CHAPTER 21

Wappingworld

Looking down the long boardroom table, I counted four lords, one baroness, and three knights, all murmuring among themselves. When I called the meeting to order, an instant silence resulted as they turned their gazes towards me.

I’m still embarrassed by how much pleasure this memory gives me. I had thought of my parents and imagined my mother’s pursed-lip pride as her son sat at the head of that important table, chairing the quarterly meeting of Times Newspapers Holdings Limited.

Twenty years before, these people would have intimidated me, but America — for all its imperfections, so irrepressible, so full of unruly ambition and self-belief — had inoculated me against the old class divides of Britain. Peers of the realm and people with hyphenated names no longer represented a superior species. The men and women at the table were interesting, and mostly clever, individuals, that was all. The few who affected old, high-born manners looked out of date. The best among them was Ralph, Lord Harris of High Cross, the economist who inspired Margaret Thatcher, and his father had been a London tramways inspector.

The Times board, whose duties included protecting the two editors from managerial interference, was a constant problem at News International. This was because so many people suspected it was toothless. Six independent directors had the power to agree the hiring and firing of an editor. The flaw in this part of the arrangement was that, no matter what the independent directors thought, no self-respecting editor would stay in a job where they felt unwanted by management, and no management could be expected to tolerate an editor it considered to be no good. But that didn’t mean these directors were impotent. Some rightly saw their presence as a nuclear deterrent, and understood the damage they could cause by publicly complaining that management was dictating policy to an editor.

But The Times board was far from top of my list of worries when I arrived in London. We needed to fix a faltering and unhappy company. Also, as Rupert had warned over dinner, I had to deal with the tides and currents of a high-profile job. Keeping a low profile was easier in America, but Britain was a smaller pond and I was a bigger fish. Uncomfortable references to me appeared in rival newspapers. Newspapers that didn’t like Rupert — that would be every one he didn’t own — described me in unappealing ways. I was his hitman, consigliore, henchman, capo, or, divinely, his ‘representative on earth’. Paradoxically, for all the antipathy towards us, every industry crisis seemed to arrive at our front door. Within weeks I had to decide the fate of the Press Association, the country’s premier news agency, which had existed since 1868. An alliance of newspaper groups, dismayed by the cost and quality of the PA, was supporting an effort to replace it with a new agency called UK News. I was besieged by rivals imploring us to join them. These rivals had a good argument against the agency; its coverage had deteriorated at the same time as it put up prices. The newly appointed editor-in-chief was desperate when he came to my office. ‘We’re on the brink,’ he said. ‘I know I can fix the place, but I need time.’ Paul Potts was an old friend and a talented editor. He had taken the PA job after quitting as deputy editor of the Daily Express. I decided against ditching the PA and Potts went on to rebuild Britain’s oldest news agency as editor-in-chief and chief executive, with many of its would-be destroyers becoming significant shareholders. Six years later, the official history of the Press Association — Living on a Deadline, by Chris Moncrieff — recorded the details of the company’s existential crisis. There was, it said, ‘a key figure in PA’s survival without whom the modern PA probably would not exist … it was Hinton who had saved the day’. It was nice of them to say so, but in truth I was too busy with other things to think clearly about the drastic action of killing off an institution.

There were activists outside the gates of Wapping, and employees within, who believed the company was ripe to re-unionise. At a Westminster cocktail party, a union official smiled narrowly at me. ‘We’re coming back, you know,’ he said. Our journalists were picking up the same message among trade union officials and Labour MPs.

Trade unions provided Labour’s lifeblood of cash, as well as millions of votes. They wanted to be free of the restraints Thatcher had imposed, and Labour had promised, if it won the election, to reinstate powers that could allow the unions to force their way back into Wapping.

But unions were no longer at the heart of News International’s problems. The threat from them was symptom not cause. We were desperate to keep out the unions, but our problems were home-grown.

—

Bill O’Neill had been Australian, in every way — a laconic, soft-spoken, country style of Australian, even though he grew up on Sydney’s North Shore. By the time we worked together in Wapping, O’Neill had been body-snatched by the spirit of Texas. He wore sharp-tipped snakeskin boots with Cuban heels, heavy turquoise and silver rings, string leather ties, and Western-style jackets decorated with curved and pointed piping. It was cowboy business attire. O’Neill remained laconic as he morphed into a Texan, but became more Gary Cooper than Paul Hogan. He even had a rolling, just-off-a-horse gait, but only since he broke a hip running for a train in icy Poughkeepsie, 2000 miles from his home in San Antonio.

