The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Cherie looked startled, but Blair and Rupert appeared unfazed. Afterwards, we went for a further drink at a hotel bar. James had cursed only three or four times before the barman instructed him sharply to mind his language. The tycoon’s son had no privilege here — what had been tolerated at the dinner table of the British prime minister was too much from an anonymous drinker in a swanky London saloon.

  Cherie Blair could be free with her advice. Sitting beside me at a dinner in 1998, soon after Stuart Higgins had departed as The Sun’s editor, Cherie was forceful in recommending a successor. The only person for the job, she insisted, was Rebekah Wade. I told her that Wade — later Brooks — was 30, had only recently become Higgins’ deputy, and had yet to prove herself.

  Mrs Blair sometimes sought favours. She asked me to give her eldest son, Euan, a summer internship at The Times. ‘He thinks he wants to be a journalist,’ she said. ‘Please talk him out of it.’ Euan spent a few weeks working on the sports section. There is no record of him having any further association with the media.

  The hostility between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was the perpetual backdrop of Labour’s reign from 1997 to 2010. Before Labour’s victory, Blair and Brown came together to Rupert’s flat to drink wine and talk of their plans should they become Downing Street neighbours. They came across as a perfect double act, seamlessly united, sitting side by side in the vast living room, echoing each other’s words. Their relationship was strained even then, but it would be years before it unravelled so completely and so ruinously for their party.

  Brown had, in 1994, been seen as the natural successor to then Labour leader, John Smith, who died of a heart attack in May that year. But others thought differently, and Blair himself was convinced he was the party’s best hope.

  By the time of the 1997 election, with Blairism at its height, the pair had reached an uneasy but genuine truce. Brown’s later, intense malice was rooted in his belief that Blair betrayed a promise that he would stand aside in order to give Brown a shot at being prime minister. In the early years, both blithely denied their relationship was troubled, but not many people were fooled and in the end they stopped pretending.

  When the tension between them was at its height, Blair invited me one evening to his flat. It was just before the 2003 Iraq invasion and Blair had never been under more pressure. I had never seen him so careworn. The bright-eyed, election-winning boyishness had drained away. I remember the bottle of wine he opened was corked. He made no attempt to fake his feelings towards Brown and waved his hands furiously towards the ceiling. ‘He has no idea what it takes to do this job,’ he stormed.

  I asked him why he hadn’t fired Brown: ‘Why have you lived all these years with a disloyal deputy?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It was never as easy as that.’

  He had always been afraid that Brown would become his open enemy on the backbenches of Parliament. There were a significant number of MPs who preferred Brown, or thought they did. Many people got caught in the crossfire between Brown and Blair, including me.

  Invitations to spend time with Brown were frequent. He asked me to breakfast at Number 11 Downing Street, the chancellor’s home, with Terry Leahy, chief executive of the supermarket chain Tesco. Leahy was a Liverpudlian, too, and Brown wanted us to lead a project to revitalise the city. It might have been a good idea for Leahy, but I wasn’t getting hooked into working on behalf of any political party.

  Just as we were leaving, Blair came bouncing down the stairs. It looked like a well-timed arrival, and Brown’s face fell as he greeted us. But Blair gave me an icy smile. I think until then he thought I was his ally. I was never again invited for a quiet drink at Number 10.

  Brown stayed close to News International as Blair’s reputation was shredded in the gruesome aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Even after I had gone back to New York, he would call to vent about one political problem or another, especially if News International papers were giving him a hard time. Brown and I had a connection in our poor eyesight. He had lost the sight of his left eye to a rugby kick when he was 16, and, like me, had suffered retinal detachments in the remaining useful one. We talked about the difficulties and the possibility of blindness we had both faced. Brown was an odd mixture of brooding ill temper and a jollity that much of the time seemed artificial. His laugh seemed more decided than spontaneous. He was a decent man but devoid of the natural charm possessed of the most successful politicians, in particular Tony Blair.

