When I first started working in newspapers in the mid-1980s, whenever I met other journalists for a drink, sooner or later the conversation would turn to the hottest topic of the time, more important even than our perfidious editors or, indeed, ourselves. Instead, we’d earnestly debate the motion: “Who is madder – Robert Maxwell or Rupert Murdoch?
Initially, to be sure, most contributing hacks would plump for Maxwell, while conceding that both of them were clearly mad in a general megalomaniac-stroking-a-white-cat-in-a-secret-underwater-base kind of way. However, although Maxwell was a bully and (it transpired to no one’s surprise) a crook, with an obvious eating disorder and likely alcoholism to boot, I always dissented at this point. On the contrary, I’d say, Murdoch is much more truly, deeply mad than Maxwell could ever be, and my evidence went like this.
You first had to understand that Murdoch’s real first name is Keith, named after his father Sir Keith Murdoch, a regional newspaper magnate in the very small media pond of Australia between the wars. However, instead of bearing a manly, no-nonsense, rugged name like Keith, in the unforgivingly machismo Australia of the 1930s, little Murdoch was known by his second given name, the infinitely less rugged Rupert, with all that a wussy moniker like that implies. Thus, I’d continue, you should see Rupert’s entire life as a titanic psychological battle to reclaim his denied Keithness.
After his father’s death (and after Rupert’s time at Oxford when he kept a bust of Lenin on his mantelpiece in a text-book piece of youthful rebellion), the yearning for Keithness grew exponentially: it turned, eventually, into a global struggle to win his dead father’s approval by not only asserting his fundamental Keithness, but also to out-Keith the original Keith through massive overcompensation. Thus, whereas Keith senior only owned The Melbourne Age, Keith Rupert was compelled, rather pathetically, to own every other newspaper on the planet. Then, finally, dead Keith could acknowledge that his son was worthy to be a Keith too, and the terrible inner screaming might stop at last.
So far, so much psychobabble. But don’t forget that Rupert is also incredibly grand by Australian standards. While craving his dead father’s approval, he also had to kill him
all over again by denying this at every turn: thus the son of Sir Keith became, he avowed, a committed republican. He sought further
to reject his father by abandoning his nationality; further, the little boy who was sent to Australia’s best schools before going to Oxford deliberately besmirched his parents’ world of sherry with the High Commissioner and charity tea parties by dragging his father’s profession as deep into the gutter as it could go.
Indeed, the print unions’ strike newspaper, The Wapping Times, got hold of an eminent psychologist to analyse Rupert, and he concluded that Murdoch’s propensity for surrounding himself with unctuoous creatures such as Kelvin MacKenzie, David Montgomery, Andrew Neil or, latterly, Piers Morgan and Rebekah Brooks, was a classic act of transference by which he symbolically sought out shits in order to defy Dame Elizabeth Murdoch’s attempts to potty train him.
This faecal dysfunction goes further. I was working on Today when Murdoch bought the paper from Lonrho. As we were waiting for new editor David Montgomery, deputy editor George Darby gave me a crash course in how the Murdoch empire functioned. It was a standard hierarchical pyramid, George explained, with Rupert at the top, supported by his regional gauleiters, who he’d treat like shit; they, in their turn, would treat the editors beneath them like shit, who’d do the same to the journos, in spades, and the journos would then serve up shit to the readers. In short, it was a vast fountain of shit, all emanating from little Rupe, torn between the need to do his whoopsie in the correct receptacle to earn his parents’ love, and the overwhelming urge to smear it all over himself and everything in sight. Then Monty walked into the room – although I initially mistook him for the postboy – and George was unceremoniously sacked within half an hour.
It gets worse. Publicising his recent, rather disappointing biography of Murdoch, Vanity Fair journalist Michael Wolff told a BBC arts programme that interviewing Rupert was very difficult, because when he raised issues that others might consider defined the man and his works – like the dishonesty of the journalism, the craven surrender to anyone who’d offer him any kind of commercial advantage, the disproportionate political influence he exerted – Rupert would stare at him in blank incomprehension.
Wolff implied that Murdoch was quite simply incapable of understanding why the consequences of his actions should be a problem. This defining insensitivity to others – whether it be a failure of empathy or self interest masking a pathological degree of selfishness – suggests that, on top of everything else, Murdoch is clinically as well as morally autistic. And that helps explain a lot else. Three marriages in, this 78-year-old toddler (whose mother, significantly, is still alive) can only relate to other people in a specific, highly controlled and ritualised way. All the latent pratfalls of human interaction have been magicked away through the simple expedient of reducing the basis all relationships to fear and worship. Moreover….
Sorry. Please excuse me. Ignore all of the above. I’ve absent-mindedly been attacking someone for their personal disabilities. And that would never do, would it now?
