by Bruce Page
The financial connection between Murdoch’s great Battle of Wapping and the birth of the Fox network in America has been acutely pointed out by Neil Chenoweth – and was quoted at the end of the previous chapter. But he may have gone a little far in suggesting that it was the British social system which unravelled in consequence. Rather, it was a part of the system called the Conservative Party, which at the time of writing has yet to recover.
Murdoch’s father Keith worked in direct personal contact with Billy Hughes, Joe Lyons and Robert Menzies. Similarly Rupert’s 1960s apprenticeship with Black jack McEwen was direct and personal. In the 1970s and 1980s a business operating multi-nationally needed more complex linkages, and Murdoch successfully developed the ability to work through others, like John Menadue and Larry Lamb. Of course Menadue – the man through whom the eventually destructive link between Rupert Murdoch and Gough Whitlam (see Chapter 6 above) was established was never Murdoch’s instrument alone, and Lamb considered himself, if not very credibly, an independent editorial power.
Woodrow Wyatt, who succeeded Larry Lamb as Murdoch’s chief link with Margaret Thatcher, was much more completely the courtier (which means lobbyist in present-day terms) and, as the editor of his journals suggests, a personal acolyte. The 1980s in Britain were a decade of hectically coloured political events, and are treasured by a good many people as the country’s second- or third-finest hour. Serious-minded comparisons have been drawn in which Margaret Thatcher is Elizabeth Tudor – Gloriana and Rupert Murdoch the splendid pirate Sir Francis Drake. Wyatt indeed saw it like that.
Politics as historical melodrama turned out to be an expensive occupation for the country as a whole. Britain began the period with a functioning Conservative Party – one capable either of governing the country or of providing an effective Opposition – and emerged some years later with an inharmonious fringe movement in its place. The operations of the modern-day Sir Francis turn out to be closely connected with this transformation – a story which concludes with the chronicler Wyatt in a disillusioned condition, though that denouement isn’t reached in this chapter. Wyatt, unlike Murdoch, was a true believer in the Thatcher cause.
It seems to have been Harry Evans who introduced them, at a dinner party given in 1969 when his most adventurous years with the Sunday Times were still to come. Evans then felt a mixture of sympathy and curiosity towards Murdoch, who was enduring resentfully the worst of the Profumo backlash (see Chapter 4 above). Much of the evening was taken up with Wyatt’s passionate defence of the Vietnam War.
Wyatt was a man of causes, to which he brought pertinacity and polemical skill but, as time passed, an increasingly erratic judgment something demonstrated, if not otherwise, by his estimate of Murdoch as a man of similar outlook to his own. Operating under that illusion, he was able to do much essential good for Murdoch which the hero would have found hard to secure by himself. Lord Wyatt – as his heroine eventually named him – was like a soldier who, having secured one spectacular and righteous victory, spends subsequent years in search of others, without paying much attention to the features of the battlefield or the nature of his opponents. He distinguished himself initially as an opponent of communist dishonesties which others on the British left preferred to ignore.
Woodrow Wyatt was born in 1918, a descendant of Thomas Wyatt, the chief architect of Worcester College, Oxford, from which he graduated in law just before the Second World War – and, though a generation intervened, he felt connected to Murdoch through their college. When he became a Labour Member of Parliament in 1945, he seemed one of the likeliest of the upper-middle-class war veterans recruited to socialism by the Great Depression and their experiences in the anti-fascist war. But he sharply reduced his standing with Labour by heretically opposing the nationalisation of the steel industry in 1951. At that time the party believed in state socialism as a cure for the British industrial system’s ills just as passionately as the Thatcherites later believed in privatisation.
As this is written – as the British public contemplates the tangled record of privatisations and counter-nationalisations – it is hard to recall why either side felt so sure it was discussing the real point. But the passage of time detracts only slightly from Wyatt’s stand in his other early cause. He was centrally involved in exposing the Communist Party’s illegal control of what was then the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), one of the country’s biggest organisations of skilled workers. This drawn-out battle began when Wyatt was a Labour MP and continued when he became a BBC television presenter after the loss of his seat in 1951.