Wapping was in trouble, and when Rupert made me boss, he sent Bill O’Neill ahead with his knuckle-duster rings to clean up the place. O’Neill was the sheriff of Wapping, gliding through its corridors, nodding to passers-by, leaning here and there on the wall to talk, fingers slipped into the horizontal pockets of his trousers. No one knew Wapping better than him, and no one was a better peacemaker. He was the chief negotiator who settled the Wapping dispute in 1987 and then became friends with his trade union counterpart, Brenda Dean. They dined together regularly to share war stories, like respectful old generals who had made peace. O’Neill was one of my heroes.

Wapping was a peaceful place in the years following the dispute. New technology had made the newspapers far more efficient, employees felt secure and fairly treated, and bosses were delivering good profits to News Corp’s New York headquarters. But a few years before I arrived, there was an economic downturn. Consumers stopped spending and companies stopped marketing; big declines in advertising revenue mean trouble for newspapers. When managers get lax in good times — and this happens a lot — they are forced to take painful action when business dries up. This is what happened at News International, and by 1995 there were so many layoffs that Friday became known as Black Bag Day — you needed the bag to empty the contents of your desk.

O’Neill was dismayed by what he found. The company was boiling with anger and resentment. In personal papers donated to Warwick University, he writes: ‘Morale was in the basement and distrust of senior management extreme.’ O’Neill was convinced the company would lose a union ballot in a landslide.

When Richard Stott became editor of Today, one of News Corp’s three dailies, he was shocked at what he found. Stott had been editor of the Daily Mirror, and in his memoir Dogs And Lampposts, he writes of his arrival in 1993: ‘For years we envied News International their management [but] I was amazed to find excesses … inefficiency, overstaffing, and indiscipline long since eradicated at the Mirror.’ Evening print runs, he said, were ‘rarely managed without some form of disaster’. It was so bad that Stott suspected print workers were sabotaging the presses.

O’Neill’s advice to me was clear. ‘You must act quickly. You’ve got to be seen and heard,’ he said. ‘They’ve got to believe things have changed.’

We decided on a company road show to all our big offices, travelling from London to Merseyside, Manchester, Glasgow, Peterborough, and Dublin. Every employee was invited to hear from the new team. A fancy, portable set was built to serve as a backdrop for each appearance. A giant screen came with us to display optimistic video and slides, with numbers laying out the company’s strengths and difficulties.

The first session was mid-afternoon in the vast newsprint warehouse in London. Hundreds of seats were placed among newsprint reels stacked to the ceiling. The detail of our presentation doesn’t matter much now; the important point was to make people feel involved. We told them as much as we sensibly could about our financial performance, growing costs, opportunities, and threats, remembering whatever we said would surely leak. This kind of open session seemed years later to be a natural thing to do, but in the 1990s many companies didn’t care so much about keeping the mass of their workforce informed.

But it was only one small step. The plant was a factory building with rudimentary office space that had been added as an afterthought. The building had ‘levels’ instead of floors, like a warehouse — I was on Level Six. When Wapping was at war and everyone was in the trenches, no one gave much thought to comfort in the office. But that was years ago and now there were unending complaints. It was not a thoughtful management that spent millions on a gaudy lobby and the splendid office suite I inherited, while crowding people into tiny, windowless offices.

Doug Flynn was an animated Australian chemical engineer who had stumbled into newspapers. Flynn had joined News International a year before me and was about to quit when I arrived, fed up with his bosses. He had a tempestuous Irish streak, but a quick and logical mind, and I promoted him to be my number two. We worked together through the toughest years at Wapping, before he left the industry and went off to make millions in outside businesses, too restless to spend any longer as a second in command.

‘This place is a fucking dump,’ he told me soon after I arrived. It was only a slight exaggeration. We decided a gesture was needed, and Flynn developed a plan. We bought a new building next door and moved The Times and The Sunday Times out of their rundown rum house. We began to renovate office space everywhere else. It took a couple of years, but spirits were lifted just by the knowledge it was happening.

