by Nick Davies
Just as Ofcom were landing that blow, in March 2007 they struck a second time when they announced an investigation into pay TV in the UK. This was a market worth £4 billion a year, dominated by BSkyB. The Murdoch company owned the rights to key sporting events and to a huge archive of films, all of which they sold to subscribers through their own satellite platform – and also to rival pay-TV outlets. These smaller rivals complained that BSkyB exercised a ‘vicious circle of control’, charging them extortionate rates to carry their output. Ofcom were clearly willing to consider ordering BSkyB to cut their prices so that consumers had more choice about which pay-TV channels to subscribe to.
James fought back hard. Ofcom faced what one of those involved called ‘a barrage of disputation and aggression’ as BSkyB used its financial strength to hire specialist litigators, corporate lawyers, consultants and expert witnesses, all of whom submitted a torrent of reports, attempting to find fault in the regulator’s behaviour. In the background, the Murdochs used political lobbyists and their own direct access to ministers to complain bitterly about Ofcom’s role. As with their campaign against the BBC, there were some indications that they may have been tempted to use fouler means. Ofcom’s chief executive, Ed Richards, told colleagues he suspected he was the object of some surveillance. Neighbours at his home in Wales said somebody had been asking questions about him, and there were signs that someone might have been looking through his dustbins.
As with the BBC, so too with Ofcom, the assault came to a climax in James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture on 28 August 2009. He called for ‘a radical reorientation of the regulatory approach’ to UK media and denounced his tormentor as ‘a regulator armed with a set of prejudices and a spreadsheet’.
So it was that in the summer of 2009, with a general election due within the following twelve months, there was a special interest in a simple question: would News International be content to let Gordon Brown stay in Downing Street?
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Gordon Brown’s camp watched these manoeuvres sullenly from the sidelines, conspicuously failing to comply with the Murdochs’ demands that the BBC and Ofcom be cut back. Some of those who were close to Brown claim that this was because they regarded the demands as illegitimate and wanted no part of them. Others say that by this time in his premiership, Brown had sunk into a mire of anxiety and dithering and that they failed to react simply because they failed to decide to do so.
It appears that Downing Street also failed to understand that Brown’s personal link to Rupert Murdoch was counting for less and less as James Murdoch continued his grab for power inside News Corp. According to several sources, father and son were now frequently snarling at each other. In February 2009, James won an important battle when Murdoch’s chief operating officer, Peter Chernin, announced that he was leaving. Michael Wolff’s book, The Man Who Owns the News, describes how in 2005 Chernin and Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, had ‘ganged up’ on James’s older brother, Lachlan, forcing him to retreat back to Australia. James was not going to be pushed through the same door.
With Chernin clearing his desk, James moved aggressively against News Corp’s head of marketing and corporate affairs in New York, Gary Ginsberg, an influential figure in the senior ranks of the company and an ally of his father. According to one senior executive: ‘James went after Ginsberg in the most vicious way, denouncing his ideas as the most stupid he had ever heard, saying things like “I’ll crush you if you make that happen.”’
Although much of this was hidden from the outside world, nevertheless the gap in Gordon Brown’s defences was easy to see, and David Cameron moved in quickly. At key moments during 2009, Cameron and his spokesmen simply picked up the signals from James Murdoch’s camp and played them back, while the Murdoch team replied with their own signals of encouragement and desire, rather like two birds calling out to each other in the woods, moving closer and closer in harmony.
In March 2009, Cameron picked up the very loud call about the BBC licence fee, declaring in a speech that it should be frozen, adding a particularly seductive note that it would be difficult to keep the licence fee at all if the BBC did not make changes. The message was well received and understood by the Murdoch camp, who flashed back a response, through the Sun, with a news story which said nothing about the impact which a frozen licence fee might have on the BBC’s ability to produce quality programmes but reported that ‘Mr Cameron wants to curb the BBC’s bloated bureaucracy and waste of cash. He plans to choke off the taxpayer funding that gives it an advantage over rivals such as Sky.’ The Sun then listed the amounts which, they claimed, the corporation had spent on taxis and high salaries.
