Rupert’s c*nt cake: Murdoch at 90 and a gift from The Times for Boris Johnson
Rupe's trying to do a Kissinger and The Times gives the Prime Minister a soapy handjob before the Conservative Party conference kicks off.
Rupert Murdoch turned 90 on March 11. You may have noticed as the sky went black, blotting out the sun (but, crucially, not The Sun), eldritch horrors emerged from their subterranean lairs to pull party poppers that sent shockwaves across the oceans, and anguished screams were heard ringing out across the globe. Or, you may have just thought: “Yeah, just a typical Thursday.”
But even the birthdays of dark lords have been disrupted by the pandemic — sadly Henry Kissinger was denied his much-desired trip to the Neasden branch of Nando’s1, having decided to give Woking Pizza Express a miss — so it wasn’t until last month that Murdoch’s 90th birthday ‘bash’ took place.
Though you’d struggle to find any mention of the event — which had a rash of British government ministers in attendance and included Boris Johnson paying homage in a syrupy video tribute — in the British press, aside from a quote from The Sydney Morning Herald picked up by The Week and a glancing reference in an article in The Daily Telegraph’s business pages (“[Murdoch] will host executives, friends, family and politicians who dare accept his hospitality a decade after the phone-hacking scandal.”)
It’s not surprising that The Sydney Morning Herald — a rickety old life raft in a sea dominated by Murdoch-owned sharks — should pay attention to the event. It has every incentive to needle the man born Keith Rupert Murdoch and its piece on the party tried hard to achieve that. On September 27, it reported:
It was just over a week ago KRM and his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, 65, threw open the doors of Holmwood, their £11 million, 11-bedroom Georgian palace in the Chilterns, west of London, to about 150 of their nearest and dearest friends for the mogul’s much delayed 90th birthday.
Fittingly, the heritage-listed Holmwood was once the residence of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the 19th century British equivalent of a Sky News anchor.
Among the adoring throng of well-wishers, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Chancellor Rishi Sunak, legendary performer Barry Humphries and Isaac Levido, the youthful Australian political strategist to both BoJo and ScoMo.
Just one thing seemed to be missing: Murdoch’s youngest son James, who split from the company last year after expressing unease about the editorial direction of its mastheads. Murdoch jnr was not spotted and his apparent absence was a hot topic of conversation.
Odd to see no mention of Priti Patel there, but perhaps she prefers to stick to “private” dinners with Murdoch of the kind that are grudgingly declared in lists of ministerial meetings. Still, while the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have been at the blowout in person, he was there in spirit and virtual form:
… the lengthy video tribute, put together by Murdoch’s TV-producing daughter Elisabeth… starred eldest son Lachlan Murdoch, former [Australian] prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott, as well as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and… was said to include the theme tune to the HBO drama Succession, a totally fictitious drama about a dysfunctional media dynasty.
Succession, about the endlessly feuding and fascinatingly odious Roy family, whose patriarch Logan is Rupert Murdoch made less shabby and more Shakesperian, debuted in June 2018, the same year that the Murdoch sold his stake in Sky. Succession is shown on Sky Atlantic in the UK, a berth I rather suspect it might not have had if KRM was still the god-king of satellite.
In last week’s Sunday Times feature on the return of Succession — its third season premieres this month — there was understandably only one brief mention of parallels between the Roys and the paper’s beloved proprietor. But Murdoch’s own granddaughter, Charlotte Freud (now rebranding herself as Tiarlie in an attempt to launch a pop career) told Tatler2 that scenes from the show could have been directly ripped from her life:
They say it’s not based on us, but there are certain bits that I feel have been plucked from my childhood memories.
The alleged inclusion of the Succession theme tune in the Murdoch tribute video is the kind of PR detail the family would no doubt be delighted to see ‘leak’. The tune they’re playing is: “Look! We can laugh at ourselves…” with the usual sinister counter-melody of “… but if you laugh at us, we will do our best to completely and utterly destroy you.”