The road show became an exhausting annual event. We also introduced a regular workforce opinion poll, the results of which were not always comfortable reading. Thousands came to ‘family days’ at the plants in London, Merseyside, and Glasgow, with food stalls and games, and exhibits where parents showed children what happened where they worked.

We had an annual retreat with members of the Staff Association Consultative Council, who had been elected by employees. These could be boisterous meetings. At our 1999 session, some of the council were determined to shut down the plants on New Year’s Eve so everyone could celebrate the millennium. It was a terrible idea, and out of the question. We were newspaper people, I told them. The arrival of the new millennium was historic. How could we not have newspapers with the date 1 January 2000? It was our duty to record the moment. Thousands would keep our newspapers as souvenirs.

There was silence when I finished, but they knew I was right. One of the Liverpool members stood at the back. ‘That means you’ll be working that night too, right?’ There was no escape.

‘You got me,’ I said. ‘I will be now.’

And so, on the night of 31 December 1999, I wandered the Wapping plant with nothing to do but show my face while the rest of the family reunited more than 3000 miles away in New York.

Showing my face was always a good idea. It’s amazing what you discover by leaving a lonely desk. There are always unpleasant secrets that executives keep to themselves. Hyman Rickover, the admiral who developed nuclear propulsion for the US Navy and who had a formidable reputation for hard work and high standards, said: ‘Always use the chain of command to issue orders, but if you use the chain of command for information, you’re dead.’ It was advice I commended to everyone.

The discontent faded over the years, but it would be overdoing it to say Wapping became an industrial paradise. Jobs were lost when projects failed, or economies demanded it. Digital began to squeeze our profits, managers made dumb mistakes, and badly treated employees won grievances. We were like every other media company struggling into the new millennium. But there was never a serious effort to bring back the unions.

In his book, Richard Stott gives me the credit for this. He says my ‘more relaxed, informal, and accessible style kept the unions out of Wapping. But for Murdoch it had been a damned close run thing, too close for comfort.’

It was hard work and I don’t remember often feeling relaxed. But Bill O’Neill, the shrewd, soothing sheriff of Wapping, deserved much of the praise. There is an old saying that you can get anything done so long as you don’t care who gets the credit. It was a corny epigram until I worked in Wapping with O’Neill. I didn’t meet many like him in Hollywood. All he wanted was to do the job and head out of town, back to Texas.

—

When it came to swinging elections, politicians in Britain gave newspapers too much credit. Naturally, no newspaper tried hard to disabuse them, but it was mostly nonsense that the press determined election results. Two years after Neil Kinnock lost the 1992 general election, and after the death of his successor, John Smith, Tony Blair was reshaping the Labour Party. In 1997, he swamped the Conservatives, winning his party more seats than ever before. No newspaper campaign would have changed the 1997 result. After 18 years in government, the Conservative Party’s own blunders and internal fighting had reduced it to a nervous wreck.

But Blair and his inner circle were taking no chances. Nor were the Conservatives, for that matter. They still placed value on The Sun’s support and worked hard to maintain it as the 1997 election approached. My first invitation to Number 10 Downing Street was for a party hosted by John Major, but it was the American guest of honour I most remember.

An invitation to Number 10 makes an impression. Walking through the tall black gates guarding Downing Street, towards that blackened Georgian symmetry, is like entering a sculpture you have known all your life. Most of the time, you don’t even need to knock on the towering entrance, with its patent leather sheen; as you approach, it magically opens. I walked for the first time through that front door in November 1995, up a staircase lined with portraits of past prime ministers.

Guests were crowding around in happy-eyed anticipation. Downing Street staff offered drinks with looks of blank routine. A hand squeezed my elbow. ‘Come on over and meet the president,’ said John Major, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom led me across the great drawing room to meet the President of the United States.

Bill Clinton was standing with his back against a fireplace. Hillary Clinton looked sullen on a gold sofa, surrounded by other women. Major pressed me into the tight group around Clinton, so that I was standing to his left. ‘Hi,’ Clinton said with his famous blue-glow beam. We talked about Northern Ireland, Europe, and his Rhodes Scholar days in Britain in the 1960s.

