The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  Soon after going into Downing Street, Kath began to worry about Brown’s state of mind. He had started on a high. The unanimous vote of Labour MPs propelled him into Number 10 after Blair’s mid-term resignation, and early polls showed a surge in popular support. But his first weeks had been hard going. All politicians dread uncontrollable ‘events’, and the summer of 2007 had plenty of them. Extensive flooding across Britain, terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, and the gangland murder of a child in Liverpool all contributed to the chaos. Kath thought Brown was a brilliant and original thinker, but one evening after another stormy day, she told me: ‘I think the strain’s beginning to show. He threw a telephone at someone today.’

  Brown had been in a foul mood that morning when Kath walked into his office. He had been reading the newspapers and they were not treating him well. When another official arrived late for the meeting, he kicked his office wall in a fury, leaving the latecomer in tears.

  Brown’s intemperance became the gossip of Downing Street. He once grew so angry with a harried secretary who was slow to type his dictation that he lifted her from her chair to seize control of the keypad himself. Even as chancellor of the exchequer, his flashes of temper were famous.

  But Kath also found him disorganised, limited in the range of policies that kept his interest, and said he often failed to complete the more boring work in his overnight red boxes. She was also disappointed, considering Labour’s vaunted advocacy of women in politics, to find herself the lone woman in Brown’s 10-member policy unit.

  The next time Rupert called, I was less emphatic in my refusal. He could hear my new hesitation and pressed hard. ‘I’ve got to make a decision,’ he said. ‘Are you going to take the job or not?’ For the first time he named two other candidates he was considering. ‘You’re my first choice, but I need to know soon.’

  I told him we should meet, and on the evening of Sunday 7 October 2007 we sat together in the same small hotel where we had dined 12 years earlier when he first took me to Wapping. It was Kath’s birthday and we had spent the weekend in Norfolk, walking the freezing fens and bird watching, talking about the possibilities of Dow Jones and New York. She waited for me a street away at another hotel while Rupert and I talked.

  Our meeting didn’t take long. He produced paper and a pen and began writing numbers. I periodically invited him to increase these numbers, and sometimes he did, but not always.

  Rupert said he wanted me to sign a five-year contract. It would be the first time in 48 years that I would have a written employment agreement; it was the same for many of Rupert’s early executives. This informality ended as the American operation grew, but by that time I had been there so long tenure was on my side, and Rupert had a reputation of being a generous sacker; more than once, I proposed a settlement for a departing executive and he instructed me to improve upon it. I had imagined working full-time three more years before putting together a portfolio of more varied and less demanding jobs. But five years was a solid guarantee going into a challenging job.

  With the deal done, Rupert, Kath, and I headed for dinner at the home of Rupert’s daughter, Elisabeth, and her husband Matthew Freud, in Notting Hill. It was a big, white-stuccoed house, overlooked by a block of council flats, with many rooms and levels, and the scene of some spectacular and occasionally wild parties. That night, there was only a small group gathered at a table in the kitchen.

  Matthew was wearing his standard expression of permanent pop-eyed surprise. He was one of London’s most successful PR operators and a perennial schemer whose mother once told Kath: ‘We knew he would end up either a millionaire or in prison.’

  Elisabeth, for all her drive, success, and practised toughness, was a naturally warm woman whose face in quiet moments would soften to the point of seeming almost needy. Born in Australia, raised mostly in America, now a dedicated Brit, her American accent was thinning with the years.

  Also at the table was Rupert’s younger son James, 34, who always radiated a fierceness and absence of self-doubt that was either innate or an act, I could never decide. He had made shareholders happy and his father proud as CEO of Sky TV. Rebekah Wade — soon to be Brooks — was there, with her sharp, measuring eyes; and Charles Dunstone, a family friend, and to me always a plump, sweet-natured man and great company. However, since he had built a billion-pound company, Carphone Warehouse, from savings of £6000, I doubt I had the full picture of him.

  Even at family gatherings, Rupert’s presence brought tautness to the atmosphere; he was always the patriarch his children were anxious to impress. For outsiders, it could sometimes be awkward to watch, but that night I paid no attention to the usual tensions.

  I spent the evening in a daze of excitement and doubt, feeling the familiar thrill that came with another big Murdoch move, relishing the drama and challenge, and the power and attention as well. But I was worried about Kath. She might have appeared cheerful to everyone else that night, but by now I recognised her brave face. I knew she would have preferred a quiet evening at home, discussing our plans. Besides, she disliked this sort of dinner party, and wasn’t fond of all the guests. She had once told James Murdoch to ‘watch your manners, Mr Murdoch’ during one of his famous sweary rants.

  She was leaving behind her whole life for a place where she knew no one but me. She also knew she had triggered the decision, that it would not be happening but for her. I think, consciously or not, she had tested me, that at first she feared I would find the offer irresistible and accept it whether or not she came with me. Once she knew I would never leave without her, I think she made her sacrifice in place of the one she knew I was ready to make.