The communist minority in the ETU gained and held control by their proficiency in ballot-rigging. They were dislodged by lawsuits which right-wing members of the union fought, and by journalistic disclosures – many of them Wyatt’s, via the BBC’s Panorama programme, the New Statesman magazine and the Daily Mirror. The victors then imposed a regime not much less draconian than that of the communists, which was deeply resented by left-wing unions who were not communist themselves but had been reliant on policy support from that direction. Many chose not to notice that the ETU right, if rebarbative at times, was not illegitimate.
The effect of this on the ETU was to create a relationship of contempt with the rest of the union movement – this would make them eventually into the footsoldiers of Murdoch’s 1986 war against the print unions. The effect on Wyatt was to shift his political standpoint towards the Manichaean right, from which he increasingly saw any liberal or social-democratic view as incipient communism, fit only for denunciation. This by stages enlisted him in support of causes such as the elimination of a crypto-communist ‘Mafia’ alleged to control the BBC; the racially neutral character of apartheid; the unharmful character of tobacco (especially with reference to cancer); and the prospect of swift victory in Vietnam if Western backsliders could just be silenced. He became a recognised eccentric – though one with a wide political connection, because many people thought him entertaining, and some saw that he had the courage of his eccentricities.
None of this made him a Tory – after Labour proscribed him he never joined another party. But it made him a devotee of Margaret Thatcher, when he became convinced in the 1970s that she would blow away ‘the soggy consensus which had lain like dank fog over Britain and her politicians since 1951’. He was not quite right, for ‘consensus’ means uniformity of opinion, and Mrs Thatcher turned out to have a sturdy affection for it. But he was right that the kind of consensus she wanted to impose was a new one, and not soggy. He became one of her admirers before the 1979 election (see Chapter 7 above), and then one of the circle of informal advisers she consulted regularly once she was Prime Minister – and whom she usually cited to her Cabinet colleagues as ‘my people’.
To Geoffrey Howe, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Foreign Secretary, it sometimes seemed as though Mrs Thatcher ‘was Joan of Arc invoking the authority of her “voices”. The Prime Minister was understandably reluctant to reveal the balance of her telephonic kitchen cabinet. Quite often, I suspect, the voice was that of Woodrow Wyatt – which she may have thought sufficient reason for cloaking it in anonymity.’ Wyatt’s own very persuasive account – discussed in Chapter 8 – was that he played the crucial part in her determination to protect News International’s purchase of Times Newspapers from the Monopolies Commission in 1981.
In 1983, after a long period writing for the Daily Mirror, he agreed with Murdoch a contract to write each week two columns in The Times and one in the News of the World – where he was billed each Sunday as The Voice of Reason. Charles Douglas-Home, editor of The Times, and David Montgomery, editor of the News of the World, were involved with these arrangements in trivial detail alone. Remuneration was discussed with Murdoch or with News International managers, and editorially Wyatt was quite independent of such modest independence as the two editors themselves possessed.
In October 1985 Wyatt began keeping his very detailed diaries, recording regular weekend phone conversations with th
e Prime Minister, and intermittent meetings. They also show that whenever Murdoch was in London he and Wyatt made personal contact, and often discussed Prime Ministerial opinions and intentions. In the years since, Murdoch has suggested when convenient that his connection with the Prime Minister was (like his acquaintance with Sir John Kerr) fragmentary and episodic. But this is tergiversation – the diaries reveal a sturdy, continuous link, which it was Wyatt’s task to maintain and enhance as far as the crowded schedules of his two principals allowed.
If there is similarity between the roles of Wyatt and Menadue, there is a major difference as well. Where traffic in the Whitlam case had been largely one-sided, respects and confidences travelled in both directions between Thatcher and Murdoch. Whereas Whitlam didn’t care to ‘share his thoughts with Rupert Murdoch’, Mrs Thatcher was ready to do so in person, where circumstance allowed, and otherwise through Wyatt.
