The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Bolland was not popular in the various courts of the Windsor family. Competing courtiers suspected him of leaking damaging stories to enhance Charles’ image at the expense of other family members. Certainly, he did not play by old rules. Royal staffers were world-class obfuscators, but Bolland knew intuitively how to get the media on his side. He was the master of tantalising indiscretion — whispered nuggets for gossip columnists, tip-offs on upcoming celebrity knighthoods, and sometimes more. These morsels never put his core objective at risk, but drew closer to him the people he needed in order to achieve it.

  Bolland had trained well for the task. Before joining Charles, he was director of the Press Complaints Commission. When newspapers were unfair, inaccurate, or cruel — which was often — the PCC was the field hospital where victims took their wounds to be redressed. After four years in the job, Bolland had seen the best and worst of newspapers, and knew the best and worst of journalists.

  Bolland took me to dinner in 1996, soon after taking his job with Prince Charles, and before Diana’s death. The rehabilitation of Charles and Camilla was already a challenge; he had no idea how hard it would become.

  For our meeting, he picked a place to impress. Mayfair’s cheerful name belies its aloofly opulent, overdressed, and curiously soulless personality; and Harry’s Bar was one of Mayfair’s most desirable venues, a private dining club where the prices were ridiculously high, and the chairs and tables uncomfortably low. Its founder, the perfectionist entrepreneur Mark Birley, shortened the legs of all the restaurant’s furniture to make space for a huge, dominating chandelier that he loved.

  Harry’s Bar was where Bolland took me for his subtle vetting of me, to decide whether I would be useful to his mission, or an obstacle. He knew Rupert disliked royalty and inherited privilege, and had noted along with many others how this view contradicted his own dynastic determination to have his children run the company he created. Bolland was keen to know how closely I followed my boss’ lead.

  Fleet Street covered the spectrum in its support of the monarchy. The Independent proudly ignored them most of the time, while the Daily Mail offered its readers cheap souvenir crockery marking every royal moment. Rupert was too pragmatic to impose his own republican instincts, but was not displeased when his newspapers went on the attack.

  By the end of our meal, Bolland understood that I was more bemused about royalty than hostile, and, above all, recognised that most readers approved of the monarchy. He was keen to get Charles and Rupert together for lunch, but I told him that was a bad idea. Rupert thought Charles dull and ‘lightweight’, and cranky in many of his views.

  Bolland’s task of rehabilitation was sidelined by the tragedy of Diana’s death, but he was diligent in keeping in touch with me and other Fleet Street bosses. By the spring of 1998, when I had dinner with Camilla Parker Bowles, his campaign was in full swing again.

  In November 1998, the Queen staged an epic party at Buckingham Palace for Prince Charles’ fiftieth birthday. Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were there, along with Charles’ show business friends — Spike Milligan, Stephen Fry, and Jimmy Savile. The Hobbit-height figure of the 98-year-old Queen Mother wandered among the guests. The Queen and Charles stood on a dais before two gold and crimson thrones. He called her ‘Mummy’, and the Queen offered her son a champagne toast, but nothing so informal as a birthday kiss. In the state dining room, a tuba-euphonium ensemble, Tubalaté, had not chosen an ideal repertoire; they played the theme from Mission Impossible.

  Editors and media executives were invited to Buckingham Palace, but not Camilla, not yet. She appeared later that week at another birthday event not attended by the Queen. It was a banquet at sixteenth-century Hampton Court Palace, 12 miles southwest of London. Camilla was present, but Charles was not her escort. They sat at a careful distance, diagonally apart at the top table, within sight but well beyond touching distance. Again, Fleet Street was flattered with invitations. We were far away, at the bottom of a long table, but close enough to bear witness.

  Camilla was eased into the spotlight at other opportunities. Whenever she and Charles attended the same private events, Mark Bolland made sure newspapers knew. Images appeared on front pages of the couple arriving and departing separately, but not yet together, and never close enough to be captured in a single frame.