In Castro and Stockmaster: A Life in Reuters by Michael Nelson, there is a telling section about Murdoch, who was on the Reuters board in the late-70s:
Murdoch took his Reuters responsibilities very seriously… on one visit by the board to New York he gave a black-tie dinner party in his Fifth Avenue apartment. He cleared the furniture out of the apartment and hired dining tables and chairs. When we got up from the dinner we saw that white paint stripes had appeared down the backs of all the dinner jackets, picked up from the hired chairs. The next day the secretary of Lord Rothermere telephoned Murdoch’s secretary to say that her boss, the multi-millionaire owner of the Daily Mail, would be grateful if Murdoch would pay for him to have a replacement dinner jacket made. Murdoch declined but said he would pay for the jacket to be cleaned.
Over the years I posed a number of questions to Murdoch
What do you think of banks? “Don’t trust them.”
… why do you never sue for libel? “Not worth the hassle.”
What’s your key to success? “I have a knack for seeing opportunities.”
It illustrates a couple of things: How the press barons relate to each other like squabbling children fighting over the same toys but become extremely defensive of each other when anyone from another school criticises them, and how ruthlessly Murdoch can assess himself and others
As I wrote in December last year, there are more crime families in London alone (the Aries, the Brindles, the Walkers, the Adams…) than there are major media owners in Britain. Just three families — the Rothermeres, the Murdochs and the Barclays — control 68% of newspaper circulation.
A fourth family, the Lebedevs (with 7.9% of the market) was gifted a seat in the House of Lords by Boris Johnson’s government, transforming Evgeny Lebedev into Baron Lebedev of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation.
From the day Boris Johnson became Prime Minister in July 2019 through to the end of September 2020, Murdoch, Rothermere and the Barclays (or representatives of them) had more meetings with ministers than the rest of the UK media combined. Murdoch and his made men and women had 40 meetings alone.
It’s no surprise then that Boris Johnson made sure to pay homage to Murdoch in that birthday video, just as every Prime Minister from Margaret Thatcher on has done. And it’s equally unsurprising that details of that video have not appeared in papers controlled by families who effectively have a non-aggression pact. They’ll attack each other’s titles but attacks on each other are largely avoided.
And for politicians, paying homage to Murdoch pays dividends. In today’s Times, Steven Swinford, the paper’s Deputy Political Editor, conducts an interview with Prime Minister, birthday video star and animatronic bin bag, Boris Johnson, that is so soft soaping it could be the script for a Dove advert.
This is not because Rupert Murdoch had a word in Swinford’s ear or even that John Witherow, the editor of The Times, gave his deputy political editor the line to take. As British hacks are so often keen to stress, no one tells him what to write. The corollary to that statement, however, is that no-one needs to tell them what to write; what is and isn’t permissible in The Times is apparent. Hacks know what their proprietors think almost by osmosis, plus Swinford, previously of The Daily Telegraph, comes with the correct ideological qualifications (though I’m sure if I said as much to him he would protest loudly that he is his own man).
From the opening paragraph on, the reader is given undiluted ‘Boris’ boosterism, with few caveats from Swinford. So it is that we’re told:
Boris Johnson is looking forward to the Conservative Party conference, the first in-person version for two years. “It’s very, very exciting, we will be back together in the traditional Tory cheek-by-jowl way,” he told The Times from Downing Street yesterday. “That’s because we’ve had the fastest vaccine rollout in Europe. The result is the fastest-growing economy in the G7. There is a lot to be very confident about. There’s a massive agenda and I think people will be looking forward to it. They will be in high spirits.”
Britain did have a sprint start in the vaccine rollout but it’s now lagging behind both France and Germany in doses dispensed and vaccinations per 100 people. And choosing to open a piece about the Prime Minister with claims about the country’s economy — largely based on forecasts — while it is in the grip of both fuel3 and energy crises is a deeply suspect choice.
Swinford does raises the fuel and energy crises quickly (along with what broadsheets seem legally obliged to call the “looming spectre” of inflation) but allows Johnson to sweep those concerns aside with his usual brand of burbling:
Johnson, however, says people should be “very confident” about the economy. “Yes, we are seeing some post-Covid stresses,” he says. “There’s a shortage of lorry drivers which has been around for a very long time, that’s one of the things we need to fix. If you look at the road-haulage industry in this country there are issues about pay and conditions that I think you’re going to change. You’re going to move to a higher investment, higher-productivity economy.”