29 December 1985 … I asked her whether she would like to come to dinner again. She said ‘Very much.’ ‘Who would you like to have with you?’ ‘Oh, just one or two people … What about Rupert Murdoch? I like talking to him …
Wyatt would have strongly resented being called a ‘lobbyist’ – for he had once done serious service as a journalist – but that was exactly what he became. During the whole of Mrs Thatcher’s reign he had access of a kind which those who openly acknowledge their activities can only dream about (and, though Murdoch was his chief client, there were several others).
As Howe’s description shows, the Prime Minister was discreet about the relationship, and Wyatt himself made his arrangements clandestine as far as possible; though he liked to talk himself up in other matters, he took care not to boast about his calls to Downing Street. Neither Thatcher nor Murdoch knew about the diaries until after Wyatt’s death, and, although members of the Cabinet were aware that the ‘voices’ exercised influence and that Wyatt was a prominent one – they knew very little about the details. Wyatt’s picture of Margaret Thatcher is affectionate throughout. He cannot endow her with Elizabeth Tudor’s polymathic intellect, but she seems warm, and sometimes amusing – it is not a toady’s relationship. And Murdoch, most of the way, indeed shows in a heroic light. But even in the first volume of the diaries, largely triumphal, there are moments where the frailty of Murdoch’s attachment to the true faith – a major theme of the third volume – makes itself uncomfortably visible to Wyatt.
For example, like the Prime Minister and other of her advisers, he believed there was a vast, Augean task to be undertaken in cleansing the BBC of decadent leftism, before relaunching it as a grand vessel of private enterprise. When the BBC chairmanship came up in 1986 he therefore hoped for a modern Hercules to be appointed. At the time the job was in the Prime Ministerial gift with no trace of public accountability, and she gave it to Duke Hussey, then performing minor tasks for Murdoch at Times Newspapers.
Wednesday I October … a message to speak to Downing Street urgently. The Prime Minister wanted me to know before the official announcement … that Duke Hussey was to be the new Chairman … I was shattered …
Wyatt’s immediate, horrified thought was that Murdoch must be responsible, must have cynically unloaded on Downing Street the man who had reduced the Sunday Times and The Times to the sad condition of takeover fodder (see Chapter 8 above) and had been kept on, as Wyatt thought, for the sake of charity – now opportunistically terminated. But reassurance came almost immediately:
Rupert rings in a great state: ‘Has she gone mad? What a disastrous appointment. He (Hussey) was quite useless here and the only thing he was fit for was to run things like the Hampton Court entertainment … They will make rings round him. The BBC Mafia must be absolutely delighted …’
Murdoch’s conspiratorial suggestion was that Hussey’s royal connections (his wife was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen) must be grooming him for a peerage. But a few days later the subject came up when Wyatt was helping the Prime Minister with her speech for the Tory Party conference.
When I told her that the Duke Hussey appointment was a bad one, disastrous like the two previous ones, she said, ‘I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t had a strong recommendation from Rupert.’ I was amazed and said, ‘But he rang me up asking whether you’d gone mad …
‘Good Lord,’ she said. ‘Well, he told me he was a very strong man, what had happened at The Times was not his fault … Otherwise I wouldn’t have made the appointment.’
Wyatt, nothing if not persistent, caught up with his boss four days later, as Murdoch was taking flight for California.
I tackle him about his having recommended Duke Hussey. Strange. He denies it, says he didn’t mention his name … I said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t say anything about Duke Hussey?’ He seemed evasive and giggled a bit. I said, ‘Why did she get the strong impression that you did?’ He says he doesn’t know. I think she is telling the truth and not Rupert …
It seems unlikely that Thatcher or Wyatt were mistaken about what was said – and the exchange disposes of suggestions that the Murdoch–Thatcher bond was in any way trivial. The giggle, perhaps, is a rare manifestation of Murdoch’s inner amazement at the suggestibility of politicians.
