by Nick Davies
How would those children feel if they learned they were at risk by reading about themselves in the Sun? How would Fraser feel if, when he was old enough to read, he came across stories on the Internet about his illness possibly meaning that he might die young? The aide recalled: ‘Gordon really was near tears. He was absolutely clear that he was not going to have his son treated as press property.’
So they came to a decision: if they could not prevent the story coming out, they could at least try to make sure that it came out on their terms and not as the property of the Sun; they would put out a press release describing their son’s condition for all news organisations. This was a dangerous act of defiance.
If Brown was to become prime minister, he needed Fleet Street – particularly the Sun – to support him. But the Sun, like Rupert Murdoch’s three other UK titles, backed the rival Blair camp. Brown had done his best to throw right-wing meat to the Sun’s attack dogs, but they were reluctant to swallow it, observing that Brown was simultaneously offering left-wing treats to the Labour MPs whose support he also needed. Now, it was horribly obvious that if the Browns gave away the Sun’s exclusive about Fraser’s illness, they would be slapping the Sun in the face just as Brown most wanted to reach out and take its hand. Nevertheless, Brown stood his ground and insisted. And then Rebekah Brooks called.
According to the senior aide: ‘She made it pretty clear that this would be a disaster for Gordon’s relationship with the Sun if their exclusive was spoiled. She said it would mean that in future when the Sun had stories about Gordon, they would publish them without checking with him. She was putting on the thumbscrews. There were three or four calls from her that afternoon – “What are you going to do? You mustn’t do this.”’
Concern for the child, or for the parents who were supposed to be her friends, does not appear to have coloured her position. Another source close to Brown claims that Rebekah also called direct to Sarah Brown that afternoon, putting pressure on her to protect their exclusive: ‘She was saying, “We do feel for you, we want to make it gentle.”’
Brown stuck to his line, but his advisers were so worried about alienating the Sun that they engineered a discreet compromise. One of them called the Sun to tell them that they would delay releasing the Browns’ statement until the early evening in order to give the Sun time to produce a mock-up of their next day’s front page which they could send round to TV studios, so that the early evening bulletins might present the story as their exclusive. Rebekah had to be pleased.
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Brown never managed to bend far enough to pull off Blair’s trick of making peace with the Murdochs. Brown and Rupert Murdoch liked each other and got on well, meeting for private breakfasts at Claridge’s hotel when the mogul was in London. The problem was that Brown’s gut instincts were far more radical than Blair’s. Furthermore, he thought James Murdoch was conservative beyond comprehension and he loathed much of News International’s journalism, particularly the work of Trevor Kavanagh, who was happy to attack Brown in print and to his face for being too soft on migrants, criminals, ‘benefit scroungers’ and other Sun targets.
Brown spent years trying to get it right. Sometimes, his radical roots would break through. Then his fear of the Sun would take over and he would compromise his own beliefs. For example, in 2003, officials say he hatched a plan to impose VAT on newspaper sales to punish News International for its bullying – and then quickly saw the blood on the Sun’s teeth and dropped it. He was opposed on principle to Tony Blair’s ‘reform agenda’, to model public services on private businesses by giving each school and hospital a budget and making them compete for students and patients. But the Sun liked Blair’s plan and made its feelings very clear. At the News International party at the Labour conference in the autumn of 2003, according to one of Brown’s staff, he was surrounded by hostile Murdoch journalists ‘like a pack of dogs and they all started yapping and biting and chewing into him. Gordon was blocking foundation hospitals, and they didn’t like it. There was a horrific exchange with them.’
The pressure to adopt the reform agenda continued, according to another former official who says: ‘There were a lot of calls to Gordon’s office from people like Trevor Kavanagh – “you’re making a big mistake” kind of stuff.’ One source says that Rupert Murdoch personally told Brown that he must support the ‘marketisation’ of the health service. Eventually, as the final clash with Tony Blair grew closer, Brown sidelined his principles and softened his approach to the whole subject.
