Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain (3 page)

His passion was not money, though, but business itself. He loved the piratical thrill of takeovers – the brinkmanship, the deal-making, the constant expansion – and the power. Both came most intoxicatingly in ink. In Britain, he had come to control 40 per cent of national newspaper circulation – making him the most important proprietor in politics – through his ownership of the best-selling Sunday paper the
News of the World
and the daily
Sun
, and their quality stablemates
The Times
and
The Sunday Times
. In his native Australia his dominance was greater still: 70 per cent of the newspaper market; while in his adopted United States, through the
New York Post,
the
Wall Street Journal
and the most-watched cable news outlet, Fox News, Murdoch exerted a strong pull on American politics.

All this he had accrued from a single newspaper in Adelaide, the
News
, which he inherited from his domineering father in 1952 and where he learned the uncompromising tactics that made him the news baron of the twenty-first century. In his Australian apprenticeship, Murdoch did not overly bother with journalistic ethics or notions of media responsibility, but identified and published what sold. His newspapers plumbed the commonest denominators of sex, celebrity, crime, scandal and sport – ideally, all together. After moving to the UK in the 1970s, he promoted the naked page 3 girl, published the fraudulent ‘Hitler Diaries’, and backed the
Sun’
s hot-headed editor Kelvin Mackenzie despite the printing of false stories, such as the front page claiming that Liverpool football fans had pickpocketed the dead during the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster. The ‘Dirty Digger’, as he was named by
Private Eye
, operated with guile, charm, tenacity and ruthlessness. As soon as he took over a newspaper, he broke his promises. After buying the
News of the World
in 1969 he swiftly eased out the chairman Sir William Carr despite promising to keep him; at the
Sun
he abandoned his assurance that he would maintain its support of Labour, when it backed the Conservatives in 1979; and at
The Times
and
The
Sunday Times
he broke all of his guarantees of editorial independence in his first year of ownership. Harry Evans,
The Times’
s erstwhile editor, recalled: ‘He put his point of view very simply to the home editor of
The Times
, Fred Emery, when he summoned him from holiday on 4 March to his office shortly before asking for my resignation: “I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn’t I in London?” He was reminded of his undertakings to the Secretary of State. “They’re not worth the paper they’re written on,” Murdoch replied.’
²

Most importantly, Murdoch courted and cajoled politicians. He started with a bust of Lenin in his room at Oxford University, but soon espoused the hard-right-wing views common among the super-rich: for strong leadership, low taxation and light regulation, and against trade unions, the European Union and global-warming science. His newspapers undermined disobedient politicians and wholeheartedly supported challengers who would advance his political and commercial agenda, particularly by granting him favours in the heavily regulated TV industry.

He championed the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher, whose government approved his purchase of the
Times
titles, ordered the police to help him fight the print unions at Wapping (where he installed industry-changing new technology – an achievement which transformed the finances of newspapers), and exempted his Luxembourg-based Sky satellite business from rules on foreign ownership. Aware that no political party stayed in power for ever, Murdoch changed political horses in the mid-1990s, when he began wooing Labour’s youthful leader Tony Blair. Desperate to end Labour’s electoral drubbings, in 1995 Blair made a transcontinental pilgrimage to a News Corp conference on Hayman Island off Australia, where he spoke to the assembled executives of News Corporation and held talks with the kingmaker. In his book
Where Power Lies
, the former Labour spin doctor Lance Price wrote: ‘A deal had been done, although with nothing in writing. If Murdoch were left to pursue his business interests in peace he would give Labour a fair wind.’
³
According to the diaries of Piers Morgan, the former
News of the World
editor, an apologetic Blair told him: ‘Piers, I had to court him … It is better to be riding the tiger’s back than let it rip your throat out. Look what Murdoch did to Kinnock.’
*
4

Murdoch’s newspapers endorsed Tony Blair at three general elections. In return, Blair’s Labour Party opposed plans to impose tougher cross-media ownership rules in 1996, rejected calls for a ban on predatory pricing of newspapers in 1998, the same year lobbied for Murdoch’s television interests – asking the Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi whether the tycoon could acquire Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset TV network – and frequently gave interviews and important announcements to his papers, such as the date of the 2001 general election.