The two sides exchanged a chorus of other calls about the BBC. The Murdochs complained that the BBC now had more than half of all radio listeners and that more of the bandwidth should be given to commercial radio companies, many of whom bought their news bulletins from BSkyB. Cameron’s junior media spokesman, Ed Vaizey, saw it the same way: ‘There is a good argument for the BBC to be rid of Radio 1 and give the commercial sector a chance to use the frequency.’
The Murdochs accused the BBC of trespassing into new markets which had previously belonged to commercial providers, specifically ‘providing magazines and websites on a commercial basis’. David Cameron similarly complained about ‘the big boot of the BBC coming thumping into a new market and suddenly the Internet service, the education provider, the small publishing businesses are completely squashed’. The Murdochs also attacked the BBC Trust, which ultimately owns and oversees the BBC, for its ‘recklessness … total failure … abysmal record’. Their primary complaint was that the trust had failed to stop the BBC’s expansion into new commercial markets. Seven weeks later, Cameron’s senior media spokesman, Jeremy Hunt, announced that a Conservative government would abolish the BBC Trust because it had allowed the BBC ‘to crush media competition’.
And then there was Ofcom. On 26 June 2009, two years after it started its inquiry into pay TV, Ofcom announced that BSkyB should be forced to cut as much as 30% off the price of the material it sold to rival platforms. BSkyB said it would appeal. One well-placed source says that James Murdoch was furious at this judgement and was declaring with considerable anger that Ofcom must be abolished. Ten days later, on 6 July 2009, David Cameron announced that, if elected, he would abolish Ofcom.
On 9 July – the day after the Guardian ran its first phone-hacking story – The Times ran a story accusing Ofcom executives of having high salaries and expense accounts. On 15 July, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks met another Cameron ally, Oliver Letwin, who was in charge of drawing up the Conservative manifesto for the coming general election, specifically to discuss the future of Ofcom. On 23 July, the Sun ran a column by Kelvin MacKenzie which accused the Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, of ‘brown-nosing’ and described the Ofcom chair, Colette Bowe, as ‘an elderly has-been’.
The two camps exchanged another short burst of signals on one of BSkyB’s main sources of income. The Murdochs said there was too much regulation around advertising on television and that this was diverting valuable ad revenues into the bank account of the entirely unregulated Google. Jeremy Hunt saw it the same way: ‘Google’s advertising revenue in the UK surpassed that of ITV in the first half of this year … In such a climate, it is right to examine whether some of the regulations designed to ensure a level playing field are still appropriate.’
By late August, after James Murdoch’s MacTaggart lecture, the manoeuvring was nearly complete. Immediately after the lecture, Jeremy Hunt travelled to New York where, according to the House of Commons register of interests, he had meetings with ‘representatives of News Corp’.
In the background, according to two well-placed sources, Rupert Murdoch was growing increasingly tetchy about his son’s hectoring insistence that they must abandon Gordon Brown. But Rebekah Brooks, who continued to command the older man’s attention, acted as a peacemaker between the two and joined James in persuading Rupert that the
y must support Cameron. The sources claim that a key part of James’s argument was that a Cameron government would be less likely to cause problems with their secretly planned bid to buy all of BSkyB, the most important move on News Corp’s horizon. Reluctantly, the sources say, the father bowed to the son’s pressure, though, according to one, ‘he was very pissed off about it’.
On the evening of 10 September 2009, James Murdoch met David Cameron for a private drink at the exclusive George club, in Mayfair. There, the young mogul explained that he had held discussions with his father and Rebekah Brooks and with the new editor of the Sun, Dominic Mohan, and, as a result, he was able to tell Cameron that Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper had decided to announce that they would be supporting the Conservatives at the next general election.