  Excited as we were, we had to keep our news secret for two months, until the Dow Jones deal was formally closed and News Corp took possession. I told the children in New York — they had been keen all along for me to come ‘home’ — but Robert Thomson and I shared the secret alone at News International. After five years editing The Times, Robert would become Dow Jones’ ‘publisher’, in practice the editor-in-chief. He was another veteran of New York, having spent four years as US editor of the Financial Times.

  A few at the top of the company knew in advance of our appointments, and Kath told her boss she would be leaving at the end of the year. Brown was surprised. He had been prime minister only six months. ‘I thought you were going to stay and become an MP,’ he said. He sent me his congratulations, but Kath knew he was anxious about who would take over at News International. Kath’s resignation coincided with the fatal decision of Brown’s political life. Three days before my 7 October deal with Rupert, Brown had been at Kath’s birthday party at the Shoreditch House club. He presented Kath with a gift from their son John — a toy windmill that flashed lights and played music. The evening was buzzing with the expectation he would call a general election; most of Brown’s staff were sure he would. But on Saturday 6 October, as we walked the Norfolk coast near Cley next the Sea, expecting Kath would be submerged for the next month or so with the campaign, Downing Street sent her a text saying the election was off. Brown, who had been struggling to decide, appears to have been spooked by news that an opinion poll would appear next day in, of all places, the News of the World, predicting a decisive Labour defeat. The front page next day took credit for Brown’s retreat: ‘News of the World POLL KILLS ELECTION.’

  —

  The acquisition of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal was not popular with everyone at the top of News Corp. By 2007 the company’s centre of gravity had shifted away from print. The new money-spinner was television, in particular US cable and the company’s share of British Sky Broadcasting. It had been a healthy transition from one media to another, a transition many newspaper companies failed to achieve, but that hadn’t made it less painful for inky-fingered old hands. They saw the Dow Jones bid as a last hurrah for the industry upon which Rupert had built his fortune.

  It was made with a shrewder m
otive than the simple purchase of a famous newspaper. The Wall Street Journal was a global brand with a peerless reputation. It had positioned itself online more cleverly than any competitor, determining from the start that its journalism was too good to give away. Beyond the newspaper, there was a range of promising digital assets, most of them in the growing business-to-business sector.

  All the same, there were strong reservations about the deal from some. Peter Chernin was Rupert’s number two and a Hollywood veteran who spent much of his time running the Fox operation. When he called, I thought it was with congratulations, but the first thing he said was: ‘You must be crazy taking that job.’

  We were definitely paying what business people euphemistically describe as a ‘full price’. Rupert’s offer of $60 a share was a 67 per cent premium on Dow Jones’ trading price, and valued the company at more than $5 billion.

  The bid needed to be high to make sure it broke through the resistance of the family that had controlled the company for ninety years. The business was started in 1882 by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser. Clarence Barron bought the company in 1902, and upon his death control passed to his stepdaughters, Martha and Jane. Barron’s son-in-law, Jane’s husband, a depression-prone lawyer named Hugh Bancroft, became boss in 1928, but killed himself five years later.

  By the time of our bid, the company had gone through years of change and expansion. It owned a wide range of publications including Barron’s, a weekly for sophisticated investors, and SmartMoney magazine, a down-to-earth guide to personal finance. There was also the Far Eastern Economic Review, the weekly Financial News in London, one-third of the Moscow business newspaper Vedomosti, and a chain of local newspapers in seven American states. An array of digital businesses included Marketwatch.com; Factiva, a worldwide aggregator of news and data; the business and finance news agency Dow Jones Newswire; a dozen or more operations providing high-speed data feeds and corporate governance information; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the world’s most famous stock market index.

  For the Bancrofts, a rich and secluded clan of Boston Brahmins, control of Dow Jones — in particular, The Wall Street Journal — was a point of family pride, even though it had been years since a Bancroft was in charge. Rupert’s takeover generated uproar among the usual suspects. It was a familiar chorus of hostilities that had built over decades among thwarted rivals, cast-off editors, and everyone else disaffected by his style of journalism, politics, and business.

  The pundit Bill Moyers, a charter member of the Rupert Haters Hall of Fame, represented the most extreme outrage. ‘Rupert Murdoch is to propriety what the Marquis de Sade was to chastity,’ he said. ‘When it comes to money and power, he’s carnivorous — all appetite and no taste. He’ll eat anything in his path.’ Of the Bancrofts, he said: ‘Like Adam and Eve, the parents of us all, [they] are tempted to trade their birthright for a wormy apple.’

  The Economist said The Wall Street Journal was the media version of Rupert’s ‘trophy wife’. Leslie Hill, a Bancroft family member who opposed the deal, mourned ‘the loss of an independent global news organization with unmatched credibility and integrity.’ James H. Ottaway junior, who became a director and shareholder upon selling his newspaper chain to Dow Jones in 1970, was the loudest internal critic. ‘Dow Jones is not for sale, at any price, to Rupert Murdoch,’ he said.

  There was uproar almost every time Rupert tried to buy a newspaper, and the hostile climate was familiar to him. He had won and lost many battles: he tried to buy London’s The Observer in the 1970s — failed; The Buffalo News — failed; the Boston Herald — success; Chicago Sun-Times — success, but only after a bitter struggle; The Times of London — success after another struggle.

