Hack Attack

by Nick Davies

  Certainly, many have come across a gentler version of this, something more like whitemail – a favour done rather than a threat made. There are senior politicians, police officers and others who know that senior Murdoch journalists have privately put in a word for them, to help with a promotion, to defuse some threat. Most of the wedding guests know that Rebekah worked a clever piece of whitemail with the deputy prime minister John Prescott when, as editor of the News of the World, she got hold of the story that many years earlier Prescott’s wife, Pauline, had given up a baby for adoption. This had happened before the Prescotts had met, but now the long-lost son had made contact. Prescott pleaded with Rebekah not to publish the story until his wife and her adult son had had a chance to get to know each other. She agreed, a decent act and one which earned her a sense of indebtedness from Prescott who later, when his family were ready, opted to take the story to her at the Sun, where she had become editor. Favours are valuable currency in the corridors of power.

  The power to conceal or reveal sensitive personal information turns out to be just like the power of the bully in the school playground. The bully need only batter one or two other children for the fact of his power to be established: fear will then ensure that the others do all they can to placate him. In the same way, the really big power which Murdoch is said to wield – that he can swing the result of elections – does not have to be entirely real. What matters is the fear that it could be real. Far safer to be an ally, even to join the shuffling queue of current and former members of the power elite who take his money, writing columns for his newspapers or selling their memoirs to HarperCollins: the then Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich; the daughter of the then leader of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping; the former Conservative leader William Hague; the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens; the former Labour minister David Blunkett; the former Downing Street press adviser Alastair Campbell; the former Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman; and so on and on.

  Nobody is sure whether an aggressive newspaper really can decide the outcome of a national ballot. The newspapers like to claim that they can; politicians claim not to believe it; psephologists argue about the impact of news on voters and the distribution of any newspaper’s readers among the swing voters in marginal seats which dictate results. In the best-known UK case, Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun in 1992 bloodied its toecaps all over the political career of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and then loudly claimed to have won the election for the Conservative leader, John Major. MacKenzie’s claim was widely seen as unfounded, if only because of his notorious estrangement from the truth.

  There is no doubt that the droogs can cause grievous political harm. A cynical newspaper which targets a political party – in or out of government – can inject it with chaos. All debates become splits, all problems become crises, all changes become climbdowns, all setbacks are humiliating, all successes are ignored. It can change the news agenda so that on any day, the party or government is diverted into managing some crisis which the newspaper has manufactured. It can ruin reputations, with falsehood as easily as with truth. It can wreck the public debate of whole subjects by pumping it full of distortion. (Britain’s relationship with the European Union, for example, has been fundamentally shaped by a relentless sequence of notoriously false stories about the EU supposedly banning the British Army, Scottish kilts, pints of beer, bent bananas, charity shops and Christian teachers, as well as supposedly suffocating daily life with an imaginary set of petty regulations.) The impact is like the effect which a screaming brat has on a family: the family may not break up, but ordinary life becomes impossible.

  Murdoch controls his company’s money with obsessive care, checking daily ‘flash reports’ from every subsidiary to ensure that they are sticking to the budget he has laid down for each of them. But very little of the editorial distortion in his empire comes direct from him. He intervenes in the round by requiring his outlets to work within the boundaries of policies which will favour businesses like News Corp – cut taxes, cut welfare, cut government, cut regulation, all of the essentials of neoliberalism. From time to time, he directly intervenes in particular stories – to help an ally, to promote his business, to reflect some random personal bias. His senior journalists admit privately that this is unacceptable, a clear form of editorial corruption, but they insist that he intervenes far less often than outsiders imagine. The vast bulk of Murdoch’s news output, including the huge majority of any falsehood and distortion, is simply the spontaneous product of his highly commercialised newsrooms. It sells.