  After the Blair years, when a chain of events shattered the relationship between Rupert’s newspapers and Labour, it was surreal that they had ever been so harmonious. I didn’t discover until years later how distasteful the job of befriending us had been for some New Labour leaders.

  Alastair Campbell had joined Rupert’s Today newspaper from the Daily Mirror in 1993, leaving the following year to work as Blair’s press secretary. He was appointed chief engineer in Labour’s effort to gain The Sun’s endorsement, but his published diaries suggest he found the task painful.

  Writing of a dinner in January 1997 attended by Blair, Rupert, and me, in which there had been a difference over the European single currency, he sounded disgusted: ‘It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry what they thought.’

  After another Number 10 dinner, he writes: ‘I felt frustrated that we had to pander so much.’ And of another occasion: ‘He [Blair] felt there was something unpleasant about newspaper power and influence.’

  I also discovered the motivation behind the 1995 visit to my office by Mandelson and Campbell when Mandelson offered to help polish Rupert’s image. Campbell writes: ‘TB saw Murdoch and Les Hinton at Murdoch’s flat … He felt that Murdoch personally liked him but Hinton was not so sure … TB wanted me and Peter M to see Les again soon.’

  The relationship between Blair and Rupert may have been born out of self-interest, but it became a true friendship that lasted beyond Blair’s Number 10 days, long after the support of newspapers mattered to him quite so much. Their friendship ended famously and bitterly in 2013 when Rupert divorced his third wife, Wendi, amid suspicions she and Blair had been lovers. Five years later, Blair’s many denials had failed to renew it.

  In 2007, soon after Gordon Brown had become prime minister, Rupert asked me to meet him in Sicily. I gave Blair and Cherie a lift to Sicily in Rupert’s Boeing 737, and we took a helicopter to his 184-foot sailing yacht, Rosehearty. It was a social meeting of two fond friends; I had never seen Blair seem so relaxed and unweighted with worry. He seemed happy to see the last of Westminster. Whatever plans he had upon leaving Downing Street in 2007, I wasn’t surprised he decided against following the route of predecessors who went to the House of Lords. He told me once: ‘I would sooner have my testicles nailed to a passing train.’

  Blair and Rupert talked for hours, and went alone together on a long Mediterranean swim, two distant pinheads in the waves as security men tracked them with binoculars. Cherie was in a buoyant mood. The issue of feminism came up over a deck-top lunch and I remember her calling me a ‘caveman’. She might have been joking, but I couldn’t be sure.

  We spent time on James Murdoch’s smaller, faster yacht, and Blair stood happily at the helm for more than an hour with a look of childlike glee. I remembered, over those few days, the occasion 10 years before, when Blair came alone to Rupert’s flat. As Blair and I were leaving, Rupert walked us to his door, talking about flying in his plane the following day to the Caribbean, where he would spend a week on his yacht. Rupert often talked this way, about his houses and boats and what kind of private jet he might buy next, in the casual way others talk about adding a kitchen extension, or leasing a new car.

  Blair looked over his shoulder at me, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. I was never sure what that smile meant — whether he was indicating his disapproval of such ostentatious wealth, or revealing his envy of it.

  CHAPTER 22

&n
bsp; Twilight

  At home one night, a grainy photo arrived in my email inbox. I could tell it had been taken at an expensive Mayfair bar. Four people were grinning happily, each with champagne glasses raised towards the camera, as if they were toasting me.

  This photo was an act of defiance by the four senior editors at Wapping: John Witherow, Robert Thomson, Rebekah Wade, and Colin Myler. I had mounted a purge of editorial spending and this was their retaliation. It did not indicate an eagerness to cooperate, but that was no surprise. It was not easy working with worthwhile editors. Most of the good ones were serious pains. They could be subversive, secretive, self-important, and petulant in response to the smallest criticism. But in the golden days of Wapping, everything revolved around them.