All the time, Clinton was leaning on me, not just touching shoulder to shoulder, but leaning. If I had suddenly moved, he would have lost his balance. It’s an unusual feeling being leaned on like that by the world’s most powerful man. I discovered seven years later that it was not a unique experience. The American journalist Joe Klein, in his book The Natural: the misunderstood presidency of Bill Clinton, writes about bowling with Clinton in New Hampshire. ‘At times, as we stood there, waiting for our balls to return down the alley, he’d lean up against me — a strange feline sensation; he needed the physical contact.’

Before the 1997 election, when Blair came to lunch with The Sun’s editors, he knew he was not among friends. Rupert may have been softening towards him, but key people at The Sun were not convinced.

Stuart Higgins, The Sun’s hyperactive editor, hated the idea of supporting Labour. He would wake me at home in the early hours with emotional pleas to reject Blair. Trevor Kavanagh, the urbane political editor, thought it was a terrible idea. So did Chris Roycroft-Davis, the chief leader writer. Roycroft-Davis never adjusted to the change; when Rupert walked into his office a few days after The Sun endorsed Labour, Roycroft-Davis sprung to attention. ‘Good morning, comrade,’ he said, with a salute.

At lunch, these men put Blair through an intense grilling. As Blair answered their questions, he cast glances towards his aide Alastair Campbell, checking on his reaction. To express approval of his boss’s performance, Campbell responded with almost imperceptible nods. A former political editor at Today, Campbell had left News International when Blair became leader. He was a blunt adviser and a fierce advocate to the media. He admired his boss, but never flinched from confronting him. I never heard another adviser interrupt the prime minister with the words: ‘Tony, that’s total bollocks.’

In his final weeks as opposition leader, Blair, Rupert, and I had dinner with our wives. Blair wanted a discreet venue, so they came to our house in Hampstead. It was a last-minute plan, and Mary went out for off-the-shelf Marks & Spencer meals and supermarket wine. ‘I hope we haven’t put you to any trouble,’ Cherie Blair said.

‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘all we had to do was microwave it.’

Blair responded amenably that evening to whatever Rupert said, and slickly changed the subject whenever the European single currency and other tricky matters arose. The single currency was always an issue. David Blunkett came to the house for dinner when he was home secretary and kept waving at Rupert with a €5 note he had pulled from the breast pocket of his jacket.

As the Blairs walked away down our garden path that night, Rupert said: ‘I like him. She’s a bit odd, but I like him.’

Soon after I arrived in London in 1995, Campbell had come to visit me with another close aide to Blair, Peter Mandelson. They were two of the principal architects of the New Labour revival that would return their party to power. They were an unusual couple. Mandelson smiled in a way that made it feel risky to smile back. He looked away when he spoke. Campbell had an air of incipient anger and when he smiled, his stony eyes did not always join his mouth. I did not detect much warmth between them.

They came in friendship, however, because Mandelson made a surprising proposal. He offered to help us remake Rupert’s image, which, he said helpfully, could do with ‘improvement’ in Britain.

Labour’s great rebranding had been to substitute its militant red flag with a moderate red English rose. Mandelson took part in this rebranding, but the rose was Neil Kinnock’s idea.

‘I hope you’re not going to propose a rosebud,’ I said. I had never heard a more ridiculous and self-serving proposition.

At Mandelson’s request, I arranged a discreet lunch with Rupert in one of the private townhouses connected to The Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly. Towards the end of the meal, Mandelson subtly suggested Rupert might make a donation to the Labour Party. After he had gone, Rupert was thoughtful. ‘Maybe I could give Blair a private donation,’ he said.

‘Do you honestly believe Labour would keep quiet about you giving them money?’ I asked. ‘There’ll be a photo of the cheque in The Guardian within 24 hours.’ We quickly decided it was a bad idea.

The pre-election charm of Labour lost its intensity in the years after Blair took occupancy of Number 10. Blair saw us frequently. He was usually cordial, but sometimes the meetings were tough. On one occasion, I was at Downing Street with Rupert, and, after talking for a while with the visiting Australian prime minister, John Howard, we left the grand formal rooms and took a small lift to the Blairs’ rooms on the top floor.

The flat was modest and chaotic in a family home kind of way. The lobby was cluttered with toys — their youngest son Leo was still a toddler. In the compact living room were two sofas on either side of the fireplace, and Blair’s guitar rested in a corner. Rupert and I sat tightly together on one sofa opposite Blair.