  In the same way, very little of the aggression needs to be directed by Murdoch himself. The fear is all. In the balance of power, a government wins easily over a newspaper group with its vast budget, its military and police, its bureaucracy and all the limbs of the state. But in the balance of fear, the outcome is the opposite. The government lives in fear of what the mogul might do to its collective standing (and perhaps to some individual reputations) by causing chaos in its coverage. The mogul has little to fear from the government. For the most part, politicians will step round him and, in the unlikely event that they do attack, he has the ultimate sanction: he can sell up and leave, avoiding everything they throw at him, taking his investment and his jobs with him.

  The point about real power is that it does its own work, particularly among those who deal in power. Nobody in the power elite needs to be told. They all recognise the mogul’s power and, with few exceptions, they do everything they can to pacify him, to ingratiate themselves. The mogul, for the most part, does not have to make threats or issue instructions. He just has to show up. Not even that – he just has to exist, somewhere in the background. Everybody understands; the fact of power is enough. If there’s a bull in the field, everybody steps carefully. The fear gives him access; the access, gives him influence. Real power is passive.

  * * *

  The wedding blessing ends. The sound of ‘Windmills of your Mind’ drifts across the lake, and the TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson steps up to read ‘Riders in the Stand’ by Banjo Paterson. ‘The rule holds good in everything in life’s uncertain fight; You’ll find the winner can’t go wrong, the loser can’t go right.’

  There are prayers and a hymn and then the guests are ushered away, some with the help of their chauffeurs and some on foot across the fields, to Jubilee Barn, where Rebekah and Charlie live, close by the homes of Charlie’s mother and sister. Gordon Brown discreetly takes his leave, but the others wander into a vision of the good life – two donkeys grazing peacefully in a paddock like a picture from a children’s book; a marquee dressed in the style of a Victorian carnival with tables laid out for a banquet; and a private fairground for their entertainment, complete with a big wheel.

  When the power elite meet to play, they work. On this particular day in June 2009, there are all kinds of plots swimming beneath the surface of the idle chatter at the banquet, but one plot in particular is big enough to be clearly visible. Everybody in the power elite knows that at some point in the next twelve months, Gordon Brown must call an election and so Rupert Murdoch will bestow his blessing on his chosen party with all the presumption of entitlement of a Renaissance pope. They know, too, that there is a new player in the game.

  In spite of all the fuss that follows him in the UK, like a flock of seagulls behind a trawler, the old man is no longer very interested in what happens in London. He is still interested in the Sun and he likes the money it makes; there are rumours that he has his eye on one particularly big deal, involving BSkyB; but, for the most part, the UK has become a sideshow for him. He is happy now, they say, to use it as a kind of playpit, somewhere for his son James to develop his talents before he moves on to join his father in New York, where the big game is being played.

  Ultimately, for sure, it will be Rupert who decides where his political blessing will fall, but it is James Murdoch, now aged thirty-six, who will deliver the intelligence on
which his father will act, and who now sits surrounded by the smiles of those who feel a profound desire to please him. David Cameron, for example, who sits near him, has worked hard to build a bond. Six times in the last three years, Cameron has shared breakfast, lunch or dinner with the mogul’s heir. It hasn’t been easy to manufacture a friendship.

  A year before, in July 2008, the right-wing journalist Martin Ivens, who writes for Murdoch’s Sunday Times, hosted a dinner at which Cameron was seated opposite James Murdoch. There were other guests – a couple of newspaper columnists, a PR consultant, a novelist and a conservative historian – but, according to one of those who was there, this was clearly an occasion which had been staged as a summit meeting for the two men. Cameron and James Murdoch appeared to get on well, exchanging enthusiastic agreement about the value of green politics; James frequently disappearing to stoke up on nicotine and equally frequently spicing his views with expletives (‘This country is fucked,’ he confided at one point). All might have ended well if one of the other guests had not mischievously raised the subject of wealthy residents of the UK who exploit a loophole in UK tax law and claim that they are domiciled elsewhere for tax purposes, thus depriving the government of significant income. Cameron’s wife, Samantha, evidently agreed that this was a disgrace, which immediately alarmed the Conservative leader who guessed that James Murdoch himself might well be exploiting this very loophole. According to this guest: ‘Cameron jumped to his feet and said they really ought to go “before you say anything else indiscreet, darling” and because he had Prime Minister’s Questions the next day.’