In search of News International’s backing, he spent months sending them signals which were so clear as to be clumsy. In June 2006, he reacted to news reports which said he was left wing by announcing that he would renew the Trident nuclear missile programme. Tony Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, later wrote that Brown was ‘desperate to convince Rupert Murdoch that he was, in fact, a centrist in the hope of securing the support of his papers’. He made a series of speeches about terrorism which reflected the editorial hard line of the Sun, sweeping aside anxieties about human rights and due process, calling for detention without trial for terrorist suspects, and supporting the introduction of compulsory identity cards.
But the aggression from News International broke out again, in September 2006, when Brown’s close ally, Tom Watson, led a group of junior ministers in the ‘curry-house plot’ – all resigning and calling for Blair to announce a date when he would stand down so that Brown could take over. The Murdoch titles rushed to Blair’s defence, damning the plotters and Brown too. They remained surly, further aggravated two months later by the clash over the story about Fraser’s illness.
Brown lurched towards them again. In March 2007, he gritted his teeth and publicly visited one of Blair’s hated new academy schools. That same month, he made his biggest gesture when he announced that he would cut the standard rate of income tax from 22% to only 20%. Three different advisers speaking independently say that Brown did this simply and solely to curry favour with Rupert Murdoch, who liked low-tax, low-spend governments. It worked. The Sun was delighted, welcoming it as ‘A Reason 2p Cheerful’. It was also a total disaster. Looking for a way to pay for the tax cut, Brown ended up taking money from the poorest workers in the country, provoking an outcry from his own MPs.
Still, the lurching worked to some extent. Brown had one big advantage: it looked like sooner or later, he was bound to get Blair’s job. The Murdoch papers wanted to be close to the winner, moved to embrace him and, in June 2007, with their support, Brown became prime minister as Blair stepped down.
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By the time the Guardian published the first phone-hacking story two years later, in July 2009, the tricky relationship had collapsed into the kind of marriage in which the couple never touch each other but can just about manage a polite conversation at mealtimes. The question now was whether, having helped Gordon Brown into power, News International would be content to let him stay there.
Brown was still in contact with Rupert Murdoch. The day after his brief and clumsy appearance at Rebekah Brooks’s lakeside wedding ceremony, in that summer of 2009, Brown had included Murdoch among his guests at a small dinner party in Downing Street in honour of the visiting US president, George W. Bush. The evening had gone well, with Brown far more at ease with older men in suits than with the young Cameron crowd in Oxfordshire, reaching a point of informality where, according to Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge, during a private meeting between Bush and Brown, the US president beckoned to one of Brown’s advisers, asked if he could take a message to Bush’s own staff outside the room and whispered: ‘Can you tell them to kiss my ass?’
Through his previous two years as prime minister, Brown had continued to try to cuddle up to News International. He made a powerful speech, which could have been written by Trevor Kavanagh, warning of the threat from migrants, calling for ‘British jobs for British workers’. He backed the Sun’s controversial call for forty-two days of detention without trial f
or terrorist suspects, an idea which was so unpopular that it was thrown out before it could become law.
In private, he had been equally generous. When Rebekah Brooks became involved with her husband-to-be, Charlie Brooks, who was training racehorses, she personally told the prime minister that the government should abolish the horse-race levy, which raises tax income at the expense of the racing industry. Two Downing Street advisers say that Brown asked them to look into it and to speak to Charlie Brooks ‘to make him feel involved’. At one point, he hired a new policy adviser, Kath Raymond, who happened to be the partner of the then chief executive of News International, Les Hinton. She was an experienced special adviser, but other Downing Street staff were not amused. ‘She was not a policy person at all,’ said one. ‘She was like Posh Spice, who was in the band even if she couldn’t sing.’
