A Werther's from Uncle Rupe: You can't be honest about British corruption without talking about Rupert Murdoch
Rachel Johnson says she was joking about Murdoch telling her brother, the Prime Minister, to kill the BBC. But many a true word...
Previously | Distracted by revolting Cox: Outrage, misdirection and the Mail's grim 'magic'...
On Saturday (13 November 2021), MailOnline published a story about a speech made by LBC presenter, former editor of The Lady and first sister, Rachel Johnson, at Tuning In, the annual conference of the commercial radio industry body RadioCentre.
In the appearance — originally posted to RadioCentre’s YouTube channel — but memory holed in the aftermath of MailOnline’s story, Johnson said:
In my judgement the BBC will be here in ten years. But it is going to be an increasing struggle when the whole of the television story is about streaming and subscription, to have the BBC — which costs £4 billion to run, which gets £3 billion from the licence fee — to have that entity as a competitor.
Especially when you have got people like Rupert Murdoch going to Chequers and saying to my brother, as he dandles Wilf on his knee, “Boris, you’ve got to get rid of the BBC, it’s eating my lunch, they’ve got a website, they’re a publisher, it’s not competitive.”
You can see that there are pressures from all sides.
It was that quote that drew the attention of Paul Revoir, The Daily Mail’s Media Editor and formed the central plank of his story, headlined Rupert Murdoch told PM he MUST get rid of the BBC while 'bouncing Wilfred on his knee' during visit to his country house, says Boris Johnson's sister
How odd that Revoir didn’t choose this quote about the government’s efforts to parachute former Mail editor-in-chief Paul Dacre in as Ofcom chair:
[In] putting someone in Ofcom, let’s not as we did with (former MP) Owen Patterson, simply to get the result you want, change the rules, the ref and the goalposts. So let’s not just put in the former editor of the Daily Mail because that’s the one they want, let’s find somebody who wants British producers to tell British stories to British audiences which we can then all sell overseas.
Johnson, R. — who managed to bag her brother’s employee Allegra Stratton for her show today — tweeted a denial at 10.39am yesterday, roughly 10 hours after the story went online and long after social media reached the peak of its frothy indignation about something anyone paying attention already knows:
Murdoch would love to see the BBC dead and buried before his zombie hand has to be stopped from shooting out from his grave.
In her response, Rachel Johnson wrote:
Sorry to disappoint but Rupert Murdoch NEVER told the PM to get rid of the BBC as I am quoted as saying in today’s Daily Mail. It never happened. Joke taken out of context. Totally my fault for agreeing to say “a few words” about the future of the media. Apols to all who got excited.
Since RadioCentre has removed the footage of Johnson’s speech it’s impossible to judge whether the words as spoken at the event did come over as a joke. And a cynic — that’s me — might suggest that a call was made from Number 10 to encourage the Prime Minister’s sister to clean up the mess with another call to RadioCentre sending the footage into the great digital abyss.
The Daily Express ran a story on the comments and Johnson, R.’s clarification and I’m inclined to agree with it, well… the headline at least: Rachel Johnson backtracks… This has all the hallmarks of a Johnsonian overshare — it’s a quality Boris, Rachel and their father Stanley all share — followed by a quick and unconvincing climbdown.
On the same day in 2019 that Boris Johnson said he would seek a general election, he had what was described as “a social meeting” with Rupert Murdoch. There were five personal meetings between Rupert Murdoch and ministers between 2018 and 2019. In the 14 months after Johnson entered Number 10, there were 40 meetings between ministers — including the Prime Minister — and senior News UK executives.
In a seven-week period in August and September 2020, Murdoch and his right-hand woman Rebekah Brooks held seven private meetings with five senior ministers. That included a meeting between Murdoch and Johnson on 18 September and, three days later, one between Brooks and the Prime Minister.
If — and it’s a Hollywood sign-sized big ‘if’ — there are notes from these meetings they’re unlikely to emerge for at least 20 years. When Rachel Johnson says “Rupert Murdoch never told the PM to get rid of the BBC”, she may well be telling the truth to the best of her knowledge but considering The Sun, Times, and Sunday Times’ endless animosity towards the corporation plus Murdoch’s increasing interests in radio and TV, it pushes the bounds of credulity to believe he doesn’t want the government to hobble it.
For years Murdoch and the Conservative Party alike denied there had been communication between the press baron and the Prime Minister over his desire — made reality by Thatcher’s government — to acquire The Times and Sunday Times. In 2015, documents released by the Thatcher Archive Trust at Churchill College, Cambridge, revealed that the pair had met at Chequers.
Murdoch gave Thatcher the promise of support from his papers and she gave him a commitment that he would get The Times and Sunday Times, and with them control of almost 40% of the British press.
As the late, great Harold Evans wrote in The Guardian in 2015, the release of the Thatcher Archive Documents also revealed a lie in the seventh volume of The History of The Times: The Murdoch Years, the newspaper’s official history, which had been published in 2005. In it, Graham Stewart, deceived — as so many have been — by Rupert Murdoch, wrote:
[Murdoch and Thatcher] had no communication whatsover during the period in which the Times bid and presumed referral to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission was up for discussion.