As Murdoch jetted around the world overseeing his business interests, his favoured editors became his
de facto
powerbrokers in his absence. He became particularly enamoured of one of them, Rebekah Wade, a mischievous, red-haired tabloid queen, a ‘larrikin’ in Murdoch’s Australian vernacular, who inspired fatherly feelings in the ageing patriarch. As a grammar-school girl in Warrington in England’s industrial north, her father a tugboat worker, Wade hankered for a career in journalism. She turned up on the
News of the World
at Wapping as a 21-year-old secretary in 1989 and eleven years later, after working, scheming and networking her way to the top, had become its editor. A
News of the World
reporter recalled that her ‘charisma’ matched her ambition. ‘She was very tactile, touching you on the arm, looking straight into your eyes as though there was no one more important in the room. From the way she acted, you would think she wanted to sleep with you [but] she was way too up the scale for that.’
⁵

The coquettish Wade enjoyed Murdoch’s full support, despite making blunders such as (having been promoted to edit the
Sun
in 2003) admitting to a parliamentary committee that his newspapers had bribed police.
*
He even forgave her two years later when she spent eight hours in police cells for attacking her then husband, the
East Enders
star Ross Kemp.

Usefully, Wade was very friendly with senior politicians, notably Tony Blair. During his ten years at 10 Downing Street, she was a frequent kisser of the prime ministerial cheek and one of the keepers of the Blairite flame. Those who crossed Tony Blair often saw themselves attacked by the papers under Rebekah Wade’s sway – as Tom Watson found out.

On becoming an MP in 2001, Tom Watson was oblivious to the scale of the influence wielded behind the scenes in politics by Rupert Murdoch. Within months of being elected to Parliament, the 34-year-old former backroom Labour strategist was identified as a person of interest by News International’s head of corporate affairs, Alison Clark; he accepted a tour of the company’s Wapping HQ and drank champagne aboard its yacht on the Solent. As he moved up the career ladder, becoming a minister in the whips’ office in 2004 and a junior Defence Minister in May 2006, Watson began to realize the close relationship between the Prime Minister and News Corp’s chief executive. When ministers formulated policy they often had an eye on Murdoch’s response; he was a constant invisible presence in Downing Street.

Not long after joining the government, Watson became disenchanted with Blair. As a defence minister, his nightly papers described the mounting number of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (name, rank, religion, family). The floundering military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan had undermined Blair’s political authority and diminished the trust between him and the voters. Watson had doubts about Tony Blair’s leadership of the country, but it was two trivial matters which convinced him that the Prime Minister had lost touch: reports that Blair had billed the Labour Party for his wife Cherie’s haircuts during the 2005 general election campaign, and that he had ordered the redecoration of the nuclear bunker at public expense.

On Thursday 31 August, during the summer recess, Watson was pushed into outright rebellion while sinking pints of real ale with two fellow MPs in Ye Olde Robin Hood pub on the banks of the river Severn at Ironbridge, Shropshire. A political journalist had tipped off Siôn Simon, one of Watson’s companions, that Blair had given an interview to the next day’s
Times
in which he refused to timetable his departure, declaring: ‘I’ve said I’m not going to go on and on, and I said I’ll leave ample time for my successor. Now at some point people have to accept that as a reasonable proposition and let me get on with the job.’

That night Watson and a few friends ate in the Bilash Indian restaurant in Wolverhampton. Contrary to subsequent reports, the ensuing mutiny against Blair was not hatched there, but the following day. As Watson recovered from a hangover, MPs’ phones buzzed and the Labour backbencher Chris Bryant, who had been infuriated by Blair’s comments, drafted a letter urging him to set a term to his premiership. Watson agreed to sign it if Bryant and Simon moderated its language. Seventeen backbenchers, seven ministerial aides and Watson signed the private letter to the Prime Minister calling for him to set a departure date. It was leaked to the press on 6 September. Watson resigned as a minister, followed by the seven ministerial aides.

In an angry statement, Blair called Watson ‘disloyal, discourteous and wrong’, adding that he had planned to sack him anyway. A few miles east of Downing Street, in another centre of power
,
Rebekah Wade was fuming that her close friend had been undermined.