  There are essential executives in every department of a newspaper. Pressrooms will print and bundle millions of newspapers every night; the circulation teams deliver to more than 50,000 retailers; advertising pays the bulk of the bills. But during my time in London, the other managers complained constantly about editors. Production and circulation bosses bemoaned missed deadlines; advertising executives agitated about the unsatisfactory location of their clients’ important ads, and the editorial content that had offended them; finance people sent me notes about excess spending and overstaffing. They also protested, now and then, about the high-handed manner of their insufferable peers on the editorial floors. But they knew that editors were the real engines of the newspapers; that it all meant nothing without the scores of stories and thousands of words they generated every day.

  Editors were not discouraged from regarding themselves as the nobility of News International. Rupert believed there was never a shortage of able business managers, but that talented editors were the most difficult executives to find.

  Behind its monolithic, jailhouse architecture, Wapping was a loose federation of publications, all wary of one other and sometimes quarrelsome. There were not only the redtops and broadsheets — so different they published in their own dialects — but also the lettered cloister of dishevelled poets and critics at The Times Literary Supplement, and the academic enclaves of The Times Education Supplement and Higher Education Supplement.

  Each of the big newspapers kept a jealous score of comparative marketing and editorial spends. They also double-crossed each other over exclusives. The News of the World once stole an expensive book serialisation from The Sunday Times office. The Sun overheard a News of the World scoop in the men’s room and beat their neighbour to the story.

  Most of the newspaper industry didn’t like News International. The siege of Wapping was their liberation as well as ours, but Rupert had embarrassed his meek opponents by breaking both his chains and theirs. The carnivore, it was said, had liberated the herbivores.

  We didn’t expect much affection; we were the hovering 10-tonne gorilla in their lives. Other media didn’t like us either. Sky TV was shattering the snug duopoly that dominated British broadcasting, and Rupert was forever antagonising the BBC by branding them a market-warping, state-sponsored monopolist.

  It wasn’t surprising News International had so much bad publicity. Media is the vocal chords of a free society, and just about every media property we didn’t own was lined up against us.

  How much it damaged the image of our newspapers was something else. Measured by the millions of readers and increasing profits, we were definitely keeping our customers happy. The fact that we sold so many copies — one in three of every national newspaper people bought was one of ours — was used to support claims that we were over-powerful. For us, it was a point of pride.

  Our market share had not been achieved by buying already successful titles, but through beating the competition. The Sun was dying when Rupert bought it in 1969. Twenty-five years later, on a good day it was selling more than 4 million copies. The Times was acquired in 1981 and lost money well into the new millennium — even some of Rupert’s harshest critics give him credit for supporting it.

  For all the hostility, Wapping was a thriving world of gale-force personalities and abounding self-confidence. We didn’t know back then that twilight was coming. We didn’t know that the triumphant age of newspapers would quickly begin to fade, that the industry freed by one wave of technology would be besieged by another, and that my photo of four grinning editors would become a treasured souvenir of the days when piddling spending reviews felt like a crisis.

  The electronic squeal of dial-up internet was the herald of a shattering revolution, but in 1995 it could be heard in only 1 million British homes. There were warning signs — Rupert and I had seen Encarta, the paperless encyclopaedia miraculously stored on a plastic disc, and John Evans, our canary down the mine, had predicted a challenging future for news that was printed on crushed trees. We knew it was a threat, but never imagined what would happen.

  We still lived in an all-paper world, and talked with only casual curiosity about the World Wide Web. In the summer of that year, Microsoft launched its Internet Explorer. At News International, we were fascinated by the novelty of office-wide email.

  Twenty years later, the empires of print were creaking super-tankers, left behind in the spray from a sleek fleet of algorithm-fuelled speedboats. Old media had been like a pyramid, with a few at the peak broadcasting to the masses beneath. But technology had turned the pyramid upside down. Now anyone with a 5oz mobile has infinity at their fingertips.