In his Guardian piece, Evans writes:
Not just “no communication”, but none “whatsoever”, an overemphasis characteristic of Murdoch in cover-up mode. On the contrary, the Thatcher documents reveal that the extraordinary secret lunch at Chequers in January 1981 specifically focused on his hopes of acquiring Times Newspapers. The file note by Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, is offered as a record of the “salient points” of the meeting, not a full accounting or even minutes. Nonetheless, the note has the aroma of a KGB dead letter drop.
In accordance with Thatcher’s wishes, Ingham wrote, he would not let the note go outside No 10. This meant that no one would be told of the fact of the meeting, not even the responsible minister. On Thatcher’s instructions, Ingham’s record of the event was locked away in a Downing Street file marked “Commercial – In Confidence” during her time in office, and later it was not sent to the National Archives…
… Ingham’s “note for the record” bears some parsing. First, the pretence was that Murdoch was afforded a private meeting with the prime minister so she could be briefed on the takeover competition for Times Newspapers. There was no credible reason why Murdoch would be the appropriate person for this task: it was the legal duty of the minister of trade, then John Nott. Second, the prime minister’s “briefing” was from a bidder, who naturally had an urgent interest in rubbishing his competitors. In plain language, this is called cheating. If the prime minister had any shred of justification for intervening, she should have heard from all the competitors. She did not because she was interested only in helping her ally escape the Monopolies Commission. (“He had stood by me in the dark days,” she told an official.)
In the Leveson Inquiry’s final report, Lord Justice Leveson wrote about the secret meeting with bone dry judicial irony:
That there was a confidential meeting between the then prime minister and Mr Murdoch, the fact of which did not emerge into the public domain for more than 30 years, is troubling in its lack of transparency. It serves as a reminder of the importance of contemporary practice to make public the fact of such meetings. The perceptions at the time and since of collusive arrangements between the prime minister and the preferred bidder are corrosive of public confidence …
… I have carefully considered what conclusions (whether as to fact or credibility) if any, I should draw from Mr Murdoch’s inability to recall the meeting. It is perhaps a little surprising that he does not remember a visit to a place as memorable as Chequers, in the context of a bid as important as that which he made for Times Newspapers.
However, perhaps that is all I need to say.
Murdoch’s habit of secret meetings at Chequers and returning the favour at his London home continue into the Blair era. In March 1998, The Independent reported that Murdoch had been Blair’s guest at Chequers twice since he became Prime Minister in the previous May.
The often clumsily hidden hand of Murdoch was at work throughout the Blair years, including one notable occasion in 2004 when — as revealed by Peter Oborne and Simon Walters in their book Inside Blair's Bunker — the government conspired with The Sun in a “immigration crisis week” which concluded with a scheduled exclusive interview with then-Home Secretary, David Blunkett, revealing “tough measures to crack down on asylum cheats”.
In the post-Leveson world, lists of meetings between government figures and the media are released. Obviously these do not represent the totality of contact between journalists, executives, and proprietors and ministers, civil servants, and advisors, and what is discussed remains opaque.
We’re expected to be satisfied with the limited detail that Home Secretary Priti Patel had a “private dinner” with Murdoch last September. That Patel, who was a guest at Murdoch’s wedding to his current wife Jerry Hall — “What was it that attracted you to dessicated billionaire pharoah Rupert Murdoch?” — was at that time ‘reviewing’ the report into the murder of Daniel Morgan, a case in which individuals connected to Murdoch’s businesses played significant roles.
In 2016, Murdoch wrote to The Guardian to dispute a quote attributed to him by the Evening Standard columnist Anthony Hilton (“When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.”). It’s a resilient quote and similar sentiments appeared in the BBC’s recent documentary on the Murdoch family The Rise of Murdoch Dynasty (which also provoked an official complaint from sensitive granddaddy Rupes).
Murdoch’s terse, two-paragraph letter read:
On a number of occasions now your paper has quoted me as saying: “When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice.”
There is much fake news published about me, but let me make clear that I have never uttered those words. I have made it a principle all my life never to ask for anything from any prime minister.
Rupert Murdoch
New York, USA
Given that we have documentary evidence from the Thatcher Archives showing how ‘forgetful’ Murdoch could be even in his 1980s pomp, perhaps he really does believe that he never applied the rhetorical thumbscrews to John Major over Europe, supported Tony Blair in return for a guarantee that the Euro would be off the table, or made certain that the second part of the Leveson Inquiry didn’t come to pass.
Or, more likely, Murdoch — like the capo di tutti i capi that he is — has other people to talk in explicit terms and face explicit consquences. He can have nice chats with politicians he wants to put the pressure on, knowing they’ll get his drift and if they don’t, well, that’s why he owns all those newspapers. They’ll make it clear for him while protesting that no one tells them what to write.
Joke or not, Rachel Johnson’s comments aren’t the laughable thing here. It’s the fact that we’re meant to believe that Murdoch — a man who’s never won a single vote — does not have the power to make policy and break Prime Ministers.