  For him, it was just the conqueror’s latest campaign. But for the insulated Bancrofts it created a nightmare of family tensions, tearing them between their self-perceived heritage as guardians of a great institution, and the allure of a cash pot for the family in excess of a billion dollars. As the deadline for signing the deal approached, the family patriarch, 76-year-old William Cox junior, went into diabetic shock and was taken to hospital. The Bancrofts resisted Rupert’s overtures for three months before enough of them surrendered to the money, and the pressure of other shareholders. Thirty members of the family shared $1 billion.

  Two years after the sale, Jim Ottaway crossed the ballroom of a charity event for the Committee to Protect Journalists to introduce himself to me — and take back his words. ‘I feared the worst and it didn’t happen,’ he said. ‘The Journal is excellent, much better than I believed it would be under Murdoch. And you made investments that would never have happened under the old ownership.’

  I think he came offering peace, but his apology made me angrier than ever that people like him were sucked in by the worn-out anti-Murdoch theology that we were not worthy of the responsibility of running a world-class newspaper. By then, I had purged Ottoway’s name from the local newspaper chain Dow Jones had acquired from him. It was called Ottaway Newspapers, but I gave it the bland new title Local Media Group, thus sparing Jim Ottaway the ordeal of having his family name associated with an acquisition he fought so hard to prevent. It was an act of pure spite, but I didn’t feel guilty.

  The news of my appointment broke in the first week of December and the office Christmas party in London turned into a farewell. A life-size cut-out of me was positioned at the entrance. I was presented later with a photo album with pictures of every guest standing next to ‘me’, and brief messages from each. James Murdoch, who was adding News International to his portfolio of responsibilities, wrote: ‘Big shoes, mate.’

  My farewell gifts included a huge, bright oil painting of The Sun’s newsroom, with its main characters plainly identifiable. It hangs on the wall of our London flat.

  Within a few years this painting would look like a rogues’ gallery — or, at least, a gallery of alleged rogues — of close friends and good colleagues who were about to experience some of the most difficult years of their lives.

  CHAPTER 25

  Barbarians in the elevator

  It was a cold winter afternoon — Thursday 13 December 2007. From the window we could see the vast, heartbreaking hole where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood; one of the biggest stories The Wall Street Journal ever covered had happened across the street.

  The sight of it had personal meaning — nothing in the context of that horrifying day, but a nightmare for my family. Thomas, my second son, was working as a freelance photographer and ran to the scene from his Greenwich Village apartment. When the towers collapsed, and it was clear many were dead, it was three hours before we knew Thomas was safe. Mary, at home in Hampstead, stared helplessly at the television; I wandered the office in a daze; Martin was at work as a television news producer; and William, still at college, sent a family email that somehow got through to me: ‘Is anyone there?’ The two youngest were at school and oblivious. Thomas lost most of his camera equipment running from the first collapsing tower, and found himself with police and fire officers unable to escape behind a plate glass window in the lobby of The Journal building where I now had an office. A police officer fired his handgun to shatter the glass that trapped them. ‘When he did,’ said Thomas, ‘the cops and fire officers ran straight towards the second tower. I’ll never know how many of them died.’

  Rupert, Robert Thomson, Gary Ginsberg — the News Corp communications chief — and I were waiting to appear before the massed staff of The Wall Street Journal. The four of us were in a small room on the eleventh floor of the Manhattan headquarters of Dow Jones, in the World Financial Center near the southern tip of the island.

  While Ginsberg chatted cheerfully, the rest of us were pensive. We had heard that Dow Jones shareholders, meeting in a Manhattan hotel, had formally voted to support the sale of their company to News Corp. Some of the Bancroft family were reported to have been in tears as th
e vote was announced.

  I had never been involved in an acquisition that seemed to mean more to Rupert, but he was taking it coolly, reading notes on a couple of sheets of paper that were folded to fit in the pocket of his dark-blue suit, repeating quietly to himself the words he was about to deliver to thousands of anxious new employees.

  The newsroom two floors beneath was packed, and offices across America and the rest of the world were hooked up by telephone — Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Beijing, and scores of others in more than a hundred countries. After an eight-month onslaught of critical publicity, the people waiting to meet their new ruler must have felt as if Genghis Khan had entered the building. We went down to make our appearance. ‘We’re the barbarians in the elevator,’ I said. Rupert gave a wry smile without looking up from his notes.

  The dense crowd were silent as we walked among them. I was shocked at the condition of the newsroom; it was austere and in disrepair, with a ragged blue carpet and worn-out furniture, its low ceiling bearing down on us.

  In the tradition of newsroom speeches, no special effort had been made for our appearance; there was nothing so formal as a podium to elevate the speaker. The common vantage point for any newsroom address, however important, is the top of a desk, but Rupert was 76 and, fit as he was, perhaps no longer sufficiently nimble to clamber onto one. Four green-and-white boxes of printer paper had been arranged in a neat square and someone indicated to Rupert he should stand on them. The design on these boxes was not in tune with the mood of the room — ‘Happy Holidays’, each said, next to an illustration of a jolly snowman.