  Wapping was at the pinnacle of the pyramid in the 1990s. Each of our newspapers was growing, with new magazines and extra sections. The Sunday Times, a pre-digital goldmine of classified advertising, turned its newsprint supplements into glossy magazines and dwarfed its main rival, The Observer. The Sun and the News of the World, with slick magazine inserts and beefed-up sports coverage, extended their leads until their redtop rivals became distant stragglers. The Times bundled more sections into its Saturday edition and saw its circulation grow. In a heart-stopping leap in 2003, The Times became a tabloid and found thousands more readers. We had toyed with the idea for years, planning to try it with our Ireland edition. But we always feared the damaging disapproval that could result from the Murdoch press turning a great newspaper into a tabloid. When The Independent led the way, we pulled out our old dummies and followed them in a few weeks.

  Our editors were famous, and sometimes notorious. Kelvin MacKenzie drove The Sun to success, but also alienated an entire city. In 1989, MacKenzie chose to believe South Yorkshire Police’s accounts of the behaviour of Liverpool football club fans in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, which killed 96 people. The claims — including that drunken supporters stole from the dying — have long since been discredited, and The Sun has apologised, but the city has never forgiven either MacKenzie or the newspaper. The enduring bitterness — almost 30 years after the tragedy — was not easy to understand. Nations who lost millions of people in wars had restored diplomatic relations with their old enemies in far less time. My children, without ever living there, had been Liverpool supporters all their lives and it puzzled them as well. Kath told me it was foolish to be seen carrying a copy of The Sun when we were in town, so I wrapped mine inside The Times. When I first got the London job, it was six years after Hillsborough, and I was briefly hopeful my local credentials could help heal the rift. I went to Liverpool with Stuart Higgins when he was editor and met club executives and family representatives. The club in those days wanted a good relationship, but the families were too angry. It might be mystifying after so many years, but you can’t challenge their right to be angry, given the grief and malign deceit they suffered.

  By the time I arrived in 1995, MacKenzie had left, which was a lucky escape for me that had nothing to do with Hillsborough. He was known to lock his office door to keep business executives at bay. When editors were selling newspapers, they got away with things like that.

  MacKenzie’s successor, Stuart Higgins, was a flesh-and-blood version of the newspaper he edi
ted. He was excitable and sentimental, and his feelings were as readable as a headline two inches deep. He was also a folk hero among his staff — I never knew a more popular editor.

  Higgins and Piers Morgan were creatures of Kelvin MacKenzie’s The Sun. They must have hero-worshipped him because both absorbed his personality and mannerisms: the swagger, the loud cocky voice, the biting put-downs. Morgan in particular was a simulacrum of his maverick mentor — just younger, taller, and, at the time, thinner.

  It was a blow when Morgan walked out of his job at the News of the World three weeks after I started. His idol MacKenzie had moved to the Mirror Group and wanted Morgan to edit the Daily Mirror. Morgan at the Mirror got into such a bitter feud with Higgins’ successor, David Yelland, that they fought it out in the pages of their newspapers.

  Yelland was the most unsuitable editor in The Sun’s history. He was a broadsheet man trapped at a tabloid and screaming to escape. He didn’t stand a chance in his feud with Morgan. Piers was a world-class — a Kelvin-class — insulter, and Yelland didn’t possess the tabloid genes to retaliate. Yelland had alopecia and appeared constantly in the Mirror as the Mekon, the bald, green monster out of Dan Dare comics.

  Yelland’s revenge was savage. When the Mirror became embroiled in allegations that its financial journalists were guilty of insider stock deals, Morgan became a suspect, but never faced charges. Yelland put the story on page one, again and again, so infuriating Morgan that he cornered me at a party and threatened to kill my family. ‘I know where you live,’ he said. In his volume of diaries, The Insider, he confesses how he felt the morning after: ‘I disgraced myself … It was Sonny Corleone without the brains or the charm.’

  Rebekah Wade had worked for Morgan in features on the News of the World. She was an Olive Oyl lookalike in those days, tall and skinny with her mass of red hair tied tightly back against her scalp. Wade became Phil Hall’s deputy when he succeeded Morgan as editor. Hall took great care with his appearance. He favoured Italian suits and sometimes sat at his desk reading page proofs while wrapped in a new-fangled electric device like a heart monitor that was alleged to firm abs without exercise.