  The truth is that James is not universally loved. It does not help him that he has been pushed so quickly up the family fast stream. It is only thirteen years since his father persuaded him to abandon his chosen path of producing indie music and join the family business by giving him a generous gift: he made him News Corp’s vice president in charge of music and new media. Four years later, in 2000, when he was only twenty-seven, father gave son the Star TV network and an office in Hong Kong. Three more years later, in November 2003, he handed him a prime post in London as chief executive of BSkyB. He was then the youngest chief executive of any FTSE 100 company. Four years later, as James turned thirty-five in December 2007, when Murdoch moved his old ally Les Hinton to New York to take charge of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, he moved James even closer to the top of the tree, promoting him to chairman of BSkyB but also appointing him executive chairman of News International and chief executive for all of News Corp’s activity in Europe and Asia.

  His critics, who cry nepotism, concede that James is clever and hard-working, but many of them say that they find him, well, difficult. In part, this is because James has a slightly robotic quality. He is a walking, talking model of a corporate man: the steel-rimmed glasses and the bristling crew cut, the power suit, the power swearing, the twenty-four-hour drive to succeed, the right-wing politics, and the strained language. James is famous for his addiction to the uniquely twisted talk of the corporate world: he doesn’t agree with people but he’ll be ‘on the same page’; some make plans, he has ‘projections going forward’; others are too busy to deal with some problem, he ‘doesn’t have the bandwidth to firefight that contingency right now’.

  But beyond that, the cruel truth is that a lot of people just don’t like him. In his father, they can see some charm and even a little humility; this is a man who has built the empire he runs. In James, they see a man with a sense of entitlement and little skill with people. ‘He’s bloodless,’ they say. ‘No sense of humour at all … Geeky – he wants to talk about wind turbines and iPads, he won’t talk about people … No warmth … An all-round knob.’ The work rate which serves him so well in business makes him seem neurotic and even paranoid in a social setting. He chain-smokes and speaks in staccato bursts. One person who has studied him up close claims that James is so paranoid that he keeps a gun under his bed in London, in case the proletariat try to break in and do him an injury.

  He can be as abrasive as acid. Whereas his father can hide his snarl if it serves his interests to do so, James has a reputation for indulging in sudden outbursts of ruddy-faced shouting. Years ago, in January 2002, his father took him to a private dinner with Tony Blair in Downing Street, a useful encounter for a man who was due to take over as chief executive of BSkyB and who would need political connections. Alastair Campbell’s diary records that James, briefly reverting to the left-wing views of his rebellious youth, made his mark on the prime minister by loudly contradicting his father’s claim that the Palestinians had nothing to complain about, explaining that they ‘were kicked out of their fucking homes and had nowhere to fucking live’.

  Those close to Gordon Brown say that at the time of this wedding, he is still on good terms with the old mogul, but he finds it hard to talk to James. Rupert Murdoch adopted the language of neoliberalism as respectable clothing for the otherwise naked ambition of his plans for global corporate expansion; the son really believes it. He is on a moral crusade for free enterprise and free markets and everything that makes the neoliberal heart beat strong. And anything and anybody that gets in his way must be swept aside. Brown struggles to have any kind of bond with him or with most of the others in Murdoch’s UK network. Brown’s wife Sarah, however, has worked tirelessly to shore up his standing with the Murdochs by befriending their women: Rupert’s third wife, Wendi Deng; Rupert’s daughter, Elisabeth; James’s wife, Kathryn; and spending so much time with Rebekah Brooks that one of those who works with her says that she is dangerously close to believing that Rebekah genuinely is a friend.