I got an uneasy sense this was not going to be a regular chat when Blair’s three most senior aides walked into the room and took up position beneath a window to our left. Jonathan Powell was Blair’s chief of staff, a patrician looking man whose oldest brother, Charles, had been an adviser to Thatcher. Weirdly, the brothers pronounced ‘Powell’ differently. Sally Morgan was a baroness with cropped reddish hair, and another of Tony’s inner circle. Alastair Campbell looked mischievous.

We were four feet apart across a coffee table when Tony launched into an attack on The Sun, rattling off a list of stories he thought unfair or inaccurate. I had never seen him so fierce. What was interesting was that he directed none of his attack at Rupert. It was the perfect moment to give him a piece of his mind, but he left Rupert untouched, aiming all his ire at me. I became Rupert’s proxy while he sat right next to me without saying a word. In the car heading out of Downing Street, Rupert put a reassuring hand on my knee.

‘You handled yourself very well in there,’ he said.

‘Thanks for your support,’ I replied.

Sometimes the meetings were more amusing. I was in Downing Street for dinner with Rupert and his sons Lachlan and James. Blair and his wife were the only people with us, apart from the inevitable Campbell. The discussion became heated as the evening advanced and James, agitated by his father’s opinions on Israel, began swearing loudly and freely. After he had used the words ‘fuck’ and ‘fucking’ a dozen or so times, I became uneasy. I know the feeling of being attacked by adult children who think they know everything, but we weren’t at home sitting around with a few beers.

Cherie looked startled, but Blair and Rupert appeared unfazed. Afterwards, we went for a further drink at a hotel bar. James had cursed only three or four times before the barman instructed him sharply to mind his language. The tycoon’s son had no privilege here — what had been tolerated at the dinner table of the British prime minister was too much from an anonymous drinker in a swanky London saloon.

Cherie Blair could be free with her advice. Sitting beside me at a dinner in 1998, soon after Stuart Higgins had departed as The Sun’s editor, Cherie was forceful in recommending a successor. The only person for the job, she insisted, was Rebekah Wade. I told her that Wade — later Brooks — was 30, had only recently become Higgins’ deputy, and had yet to prove herself.

Mrs Blair sometimes sought favours. She asked me to give her eldest son, Euan, a summer internship at The Times. ‘He thinks he wants to be a journalist,’ she said. ‘Please talk him out of it.’ Euan spent a few weeks working on the sports section. There is no record of him having any further association with the media.

The hostility between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was the perpetual backdrop of Labour’s reign from 1997 to 2010. Before Labour’s victory, Blair and Brown came together to Rupert’s flat to drink wine and talk of their plans should they become Downing Street neighbours. They came across as a perfect double act, seamlessly united, sitting side by side in the vast living room, echoing each other’s words. Their relationship was strained even then, but it would be years before it unravelled so completely and so ruinously for their party.

Brown had, in 1994, been seen as the natural successor to then Labour leader, John Smith, who died of a heart attack in May that year. But others thought differently, and Blair himself was convinced he was the party’s best hope.

By the time of the 1997 election, with Blairism at its height, the pair had reached an uneasy but genuine truce. Brown’s later, intense malice was rooted in his belief that Blair betrayed a promise that he would stand aside in order to give Brown a shot at being prime minister. In the early years, both blithely denied their relationship was troubled, but not many people were fooled and in the end they stopped pretending.

When the tension between them was at its height, Blair invited me one evening to his flat. It was just before the 2003 Iraq invasion and Blair had never been under more pressure. I had never seen him so careworn. The bright-eyed, election-winning boyishness had drained away. I remember the bottle of wine he opened was corked. He made no attempt to fake his feelings towards Brown and waved his hands furiously towards the ceiling. ‘He has no idea what it takes to do this job,’ he stormed.

I asked him why he hadn’t fired Brown: ‘Why have you lived all these years with a disloyal deputy?’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘It was never as easy as that.’

He had always been afraid that Brown would become his open enemy on the backbenches of Parliament. There were a significant number of MPs who preferred Brown, or thought they did. Many people got caught in the crossfire between Brown and Blair, including me.