  With these perfectly orchestrated overtures, Bolland and his team played the country and the media towards the main event. It happened on the steps of The Ritz Hotel on 29 January 1999, at a birthday party for Camilla’s sister, Annabel Elliot.

  When it finally came, it was studiously informal and understated. There was no happy-couple pose and no cooperative pause to help photographers frame their shots. There was no eye contact between them, and no touching. Charles walked first down the hotel steps, with Camilla immediately behind, a prosperous middle-aged couple on their way home after an evening out.

  Within seconds, they were in a car and gone. But scores of photographers had been positioned across the street, and the lightning storm of cameras was so intense the British Epilepsy Association appealed to television channels not to broadcast it for more than five seconds.

  Britain had at last seen Camilla and Charles as ‘a couple’, but there was no shock and surprise, or horror. The public, without knowing, had been cleverly eased towards the inevitability of the moment.

  These joint appearances were repeated, but sparingly, until the bravura moment of Bolland’s public relations master class. On 7 February 2001 the Press Complaints Commission held a party to celebrate its tenth anniversary. It was an occasion that deserved no more than a modest drinks party, but that’s not what happened. Bolland’s partner, Guy Black, had succeeded him as director of the Press Complaints Commission, and together they turned this minor celebration into an epic.

  Charles and Camilla were there, as was Prince William, pink-cheeked and uneasy, at the first public event with his future stepmother. Charles’ two brothers, Andrew, the Duke of York, and Prince Edward, arrived, and there were a score or more celebrities, as well as citizens, whose complaints the Press Complaints Commission had satisfactorily adjudicated.

  One newspaper said the royals had been lured into the lions’ den and emerged unscarred. William, who was 18, said he was grateful to have been left in peace during his recent gap year. Charles praised the editor of the Daily Mail for his crusade against genetically modified food, and urged him to keep it up.

  Mark Bolland looked pleased with himself. It was his victory lap, and he quit his job with Charles the following year. Given his impatience with palace apparatchiks, and how skilfully he undermined them, it was a miracle he lasted five years.

  Charles and Camilla were married in a civil ceremony in Windsor in April 2005. By the time of their tenth anniversary, they were an accepted couple. Opinion polls revealed a tolerance, if not yet love, for Camilla. Charles had recovered from near-disaster, but his popularity was already yielding to the next generation — to William and Catherine, and Prince Harry. For a business whose objective is an eternal brand, the monarchy looked to be in robust condition.

  Concerns about the media, and its power, had reached the top of the Royal Family. Following the turmoil of Diana’s death, and during Camilla’s rough passage to public acceptance, I was invited to Buckingham Palace for lunch.

  My host was the Lord Chamberlain, the senior officer of the Royal Household, its chief executive officer, whose job had existed since the Middle Ages. In 2000, the position was held by a former Conservative MP, Richard Luce.

  Never was duller food served in a grander setting: dry mashed potatoes, overcooked cabbage, and blackened lamb. Since the Lord Chamberlain was eating from the same kitchen as the Queen, I guessed she had a bland palate.

  Luce belonged to the patrician school of mannered men of old power. This kind of man is disappearing, along with their cut-glass accents, but still bear themselves with a raised-chin f
ormality. They have the habit of standing stiffly, with one hand in their jacket pocket, while stroking their ties with the other. It’s upper-class semaphore practised by Prince Charles and his father, and widely copied.

  Lord Luce was fishing for my opinion on the mood of Fleet Street. In 2002, the Queen would mark her Golden Jubilee — 50 years as monarch — and he wanted to know how I thought the media would react to a national celebration.

  This was a time when post-Diana wounds were still unhealed and the dot-com bubble had burst, casting a gloom over the economy. Luce was worried about the hangover of grief and anger, and the risk of looking extravagant at a time of economic hardship. Would Fleet Street, and in particular, News International, disapprove?

  Luce knew Rupert was not an avid royalist, but it was still astonishing that the confidence of the Royal Family had reached such a low ebb that they needed to conduct media focus groups.