By the middle of the 1980s, as Murdoch’s business operations moved towards the great Wapping turning point, Mrs Thatcher and her small but ascendant section within the government had gained a degree of influence over British news media which Lord Shawcross and his Royal Commission colleagues – working in the 1960s – might well have thought dangerous. This influence they owed for the most part to the Murdoch alliance, which Wyatt administered. That it didn’t become still greater even absolute – was due not to any lack of ambition, only to complications the allies failed to foresee. But it is important to notice that their motivations were not quite uniform, and the case of the BBC illustrates this. Alfred (later Sir Alfred) Sherman, a Thatcher Voice in good standing, wrote of the BBC in 1984:
There has never been a justification for its existence. It was formed during an authoritarian mood following the First World War. Justifications adduced for state broadcasting and state control of broadcasting (and until a few years ago for state monopoly of broadcasting) are identical with those used in communist and other dictatorships for state monopoly of the press.
To equate the BBC with Soviet broadcasting systems because of nominal resemblance in formal structure is like calling the USSR a democracy because of the elaborate constitution it used to parade (as Sir Alfred perhaps did in his communist period).
Murdoch could happily go along with the rhetoric – elements of it occur in his recurrent assaults on public-service broadcasting – but we may be sure he never shared Sherman’s cock-eyed sincerity. Dictatorship and state monopoly do not repel him, provided Newscorp can cut a deal with the system. Outfits like the BBC, however, under any political or economic system, are competitors which it is important to undermine because of their inexplicable creativity, if nothing else. The majority of witnesses agree that Hussey, as encore to his performance at Times Newspapers, did extensive (luckily non-fatal) damage to the BBC.
During the reign of Harry Evans, The Times’ tradition of critical sympathy with the government of the day had suffered interruption – more as a matter of troublesome news coverage than actual editorial opinion. That, of course, ended with his departure, but not by way of return to the older attitude. Subservience was the new thing.
Richard Davy, who was in charge of foreign affairs editorials when Charles Douglas-Home took over from Evans, recalls that the newspaper’s staff knew quite clearly where instruction came from:
Murdoch had let it be known that Charlie was a temporary editor, which did not suit Charlie at all, so he was eager to please.
We were soon given to understand that no criticism of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan was allowed. Other changes followed. Strange interpolations crept into leaders on their way to the printer, often reversing the sense.
On serious newspapers, journalists never surrepti
tiously switch agreed meanings of copy during the production process – if only because that way madness lies. And the atmosphere Davy describes indeed seems febrile and neurotic:
From having been personally critical of Zionism Charlie now supported ‘my friends the Israelis’, as Murdoch called them. Foreign aid became bad. Towards Moscow, balanced analysis was replaced by denunciations of the ‘evil empire’ that echoed Washington’s line at the time.
Charlie was so insecure that even when he was away he would phone in to have the leading articles read to him. Neither of the two previous editors had done that, so we felt demeaned. Once he called me from a phone box on the Scottish moors. Suddenly I heard a yelp and a clatter as the receiver fell, followed by the sound of birdsong. After a few moments he returned, breathless, to explain that he had left the handbrake off and his car was about to roll into a loch.
Douglas-Home’s behaviour suggests that the proprietor’s flip-and-zap technique was being applied to him effectively. (‘I give instructions to my editors all round the world,’ said Murdoch. ‘Why shouldn’t I in London?’) Where there had once been analysis there was now ‘a personal opinion passed down from on high’, says Davy, who thought Murdoch ‘was not really interested in issues, only in positioning his papers to win allies in high places’. Nominally the statutory provisions for the independence of The Times remained in place. But they could hardly be cited by Douglas-Home, had he wished to do so, because he owed his job to having helped subvert them. What he did do was behave humanely towards those like Davy, who preferred to leave rather than learn the new obedience.
It is hard to believe that Douglas-Home’s short period in command brought happiness: for much of the time he was courageously bearing a painful disease, and when it killed him in October 1985 Murdoch appointed Charlie Wilson, who had spent most of his career in popular newspapers, and maintained the simple allegiance with apparent enthusiasm.