Invitations to spend time with Brown were frequent. He asked me to breakfast at Number 11 Downing Street, the chancellor’s home, with Terry Leahy, chief executive of the supermarket chain Tesco. Leahy was a Liverpudlian, too, and Brown wanted us to lead a project to revitalise the city. It might have been a good idea for Leahy, but I wasn’t getting hooked into working on behalf of any political party.

Just as we were leaving, Blair came bouncing down the stairs. It looked like a well-timed arrival, and Brown’s face fell as he greeted us. But Blair gave me an icy smile. I think until then he thought I was his ally. I was never again invited for a quiet drink at Number 10.

Brown stayed close to News International as Blair’s reputation was shredded in the gruesome aftermath of the Iraq invasion. Even after I had gone back to New York, he would call to vent about one political problem or another, especially if News International papers were giving him a hard time. Brown and I had a connection in our poor eyesight. He had lost the sight of his left eye to a rugby kick when he was 16, and, like me, had suffered retinal detachments in the remaining useful one. We talked about the difficulties and the possibility of blindness we had both faced. Brown was an odd mixture of brooding ill temper and a jollity that much of the time seemed artificial. His laugh seemed more decided than spontaneous. He was a decent man but devoid of the natural charm possessed of the most successful politicians, in particular Tony Blair.

After the Blair years, when a chain of events shattered the relationship between Rupert’s newspapers and Labour, it was surreal that they had ever been so harmonious. I didn’t discover until years later how distasteful the job of befriending us had been for some New Labour leaders.

Alastair Campbell had joined Rupert’s Today newspaper from the Daily Mirror in 1993, leaving the following year to work as Blair’s press secretary. He was appointed chief engineer in Labour’s effort to gain The Sun’s endorsement, but his published diaries suggest he found the task painful.

Writing of a dinner in January 1997 attended by Blair, Rupert, and me, in which there had been a difference over the European single currency, he sounded disgusted: ‘It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry what they thought.’

After another Number 10 dinner, he writes: ‘I felt frustrated that we had to pander so much.’ And of another occasion: ‘He [Blair] felt there was something unpleasant about newspaper power and influence.’

I also discovered the motivation behind the 1995 visit to my office by Mandelson and Campbell when Mandelson offered to help polish Rupert’s image. Campbell writes: ‘TB saw Murdoch and Les Hinton at Murdoch’s flat … He felt that Murdoch personally liked him but Hinton was not so sure … TB wanted me and Peter M to see Les again soon.’

The relationship between Blair and Rupert may have been born out of self-interest, but it became a true friendship that lasted beyond Blair’s Number 10 days, long after the support of newspapers mattered to him quite so much. Their friendship ended famously and bitterly in 2013 when Rupert divorced his third wife, Wendi, amid suspicions she and Blair had been lovers. Five years later, Blair’s many denials had failed to renew it.

In 2007, soon after Gordon Brown had become prime minister, Rupert asked me to meet him in Sicily. I gave Blair and Cherie a lift to Sicily in Rupert’s Boeing 737, and we took a helicopter to his 184-foot sailing yacht, Rosehearty. It was a social meeting of two fond friends; I had never seen Blair seem so relaxed and unweighted with worry. He seemed happy to see the last of Westminster. Whatever plans he had upon leaving Downing Street in 2007, I wasn’t surprised he decided against following the route of predecessors who went to the House of Lords. He told me once: ‘I would sooner have my testicles nailed to a passing train.’

Blair and Rupert talked for hours, and went alone together on a long Mediterranean swim, two distant pinheads in the waves as security men tracked them with binoculars. Cherie was in a buoyant mood. The issue of feminism came up over a deck-top lunch and I remember her calling me a ‘caveman’. She might have been joking, but I couldn’t be sure.

We spent time on James Murdoch’s smaller, faster yacht, and Blair stood happily at the helm for more than an hour with a look of childlike glee. I remembered, over those few days, the occasion 10 years before, when Blair came alone to Rupert’s flat. As Blair and I were leaving, Rupert walked us to his door, talking about flying in his plane the following day to the Caribbean, where he would spend a week on his yacht. Rupert often talked this way, about his houses and boats and what kind of private jet he might buy next, in the casual way others talk about adding a kitchen extension, or leasing a new car.

Blair looked over his shoulder at me, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. I was never sure what that smile meant — whether he was indicating his disapproval of such ostentatious wealth, or revealing his envy of it.