Watson now experienced what it was like to get on the wrong side of the Murdoch empire. On 7 September, the
Sun
called him the ringleader of the ‘plotting gang of weasels’, reported fury at him ‘for playing grubby politics at a time when soldiers are dying in Afghanistan’ and condemned him for ‘shamefully’ walking out of his job. But as a result of the growing pressure, Blair announced that day that he would step down within a year. At the Labour Party conference the following month, Watson was told by the
Sun’
s political editor George Pascoe-Watson: ‘My editor will pursue you for the rest of your life. She will never forgive you for what you did to her Tony.’

Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister in June 2007 and made Watson a Cabinet Office minister the following year. Watson soon experienced the wrath of News International’s newspapers again. Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Wade were moving against Brown and anointing the new Opposition leader, David Cameron. In April 2009, the political blogger Iain Dale erroneously implicated Watson in a plan by Brown’s special adviser, Damian McBride, to smear Cameron and his close ally George Osborne. In an email to a former Labour special adviser, Derek Draper, McBride had rekindled rumours that the Conservative leader had an embarrassing medical condition and Osborne had taken drugs with a prostitute, which he suggested could be circulated on a new left-wing website
,
Red Rag. The right-wing ‘Guido Fawkes’ blogger, Paul Staines, somehow obtained McBride’s emails, and passed the story to
The
Sunday Times
and the
News of the World
. Shortly afterwards, Staines destroyed his computer hard drives.

The ‘Damian-gate’ plot marked a new low in Brown’s faltering government and undermined his publicly stated ambition to move beyond the ‘spin’ of Blair’s administration. McBride resigned, but one of the emails had mentioned Watson in passing. Watson issued a statement denying he was involved, but for some political journalists the story was too good to drop and on 12 April the
Mail on Sunday
ran it. As he and his wife Siobhan travelled to Cornwall, where his brother-in-law was about to undergo a double organ transplant, Watson issued a second statement again denying any complicity. While he was away from his constituency home neighbours chased off three men – one with a camera – who had scaled a 6ft gate to rifle through paperwork in his garage. Then, on 14 April, the knives came out: the
Sun
’s columnist Fergus Shanahan informed its 7 million readers: ‘There is another unsavoury creature lurking in the shadows who should join McBride on the dole – and he’s not a civil servant like McBride but a minister appointed by Brown. Treacherous Tom Watson – a tub of lard who is known without affection at Westminster as ‘Two Dinners’ Tommy – is suspected of being in this up to his bloated and bulging neck.’ Under the headline ‘Mad Dog was trained to maul’, the
Sun’
s political writer Trevor Kavanagh accused ‘hatchet man Tom Watson’ of being among the plotters, writing: ‘This was the motley crew who dreamed up grisly lies about David Cameron and George Osborne.’ The paper urged Brown to sack the ‘poisonous’ minister, whose continued employment was ‘a stain on the Prime Minister’s judgement and the government’s credibility’. George Pascoe-Watson later told Brown’s spokesman Michael Dugher that Wade had forced him to write knocking stories about Watson that he knew were ‘bollocks’. Wade also texted someone very close to Brown personally urging him to sack Watson. The Prime Minister refused to do so but, stung by the coverage, he called Watson and asked: ‘I have to ask you this: do you know anything about the registration of the Red Rag website?’ If Watson had set up Red Rag, Brown would have faced calls for his resignation.

As he lay in bed in the Ship Inn in Perranporth on 15 April, Watson could not sleep; his mind was abuzz and he constantly replayed events. He had hired a researcher on a temporary contract for three months. She was a blogger. What if she had set up Red Rag without his knowledge? At 3 a.m., he went to the bathroom and rang her. In a frantic, whispered conversation, he asked if she had been responsible. She had not, but she became anxious about Watson’s state of mind. Shortly before dawn, Watson crept out of bed and bought the papers. His picture was at the top of yet another story in the
Sun
– this time on the front page – about pressure building on Gordon Brown. That day
The Times
mocked up McBride, Watson, Nick Brown, Ian Austin, Charlie Wheelan and Ed Balls as characters from
Reservoir Dogs
. As Watson walked along the beach, he was in tears.