  I thought widespread antagonism in the media was unlikely, and told Luce so. The usual unwelcoming and anti-monarchist noises would come from The Guardian and The Independent, and from columnists in other papers, including ours, but I could not imagine broad hostility towards a national celebration.

  He listened in silence, and thanked me. A few months later I was invited back to repeat what I had said; by that time, I was even more certain he had nothing to worry about.

  The Golden Jubilee was celebrated throughout the Commonwealth. The Queen visited 70 British cities and towns. In New York, the Empire State building was lit in purple, blue, and gold. In a climactic weekend, a pop concert in the palace grounds was watched live by 12,000, and by a further 1 million on giant screens outside.

  Brian May, the guitarist from Queen, stood on the palace roof riffing wildly through God Save the Queen. The event was televised around the world and declared the most watched pop concert in history, with 200 million viewers.

  The Golden Jubilee was a spectacular success. It was also clouded with sadness for the Queen; her younger sister, Margaret, had died in February of that year, and her mother the following month.

  But Luce was still fretting about media. In his memoir Ringing the Changes, he says the media were: ‘exceedingly gloomy and pessimistic … rather assuming that the public was not interested’. He clearly dwelt on the negative stories because positive ones far outnumbered them.

  Sitting in the palace gardens that weekend, after walking through throngs in The Mall and the parks, it was hard to imagine what he or the palace had ever worried about. For all its travails and missteps, the Royal Family’s spell over Britain was unbroken. Eleven years later, when Prince George was born, a poll showed that three quarters of the population expected him one day to be king.

  CHAPTER 24

  No thanks, Rupert

  For the third consecutive Sunday afternoon, my telephone rang. It was Rupert again. It was the autumn of 2007, and once more I was caught in his headlights.

  After years of dreaming, and four months of intense and tricky negotiations, Rupert was buying Dow Jones & Co. It was a huge information operation, with global print and digital interests, and annual revenues of more than $2 billion. But the real object of Rupert’s desire, the pin-up in Dow Jones’s portfolio, was The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper he had wanted for more than two decades. He had once told me he wanted to run it himself. ‘I would make myself publisher and let other people manage the rest of the business,’ he said.

  The deal was due to be completed before the end of that year, and Rupert wanted me to leave News International, move to New York, and take the job of chief executive. Dow Jones was Rupert’s holy grail — or at least, his most recent one — and running it would be high profile, high pressure, and high paid.

  I told him I wouldn’t do it.

  For more than 40 years, I had zigzagged back and forth from three continents. I was pulled around the world in the tailwind of Dad’s military life, and then I had hitched myself to the wagon train of Rupert Murdoch’s ambitions. I had found it exhilarating — there was nothing I would have changed. But I had had enough.

  I had been in London for 12 years in a demanding, sometimes exhausting, job. For nearly 20 years, I had managed large divisions of News Corp — magazines, television stations, newspapers. I had been ‘in harness to Rupert’, as a fellow veteran, Andrew Knight, would say, for almost my entire career.

  I had also just come through the most personally painful period of my life. After 35 years of marriage and five children, Mary and I had separated in the spring of 2004. She had travelled everywhere with me in Rupert’s wake — 11 relocations among six cities, in three countries. My work had dictated the geography of her life and our children’s.

  The decision to separate had been mine, and I had moved into a flat a mile away from our family home in Hampstead. The three oldest were adults and in America, but James and Jane were teenagers and still at school. It had been hard on everyone, but three years later, although Mary was still angry, we were at least on an even keel.

  In 2007, I was living with Katharine Raymond, who I had first met at a Labour Party conference. The Sun’s political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, had introduced us, but I had no memory of it until Kath reminded me. The second time we met, years later, I wondered how I had forgotten. Kath was a clever, dark-haired, blue-eyed Liverpudlian. The daughter of a joiner and a librarian, she was born three miles south of Bootle, but 23 years after me. With Kath, I was happy in a way I had never expected to be and, at the age of 63, beginning to imagine there might be other ways of life.