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It was a night of doubletalk and drunkenness.
Nearly three weeks after James Murdoch and Cameron met at the George club, a teeming mass of Labour supporters gathered in the banqueting hall of the Grand Hotel in Brighton for the big fund-raising dinner which is always a central event in their annual party conference. Outside in the opulent white-panelled corridor, one of Gordon Brown’s most senior ministers, Peter Mandelson, was pacing up and down with his mobile phone to his ear.
On the other end of the line was Rebekah Brooks. She had news. The Sun was changing sides. The doubletalk flowed like wine. Brooks pretended that this was a decision that she and a few senior staff from the Sun had made that day. Mandelson knew very well that the Sun had been playing footsie with the Conservatives for months. Mandelson, for his part, pretended to be worried that she was making a terrible mistake which would alienate her readers and told her gently that she really was a chump (although Brooks later said she heard a more abusive word).
Back in the banqueting hall, Mandelson reported to Brown and advised him to pretend to be indifferent to the news, and so he did. Mandelson cancelled a dinner he was due to have with James Murdoch. Brown and his entourage boycotted the News International reception which was being held that evening and did their best to avoid reading the copies of the first edition of the next day’s Sun which were distributed all over the Grand Hotel with ‘Labour’s lost it’ blasted across its front page. So they pretended that life would go on unchanged and, thus content, some of them ended the night in the small hours of the morning gathered around a piano in the ground-floor bar singing Abba songs with their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders.
But the biggest piece of doubletalk was that this was simply about journalism. Brown’s advisers went along with the pretence, if only because it made it easier to bear the blow. When they met for their late-night debrief in one of the hotel bedrooms, they all agreed that they would deal with this by withdrawing all co-operation from the Sun – no stories, no briefings, no help at all for the paper’s journalists.
Rebekah Brooks, too, pretended that her conversation with Mandelson was simply journalistic, that this was nothing more than a newspaper executive courteously reporting a change in the line which would be taken in the leader column. In reality, however, this was a deeply political act.
It was political in its staging. It was now nearly three weeks since James Murdoch had told David Cameron that the Sun would back him, and yet the readers of the Sun had not been told. The announcement had been held back to this particular evening, 29 September 2009, when it was likely to cause maximum political damage to Gordon Brown.
Earlier that day, the prime minister had delivered his keynote address to the conference. For a leader whose popularity was sagging dangerously low, this was an important moment. Even a prime minister on his political deathbed is capable of producing a speech which will move the party faithful and which is calculated to strike some good notes with the electorate beyond the conference hall. Now, the news coverage of his speech was bound to be tainted or even swamped by the Sun’s announcement.
To make sure they dominated the TV bulletins as well as the newspapers, News International had set up an irresistible picture, flooding their headquarters in east London with blue light to match the official colour of the Conservative Party, and releasing blue smoke from the roof.
Above all, the move was political in its intent. By this time, Gordon Brown’s government had been weakened by two years of recurring crises and tumbling popularity, from a height of 42% support in the polls in October 2007 to only 25% now. It was clear to all observers and to the Labour leadership itself that they were unlikely to win the general election which was expected in about eight months, in the spring of 2010.
There was nothing unusual about a newspaper declaring its support for an opposition candidate during an election campaign, but to do so eight months in advance of an election was a declaration of war on a sitting prime minister. It may well be that Brown’s government was dying but the coming months saw the political assassin, discovering that a chosen target was seriously ill, nonetheless sneaking into the sickroom, climbing on to the bed and delivering a kicking of fatal ferocity. This was the act of a newspaper engaged in something which went well beyond the boundaries of mere journalism. Internal emails show that Brooks had sent the draft of the Sun leader column which announced the change of political line to James Murdoch for his approval. While the Sun now advertised its wedding to the Conservative cause, it said nothing public about any views that News Corp might share with the Conservative leadership on the future of the BBC or Ofcom. It set out not simply to support the Conservatives in its leader comments, nor even simply to choose to cover news stories which showed the Conservatives in a good light, but to engage in a sustained campaign of distortion in its news stories. Its readers were now ballot fodder. The Sun started to monster the prime minister.
