In the week the Murdochs were giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee, a new play was opening in London which, in one scene, throws more light on the relationship that Rupert Murdoch established with governments than did hours of select committee interrogations.
In Loyalty, journalist Sarah Helm, wife of Tony Blair’s chief of staff Jonathan Powell, portrays a conversation between Blair and Murdoch in the days before the war in Iraq. The media magnate tells the British Prime Minister that Donald Rumsfeld wants Blair to commit to the war because the Americans need the British base at Diego Garcia. Murdoch adds: “He’ll go without it, Tony, make no mistake, but he’d like to have it. So it’s your call. We’ll be with you. Editors have been told – it’s the right decision, Tony. Believe me.”
How closely the words of the play reflect the actual conversation is open to speculation, but had the play been performed a week earlier, members of the audience might have been forgiven for saying: “Bit far-fetched, that scene.”
Now all is changed. One of the most damning, but least surprising, revelations of the past few weeks has been that since his election in May 2010, David Cameron has met with Murdoch, or his executives, 26 times. Even without needing to know the details of what took place, the frequency of the meetings is a graphic indication of the level of power and influence wielded by News International on, or within, the British Government. This is nothing new. The previous Labour Government was almost as close. We don’t know the precise details because, disgracefully, it refused to reveal how many meetings Blair and Gordon Brown held with Murdoch and his lieutenants during their time in offices. Murdoch’s testified that the politician he had had most contact with was Brown – although in light of The Sun’s withdrawal of support just before the last election, much good it did him.
Blair began Labour’s long love-in with the Murdoch empire, travelling to Hayman Island off the coast of Australia when still Leader of the Opposition in order to win his blessing. But well before Blair, Murdoch had established his grip on British politics with his courtship of Margaret Thatcher, or perhaps it was the other way round. Both saw a soul mate in the other. They shared strong views on privatisation (for), trade unions (against) and Europe (even more against). But Murdoch wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last, media proprietor to cultivate close relations with British prime ministers and then use that relationship ruthlessly.
It probably began in earnest with David Lloyd George. As former Downing Street spin-doctor Lance Price observes in his book Where Power Lies: “When David Lloyd George supplanted Herbert Asquith in December 1916, Downing Street opened its doors for the first time to the modern age of the media-conscious prime minister.” Lloyd George’s view of media relations was: “What you can’t square, you squash. What you can’t squash, you square.”
Although the squashing was usually applied to the reporter who had written whatever the Prime Minister was objecting to, the squaring was usually done with the proprietor and might involve the exchange of favours along the lines of: “If you don’t run such and such a story, then we will/will not embark on a particular plan of action that you favour/oppose.”
Another form of “squaring” was the distribution of honours – something that Lloyd George turned into a veritable one-man industry. In 1917, he elevated Max Aitken, owner of the Daily Express, into Lord Beaverbrook. Such baubles were not meaningless trinkets for the rich. They represented power and influence. Beaverbrook was an active Conservative member of the House of Lords and eventually became a member of the Government. While Stanley Baldwin, as PM, was a real contrast to the flamboyant Lloyd George, he courted the press barons with the same degree of assiduity. But when Beaverbrook, in alliance with Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere, tried to topple him, Baldwin retaliated by enlisting his cousin – Rudyard Kipling – as his wordsmith. In a now famous riposte, he declared: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” According to the Sunday Times’ long-serving political correspondent, James Margach, who observed events at first-hand, Beaverbrook and Rothermere were “drunk with power”. They were aiming at nothing less than removing Baldwin from office and replacing him with a coalition government beholden to them. “Had their endeavour succeed, the press would have emerged as the supreme national political force with Downing Street reduced to the status of a Fleet Street outpost”, Margach suggested.
The barons learned from their rebuff that it was better to be inside the tent than out and the best way of securing this was to try and ensure your man (or woman) was ensconced in Downing Street. Beaverbrook and Lord Camrose (owner of the Daily Telegraph) put this into practice when, in 1940, they campaigned successfully to have Winston Churchill installed as Prime Minister in place of the hapless Neville Chamberlain. Churchill repaid the favour by making Beaverbrook a minister in his wartime Cabinet. Even when Beaverbrook left his ministerial posts, he remained close to Churchill and, on occasion, acted as an intermediary between London and Washington – just like Rupert Murdoch. Clement Attlee, to his credit, had little time for press barons, or the press itself. He described the news agency machine in the lobby of Downing Street as “my cricket machine”, because the only time he consulted it was to check the cricket scores. Another Labour leader, Harold Wilson, did allow himself to get dangerously close to another press proprietor and, like Baldwin, almost paid the price. Cecil King, who owned the Daily Mirror, was part of the Northcliffe and Rothermere clan and, despite the Mirror’s Labour leanings, remained a Conservative. When, in 1964, Labour stood poised to take power for the first time in 13 years, King made an extraordinary offer to Bill Deedes, a Conservative minister and editor of the Daily Telegraph, that he would ensure the Mirror switched support to the Tories in return for King being consulted in advance on all major Government policies. Deedes declined and the Mirror stayed loyal to Labour. However, in 1967, King, like press proprietors before him, deluded himself that the country was drifting and only he could save it. He asked the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten, if, with the support of the Mirror, he would agree to lead an emergency government to replace Wilson. Mountbatten was of a saner disposition and declined. Undaunted, King continued to use his newspapers against Wilson, but it was he himself who was ultimately toppled when the directors of the company that owned the Daily Mirror sacked him from the chairmanship. It was, notes Lance Price, “the last attempt by a press grandee to change the country’s political direction” – or at least to do so quite so blatantly.
On his arrival in Britain in the late 1960s, Murdoch bought the News of the World, always a staunch Conservative-supporting paper, and then acquired The Sun which, up until then, had been one of the few allies that Labour had in Fleet Street. In Thatcher, he found a political leader he could do business with.
A Murdoch editor, Charles Douglas Home, revealed to one of Murdoch’s biographers that: “Rupert and Mrs Thatcher consult regularly on every important matter of policy. Around here, he’s jokingly referred to as ‘Mr Prime Minister’, except that it’s no longer much of a joke.
In many respects, he is the phantom Prime Minister of the country.” That is an echo of Lance Price’s description of Murdoch as the 24th member of the Labour Cabinet. Murdoch’s “phantom” premiership was highly successful. The Tories, under Thatcher and John Major, adopted policies favoured by the Australian media magnate while allowing his media empire to grow. But when it was clear that the Conservative star, under Major, was on the wane and that Blair was cut from the same cloth as Thatcher, he transferred his and his papers’ “loyalty”. New Labour’s courtship of Murdoch has been well-documented. It is to Ed Miliband’s credit that, even before Murdoch looked like a busted flush, he had the courage and foresight to call for Murdoch’s bid to buy all the shares in BSkyB to be blocked, despite his spin-doctor’s earlier warnings to Labour MPs to desist from urging the same. Perhaps the only lighter moment of Murdoch’s interrogation by the Select Committee, aside from the shaving foam incident, came when he was asked about the frequency of his meetings with prime ministers. He replied: “I wish they’d leave me alone.” It’s possibly the only statement that Murdoch has ever made to which most right-thinking people would add: “Hear, hear”.