  But Cameron has luck on his side. It just so happens that his country home and his political constituency are in this part of Oxfordshire, which has become a kind of Camelot, the new stamping ground of the consciously casual Conservative elite: a land of cocaine and shepherd’s pie, where the very rich and famous live a baggy-jeans-and-T-shirt kind of life; where everybody who is anybody shops down the road at Daylesford Organic Foods, known as ‘the mother ship’ and famed for its £100 hampers with damson vodka and four different kinds of handmade cheese; where the prime minister will crack a can of beer with a rock star like Alex James from Blur, who makes cheese at his farm nearby; and where Bono will partner Rupert Murdoch for a hand of bridge, as he did a few months ago.

  Elisabeth Murdoch and her husband, the brilliant and bumptious PR millionaire Matthew Freud, live just down the road. Freud likes Cameron – they high-five when they meet at the lakeside blessing. It was Freud last summer who provided the Gulfstream IV private jet in which Cameron flew out to the Greek islands for a meeting with Rupert Murdoch on board Murdoch’s yacht, the Rosehearty. (This meeting went better than Cameron’s first encounter with Murdoch, in 2005, when Cameron is said to have trilled enthusiastically about the gay Western movie Brokeback Mountain without noticing the old man retching at the idea of anybody wanting to watch two cowboys coupling.) Freud is in the midst of creating his own personal Xanadu in a vast old priory which is set to become a hub of partying and power-broking with twenty-two bedrooms, fifteen acres of garden, a seventeenth-century rectory as a guest house, a rectory cottage as a spare guest house, a private chapel and plans for a cinema, an outdoor pool, an indoor pool, a gym, a tennis court, a riding school for Elisabeth’s horses, a shed for Matthew’s quad bikes and maybe a helipad. Cameron goes to parties there.

  Rebekah and Charlie Brooks live in the same patch. Cameron’s older brother, Alexander, was at Eton with Charlie and they ride out together on Charlie’s horses. And Rebekah, of course, is close to everybody. She goes on business trips with James Murdoch; has girly chats and cigarette breaks with Elisabeth Murdoch and produced a special 32-page edition of the Sun for her fortieth birthday; plays the part of daughter, nursemaid and plotter-in-chief to Rupert Murdoch; and, certainly, she has done her best to get close to Cameron.

  One of the wedding guests recalls that on the day in October 2007 when her supposed friend, the new pri
me minister Gordon Brown, shot a near-fatal hole in his credibility by cancelling the general election which he had been planning, Rebekah was straight on the phone to Cameron. ‘Shall I bring the champagne?’ she was heard to ask him. Another suggests that, although the Camerons respond to her endless invitations to come over for a drink, they know her game and that Mrs Cameron has said that ‘I have my old friends, I have my new friends … and I have Rebekah.’

  At this moment at the wedding banquet, Rebekah causes a stir by insisting not only on making a speech but on using it to further some plot of hers, to broker a peace between the editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, and Matthew Freud, citing the amount which Freud gives to charity as some kind of counter-balance to Dacre’s view of the young PR wizard as a yob with a gob. ‘I just wish that Paul could see the right side of Matthew,’ she explains to guests, some of whom wonder at the inner workings of a woman using her own wedding day as a platform for politics.

  In his struggle to win Murdoch’s favour, Cameron has one other asset on his side – Andy Coulson. For the first eighteen months after Cameron became leader, he tried to avoid playing the newspaper game, attempting to make his pitch to the public through television news bulletins. It didn’t work, and so, in July 2007, he hired Coulson as his director of communications. It changed Cameron’s fortunes. Coulson has several strengths: he comes from a working-class background in Essex and knows what messages to send to help the Conservatives break out of their middle-class electoral ghetto; he spent twenty years working for tabloid newspapers and so he knows how to convert that message into stories which newspapers will use; and, above all, he is connected to Rebekah and Rupert and to all that they represent.