Following months of pressure from the Information Commissioner to deal with private investigators blagging confidential data, early in 2008 Brown’s government agreed to toughen the law to make it an imprisonable offence. Brown was then visited by a delegation of Les Hinton from News International, Paul Dacre from the Daily Mail, and Murdoch MacLennan from the Telegraph Media Group, who persuaded the prime minister to shelve the plan (an interesting move from three newspaper groups who consistently denied that their journalists had ever broken the law).
The prime minister received some reward. At his party conference in the autumn of 2008, his leadership was challenged by the young Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The Sun backed Brown. At a News International lunch, several Sun journalists confronted Miliband, ridiculing his support for a new European constitution. According to one who was there, this ended with Miliband asking Trevor Kavanagh if he had even read the draft treaty which he was attacking, and Kavanagh telling Miliband that he was stupid and rude. News of this reassuring clash was fed back fast to Brown’s camp. When he made his keynote speech, Brown swatted Miliband aside by declaring that this was ‘no time for a novice’, a line that had been dreamed up for him a day or so earlier by Rebekah Brooks when dining with Brown’s close ally, Ed Balls.
At the same time, however, Brown’s first two years in Downing Street had seen News International become more and more demanding – in print and behind the scenes – calling for more hostility to migrants and to the European Union, more ferocity towards terrorists and other offenders, more resources for British troops in Afghanistan.
When the abuse and murder of the seventeen-month-old boy known as Baby P exposed the London borough of Haringey to keen criticism in 2007, the Sun had campaigned publicly for its head of children’s services, Sharon Shoesmith, to be sacked. That was an uncontroversial act for a campaigning newspaper but, behind the scenes, Rebekah Brooks was phoning the Secretary of State for children, Ed Balls, and pushing hard for him to agree, if only to stop the Sun switching its fire on to him. ‘She was pretty blunt with him,’ according to an official who heard some of the phone calls. ‘She was telling Balls he had to sack her [Shoesmith], and it was quite threatening – “We don’t want to turn this thing on you.”’ On 1 December 2008, Balls used special powers to remove Shoesmith from her post, a decision which was later found in the court of appeal to have been ‘intrinsically unfair and unlawful’.
When Brown planned a reshuffle of his government in October 2008, Rebekah intervened, privately lobbying for the prime minister to keep her friend Tessa Jowell in post even though she was clearly branded as an ally of Tony Blair, and to block her loathed enemy, Tom Watson, who was a keen supporter of Brown’s. For whatever reason, Brown kept Jowell as a minister attending Cabinet meetings – but also kept Watson as a more junior member of government. Similarly, when Ian Blair stepped down as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in January 2009, she is said by one source to have lobbied hard for him to be replaced by his deputy, Paul Stephenson, who duly got the job.
Beyond these high-handed interventions, the difficulty with the Murdoch organisation was that they were clearly moving very close to David Cameron. Murdoch’s former editor, Andy Coulson, was installed in the Conservative leader’s private office; Murdoch’s UK chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, was Cameron’s confidante; Rupert Murdoch dined with him; James Murdoch dined with him and met his closest political ally, the shadow chancellor, George Osborne, for late-night drinks.
By the time the long fuse of the phone-hacking scandal started to burn in July 2009, News Corp and Cameron’s team were engaged in an energetic exercise in political semaphore, each side sending out signals – some in private, some very public – indicating what each might want from the other if they were to form a relationship. These signals were particularly loud and clear on the subject which was most important to Rupert and James Murdoch: the ambition for their business to become even bigger.
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James Murdoch never liked the BBC.
In part, this was simply the wrestler’s view of his rival. He had first worked in the UK, from 2003, as chief executive of BSkyB, where he had been forced to face the uncomfortable fact that the BBC was the only broadcaster in the country which was big enough to offer him any serious competition. Or, as he put it to shareholders in his own signature style in November 2005, after two years of disappointing results at BSkyB: ‘We have been abused and opposed by everybody – the BBC and the papers. They are still against us.’