And on the essay question set by the tabloids — “Can Boris Johnson save Christmas?4”, Swinford again allows Johnson to deliver a monologue that bears little relation to the world as it actually is but sits nicely in the snow globe fantasy generated by the Prime Minister’s muddle through mentality:
“People are going to have a great Christmas,” he says. “What I confidently predict is that this Christmas will be considerably better than last Christmas. It will be considerably jollier and more festive. The yuletide spirit will flow in much greater abundance.”
The line being pushed by Johnson — which he and his cabinet of horrors will try to sell at the Conservative Party conference — is that the shortage of lorry drivers is entirely about wages and that the “Brexit dividend” will be better wages for all. And Swinford lets him get away with bloviating that:
… it is a “disgrace” that in the past, investment has focused on London and the southeast. “It’s madness so many parts of this country don’t have the basic transport infrastructure that they need,” he says. “We can fix that. That will make a huge difference to people’s prospects. Very often the ability to get the right bus connection from your home to your place of work can make all the difference to the job you have.”
… with no counter about the policies of Thatcherism, which Johnson has often claimed to adore, or even a reference to the recently uncovered comments from a young Michael Gove about how under her administration “the happy south [stamped] over the cruel, dirty, toothless face of the northerner.”
But most egregious of the quotes unchallenged by Swinford is the Prime Minister’s line on the police in the wake of this week’s whole-life sentence for the murderer of Sarah Everard, a serving police officer who used his knowledge of police procedure to engineer her kidnap. Like Keir Starmer, who has also given Cressida Dick his “full support”, Boris Johnson says he believes the police are “fundamentally on our side”.
“Our” is an interesting word in politics and the media; just like “we”, “our” can have the appearance of inclusivity while, in fact, meaning that something or someone serves a narrow group of people who, in tactical ignorance, pretend that the rest of the world should feel as they do. Many people — women especially and especially this week — do not believe the police are on their side.
It speaks volumes that Johnson’s last word in the interview is spent on the police’s feelings and that Swinford lets him get away with it:
“I think that everybody should be able to trust the police,” he says. “It’s vital that we do trust the police. That’s why the murder of Sarah Everard by a police officer is so utterly horrific. When you talk to the police you can see how inwardly sickened they are themselves by this.”
David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, who has spent the year since he left that job on a self-pitying retribution tour, said in an interview:
All Murdoch editors, what they do is this: they go on a journey where they end up agreeing with everything Rupert says but you don't admit to yourself that you're being influenced. Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think: what would Rupert think about this? It's like a mantra inside your head, it's like a prism. You look at the world through Rupert's eyes.
It is not just the top editors but section editors, political editors, news editors, reporters and particularly columnists who “look at the world through Rupert’s eyes”. And after Johnson’s turn at Murdoch’s 90th, what they see is him still looking kindly on the Prime Minister… for now. But the headline on Matthew Parris’ column today (Keir Starmer as Prime Minister? Yes, it can happen) is a warning flare. Old KRM could go on for years and he’s as fickle and opportunistic as he’s ever been.
Perhaps Sir Keir will tap dance across the stage at Rupert’s 91st birthday bash, a Tony Blair tribute act looking to capture the old audience once again.
For the super-pedants, I know it’s actually Nando’s Wembley Park, but it’s technically in Neasden and I wanted the alliteration, okay?
I recommend reading the whole Tatler article, it’s a rich seam of accidental comedy: “There’s no trace of brattiness or entitlement in her manner; she’s clever, funny, self-deprecating and polite. She may be the granddaughter of a billionaire – Rupert Murdoch – but she’s obviously been brought up to show empathy and interest in others. ‘My parents have been very good at not spoiling us,’ she says. ‘None of us have a huge allowance and once I moved out they said, “Get a job”... My parents would never let me die on the street, but they’re not going to buy me a house.’ Still, they pay the rent…”
Today’s newsletter was delayed because the coach I was travelling on had to stop twice in the hunt for petrol stations that had fuel and could ensure that the driver would make it back to Norfolk after reaching London.
If you see mummy kissing Santa Claus this December be cautious, it may be Boris Johnson on his mission to “save Christmas”.