The day after the conference, amidst the furore about the Sun’s announcement, other newspapers recognised that Gordon Brown had delivered an effective speech. They acknowledged his weakness, they questioned some of his claims, but they judged too that this was a well-crafted piece of work, delivered with power and passion. The new Sun which had spent the previous twelve years running news stories which showed Labour in a good light, suddenly turned on its heel and poured scorn on their recent ally.
They found no space to mention Brown’s scorching attack on the Conservatives and on the ‘bankrupt ideology’ of unrestrained free markets which the prime minister blamed for the global financial crisis of the previous year. Nor did they mention the prime minister’s plans to limit bankers’ bonuses; to create a national investment corporation; to employ 10,000 young people in skilled internships and 10,000 more in ‘green’ jobs in the low-carbon economy; to tackle the antisocial behaviour of 50,000 chaotic families; to give more money for international aid; to hold a referendum on voting reform; to create programmes to help teenaged mothers; to make further reforms of the House of Lords; to guarantee annual increases in the minimum wage. Some commentators thought these ideas were too modest. Few believed they would be enough to revive Brown’s fortunes. For readers of the Sun, they simply did not exist.
They did report some of his plans, but every positive was turned into a negative. Brown wanted change for a global age, but for the Sun, that was simply ‘a tacit admission that New Labour has failed’. Brown hit a rhetorical peak when he spoke about the ‘unsurpassed heroism’ and courage of British troops in Afghanistan, provoking a standing ovation in the conference hall, but in the Sun, this was just another problem: ‘Mr Brown spent only 35 seconds paying tribute to our servicemen and women.’
Brown said: ‘Every change we make, every single pledge we make comes with a price tag attached and a clear plan for how that cost will be met.’ In the Sun, this became: ‘He drew up a wish list of policy pledges – without admitting Britain was broke or explaining where the cash would come from to pay for them.’
He announced free childcare for a quarter of a million impoverished children but, according to the Sun, this ‘began to unravel immediately as middle-class parents reacted with fury’. He
said tests for cancer would be completed within a week, but this ‘appeared to be unfunded’. He promised tighter controls on immigration, but this was done in ‘only 83 words’. He said the new twenty-four-hour drinking law had been a success in some places and a failure in others, so local authorities would have the option of limiting licences in trouble spots. This became: ‘Mr Brown vowed to tear up Labour’s own 24-hour drinking laws – clear recognition that they have added to the antisocial behaviour that plagues our streets.’
This was only the beginning. For months, the Sun laid into Brown. The monstering was most intense in its coverage of the British military presence in Afghanistan. This had been building up during 2009 with aggressive stories attacking the Ministry of Defence – but not generally the prime minister – for choosing not to send an extra 2,000 troops to Helmand province until the US government had sorted out its own plans, and for providing inadequate equipment which allegedly exposed British soldiers to unnecessary risk. But as Brown fell from News Corp’s favour, the aim of these stories swung round and had started to target the prime minister himself. By mid-July 2009, the Sun’s defence correspondent was allowed to report: ‘Every new death in Helmand falls at No. 10’s door. It is a stain from which Mr Brown will seriously struggle to recover, whatever he does to help now.’ On 28 August, the Sun launched a vitriolic campaign under the banner ‘Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on?’, with pictures of all 221 British military personnel who had died in Afghanistan and powerful attacks from, among others, the mother of a corporal who had been killed. In the first few weeks of September, the Sun ran a letter from the stepfather of a young soldier who had died in Afghanistan, with the headline ‘Dear PM, you killed our boy’. They followed up with stories which called Brown ‘spineless’, urged him to sack himself and warned readers that ‘the PM will carry on spending YOUR cash to save his skin at the next election’.