
liked Blair’s plan and made its feelings very clear. At the News International party at the Labour conference in the autumn of 2003, according to one of Brown’s staff, he was surrounded by hostile Murdoch journalists ‘like a pack of dogs and they all started yapping and biting and chewing into him. Gordon was blocking foundation hospitals, and they didn’t like it. There was a horrific exchange with them.’

The pressure to adopt the reform agenda continued, according to another former official who says: ‘There were a lot of calls to Gordon’s office from people like Trevor Kavanagh – “you’re making a big mistake” kind of stuff.’ One source says that Rupert Murdoch personally told Brown that he must support the ‘marketisation’ of the health service. Eventually, as the final clash with Tony Blair grew closer, Brown sidelined his principles and softened his approach to the whole subject.

In search of News International’s backing, he spent months sending them signals which were so clear as to be clumsy. In June 2006, he reacted to news reports which said he was left wing by announcing that he would renew the Trident nuclear missile programme. Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, later wrote that Brown was ‘desperate to convince Rupert Murdoch that he was, in fact, a centrist in the hope of securing the support of his papers’. He made a series of speeches about terrorism which reflected the editorial hard line of the
Sun
, sweeping aside anxieties about human rights and due process, calling for detention without trial for terrorist suspects, and supporting the introduction of compulsory identity cards.

But the aggression from News International broke out again, in September 2006, when Brown’s close ally, Tom Watson, led a group of junior ministers in the ‘curry-house plot’ – all resigning and calling for Blair to announce a date when he would stand down so that Brown could take over. The Murdoch titles rushed to Blair’s defence, damning the plotters and Brown too. They remained surly, further aggravated two months later by the clash over the story about Fraser’s illness.

Brown lurched towards them again. In March 2007, he gritted his teeth and publicly visited one of Blair’s hated new academy schools. That same month, he made his biggest gesture when he announced that he would cut the standard rate of income tax from 22% to only 20%. Three different advisers speaking independently say that Brown did this simply and solely to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch, who liked low-tax, low-spend governments. It worked. The
Sun
was delighted, welcoming it as ‘A Reason 2p Cheerful’. It was also a total disaster. Looking for a way to pay for the tax cut, Brown ended up taking money from the poorest workers in the country, provoking an outcry from his own MPs.

Still, the lurching worked to some extent. Brown had one big advantage: it looked like sooner or later, he was bound to get Blair’s job. The Murdoch papers wanted to be close to the winner, moved to embrace him and, in June 2007, with their support, Brown became prime minister as Blair stepped down.

*   *   *

By the time the
Guardian
published the first phone-hacking story two years later, in July 2009, the tricky relationship had collapsed into the kind of marriage in which the couple never touch each other but can just about manage a polite conversation at mealtimes. The question now was whether, having helped Gordon Brown into power, News International would be content to let him stay there.

Brown was still in contact with Rupert Murdoch. The day after his brief and clumsy appearance at Rebekah Brooks’s lakeside wedding ceremony, in that summer of 2009, Brown had included Murdoch among his guests at a small dinner party in Downing Street in honour of the visiting US president, George W. Bush. The evening had gone well, with Brown far more at ease with older men in suits than with the young Cameron crowd in Oxfordshire, reaching a point of informality where, according to
Brown at 10
by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, during a private meeting between Bush and Brown, the US president beckoned to one of Brown’s advisers, asked if he could take a message to Bush’s own staff outside the room and whispered: ‘Can you tell them to kiss my ass?’

Through his previous two years as prime minister, Brown had continued to try to cuddle up to News International. He made a powerful speech, which could have been written by Trevor Kavanagh, warning of the threat from migrants, calling for ‘British jobs for British workers’. He backed the
Sun
’s controversial call for forty-two days of detention without trial for terrorist suspects, an idea which was so unpopular that it was thrown out before it could become law.

In private, he had been equally generous. When Rebekah Brooks became involved with her husband-to-be, Charlie Brooks, who was training racehorses, she personally told the prime minister that the government should abolish the horse-race levy, which raises tax income at the expense of the racing industry. Two Downing Street advisers say that Brown asked them to look into it and to speak to Charlie Brooks ‘to make him feel involved’. At one point, he hired a new policy adviser, Kath Raymond, who happened to be the partner of the then chief executive of News International, Les Hinton. She was an experienced special adviser, but other Downing Street staff were not amused. ‘She was not a policy person at all,’ said one. ‘She was like Posh Spice, who was in the band even if she couldn’t sing.’