  Kath mattered more than another big job; besides, she had her own career and ambitions. Brought up in working-class Liverpool, her father had been a trade unionist and a socialist, and she had inherited his passions — joining the Labour Party as a teenager and ending up as a special adviser in Tony Blair’s government. In 2007, she was working at Number 10 as a member of Gordon Brown’s policy unit, and being encouraged by the prime minister to seek election to Parliament.

  Rupert’s job offer was, of course, appealing, even though I no longer felt the need to prove myself. I enjoyed being the boss, but deep down I still missed journalism, and always preferred the intense immediacy of the newsroom to the insulated corridor of the executive. Another big job didn’t matter enough to uproot Kath and upset her plans, and I was going nowhere without her.

  But still Rupert kept calling.

  These calls were not a complete surprise; he had been plotting his Dow Jones bid for months, and had talked to me about it often. When the terms of the deal were agreed that summer, I was part of the first News Corp group to visit the company headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Ten of us spent a day in the company boardroom with a dozen apprehensive Dow Jones executives.

  As well as explaining the business to us, the Dow Jones managers were enduring personal auditions in front of their prospective future employers. It’s not hard to work out from Rupert’s body language who fails to impress him. He rarely tells someone when he thinks they’re talking rubbish — especially when he doesn’t know them — but he has a skill of simply disconnecting. More than once that day, his face glazed over, leaving me and others to continue the conversation, while he studied the notes in front of him. He could do the same to long-time executives; it was unfailingly disconcerting.

  That night, he took us to Scalinatella, an Italian restaurant in a basement off Third Avenue, where we pooled our judgements. It would have made painful listening for some of them as we discussed, dismissed, and crossed names off our mental list of ‘keepers’. Danny DeVito, the comedian and actor, looked on curiously from a nearby table.

  I gave in to Rupert on the fourth phone call. The previous weekend, Kath had unexpectedly told me I should take the job. Until then, she had said nothing, only listened as I talked. I told her several times that I had spent enough time running big businesses, that I didn’t want to go back to America, and that News International
would be my last job as a chief executive. I didn’t say she was the main reason I was turning down the job, but Kath is no fool, and that Sunday she sat beside me on the bed as I put down the phone, having once again declined Rupert’s offer.

  ‘Why don’t you do it? It’ll be hard work, but exciting and we’ll have fun for a few years. Besides, admit it, you’re bored here. What have you got to lose?’ she said.

  Kath had seen little of America, apart from occasional trips with me to visit my sons, and a month-long tour of American prisons when she was working at the Home Office. When I told her this wouldn’t have provided her with a proper perspective of the country, she had replied: ‘You learn a lot about a country from its jails.’ I knew that America’s had horrified her.

  ‘But what about you?’ I asked now.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m happy to go. I can turn my back on British politics for a while. It might even be a good idea,’ she said.

  Shortly before Brown became prime minister, Kath and I had taken him and his wife, Sarah, for dinner at Le Caprice, a smart restaurant tucked away in a dead-end street in St James’s. Kath, prone to sudden attacks of enthusiasm, had poured forth a stream of policy ideas on drug abuse and violent crime. After three years at the Home Office she had developed a range of odd passions. Gordon pulled out a notebook and began scribbling in thick felt pen. They talked for ages while Sarah and I chatted more sedately. The following day he phoned to ask her to join his policy unit at Number 10. She had accepted, but with a measure of reluctance.

  She had spent four exhausting years as an adviser to David Blunkett through his three Cabinet positions at Education, the Home Office, and Work and Pensions, and was now building her own, more easy-going, portfolio. As well as writing occasional comment pieces for the Evening Standard and other newspapers, she was working as a freelance political consultant, and the flexibility — and the money — appealed to her. Returning to government felt like dressing herself up in chains again. Besides, she was suspicious about Brown’s job offer. ‘I think he’s trying to please you,’ she told me. ‘I might be useful to him on policy, but he’s more interested in keeping News International close than he is in reforming equality laws.’ I told her she was too modest, and paranoid.