But it was also a matter of ideology. The idea of a publicly funded broadcaster simply repelled him. In an interview with the Guardian in 2000, James considered the subject of the licence fee which was then delivering four TV channels, fifty-seven radio stations and the busiest news website in Britain at a cost to each household of £139.50 per year, and released a burst of neoliberal invective, declaring that it was ‘a subsidised, horrific – how shall I put it – evil taxation scheme’.
A senior BBC executive who often dealt with him recalls: ‘He just could not accept that an intelligent adult could possibly believe that the BBC is anything other than an outrage. Listening to him talk about the BBC is like listening to Richard Dawkins talk about God – “Come on, snap out of it, you can’t believe this stuff.”’
Reflecting this commercial and ideological opposition, the Murdoch network engaged in a sustained campaign of attacks on the BBC, using various means which were perfectly fair and also on occasion apparently foul. The fair end involved conventional lobbying, using public speeches, formal meetings with ministers and social access to the power elite to argue persistently for the BBC to be cut back and for BSkyB to be spared from regulation. When the House of Commons media select committee in 2005 and again in 2008 needed a specialist adviser, on both occasions the job was filled by former heads of public affairs at BSkyB, Ray Gallagher and Martin Le Jeune. When the committee’s chairman, John Whittingdale, needed funds for his local cricket club, BSkyB made a donation of £3,000.
All of that was within the bounds of standard lobbying practice, but there are signs of some fouler tactics. In 2004, when the BBC was teetering on the edge of a strike by staff, a political officer from the broadcasting union BECTU reported being approached by a lobbying agency with links to News Corp who had asked if they might be able to help in some way. This looked very much like an attempt at industrial sabotage. The union declined the offer.
At the heart of this campaign was News International’s coverage of the BBC. Towards the end of March 2009, for example, a right-wing think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, published a highly negative report which claimed that the BBC lacked originality in its programme-making. Fleet Street generally did not bother to report it, but the Sun ran an aggressive news story: ‘The BBC is branded a parasite today for blowing the licence fee on copycat shows.’ They failed to point out that the report had been written by Martin Le Jeune, the recently retired head of public affairs at BSkyB.
The Sunday Times launched into the BBC, with a sequence of hostile stories about spending on taxis. That paper and the Sun also ran a relentless campaign about the salaries of BBC execu
tives which rose as high as £800,000 for the director general, failing to mention that James Murdoch himself was being paid $9.2 million for a year’s work. A search of a database of Fleet Street stories suggests that during this assault on the BBC in 2009, the News International titles ran a total of 515 stories about the licence fee.
In August 2009, James Murdoch delivered the MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh TV festival. Although his own newspapers were engaged in what appeared to be a campaign of politically motivated assaults on the BBC, he insisted that news media must show ‘independence of faction, industrial or political’. He went on to damn the BBC, accusing it of leading a ‘landgrab’ and of having ambitions which were ‘chilling’ in their scale. Its expansion must be stopped: ‘In the interests of a free society, it should be sternly resisted.’ More than that, he said, the BBC should have its public funding killed off or cut severely: the licence fee should survive ‘if at all … on a far, far smaller scale’. He ended with a trumpet blast of belief in his own values: ‘The only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.’
James Murdoch also never liked Ofcom. Like his father, he never liked any form of regulation which offered any kind of obstacle to the expansion of their business. He particularly disliked Ofcom, the Office of Communications, which had been involved in giving him the political equivalent of a public spanking. Twice. First, in November 2006, when he was chief executive of BSkyB, it was Ofcom which got in his way when he bought 17.9% of the ITV commercial television network. He did it to stop the rival NTL merging with ITV, creating a beast big enough to compete with BSkyB. And it worked: his raid initially pushed the ITV share price so high that NTL could no longer afford the deal. But then Ofcom investigated and reported that the share grab had given BSkyB too much influence over broadcast news bulletins in the UK. That triggered an inquiry by the Competition Commission, who told BSkyB that they must sell most of their ITV shares. BSkyB became embroiled in years of legal appeals, and the value of their ITV holding fell through the floor.