Rupert Murdoch is the kept woman of British politics. He inspires love, fear, paranoia and obsessive secrecy. Tony Blair suppressed the fact that he was godfather to Murdoch’s daughter, Grace. Gordon Brown wooed Murdoch but later declared war on him. Cameron smuggled him into Downing Street through the back door. Now, as his vast empire teeters, a breathless bulletin arrives from the desks of an Independent journalist, Martin Hickman, and a campaigning MP, Tom Watson. Their book covers the countless strands of the hacking story with admirable gusto and thoroughness.
The tone is combative but fair-minded throughout, though when Watson himself pops up it becomes melodramatic and silly. His attacks on the Murdoch press had earned him the ‘pathological dislike’ of News International’s chief executive, Rebekah Brooks. ‘Call this man off,’ she once begged Tony Blair. ‘He’s mad.’ At times Watson says he feared he might be assassinated.
Brooks emerges as a character of rare ambition and charisma. She arrived at News International, aged 21, as a secretary. And after just 11 years of ‘scheming and networking,’ she’d become an editor. The red-haired stunnah clearly thrived in the male-dominated tabloid world. Her social manner was ‘very tactile,’ a colleague recalls. ‘You would think she wanted to sleep with you, but she was way too up scale for that.’
She authorised a cruel attack on Watson after he took part in the ‘curry-house putsch’ of 2006, which forced Blair from office. A Sun columnist described the MP as
a tub of lard, who is known throughout Westminster as ‘Two Dinners Tommy’, and is suspected of being in this up to his bloated and bulging neck.
Seven million readers, we’re told, lapped up that fruity insult. Watson’s eagerness to repeat the slur, and to emphasise the scale of the readership, suggest that he’s developing a slightly pervy crush on his notoriety.
The book’s centrepiece is the appearance, last July, of Rupert and James Murdoch before the Commons Culture Committee. This chapter, grandly entitled ‘Democracy Day’, begins with Watson preparing to feed his foes to the lions:
At midday Watson shut the door of his office in Portcullis House, put on the Doors album, LA Woman, at full blast and paced around rehearsing questions.
James Murdoch, ‘impetuous, aggressive and arrogant’, began the session by apologising to the hacking victims, but he was halted by his 80-year-old father. ‘Before you get to that, I would just like to say one sentence. This is the most humble day of my life.’ (The US satirist, Jon Stewart joked, ‘not so humble that you couldn’t wait for your turn to talk!’)
Watson had hoped to savage his opponents in public, but that honour went to Jonathan May-Bowles, an exhibitionist comedian, who splatted Rupert in the face with a cream pie before being clobbered by Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng. Yet we hear less about the pie-attack than about the ‘glass of water’ incident that followed:
Watson strolled over to father and son .… Watson poured the mogul a glass of water and told him, ‘Your wife’s got a mean left hook.’ He asked James if he would like some water too. ‘No, Mr Watson,’ James replied. Watson poured him a glass anyway.
All the details about this glass of water are repeated later. It’s bizarre. Watson behaves like some star-struck stalker melting in the presence of his heroes. After hours of questioning, he admits, ‘the committee had failed to land any killer blows’. Still, he decided to celebrate with his pal, the union boss, Len McClusky. They took a private car to Claridge’s and toasted each other with pink champagne.
Aside from Watson’s Watson obsession, the book offers a masterful summary of the scandal so far. The attention to detail is exemplary. Here’s a snippet revealing that the News of the World’s final crossword was sabotaged by cheesed-off staff:
Among the clues were brook, stink, pest, less bright, woman stares wildly at calamity, string of recordings and mix in prison. Answers included disaster, stench, racket and tart. The answers to 1 across, 4 down, 10 across, and 7 down were Tomorrow, We, Are, Sacked.
This level of precision makes the book a great work of reference rather than a racy summer read. And the authors try too hard to build Murdoch up into an Orwellian arch-manipulator. To claim that his company is a ‘shadow state’ within the UK is to ignore a simple axiom of politics: newspapers don’t drive public opinion, they reflect it. If a paper could put governments in and out of office their authority would be expressed formally within our constitution.
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