He won the prize primarily because he was the only one who promised not to close the daily paper. Tycoons like Robert Maxwell and Tiny Rowland, separate consortiums led by former editors Harold Evans and William-Rees-Mogg, and rival newspaper owners Associated (Daily Mail) and Atlantic Richfield (Observer) had all sniffed around. But in 1981, after almost a year of industrial action during which neither title had even been produced, the Canadian proprietor Lord Thomson of Fleet chose to sell The Times and The Sunday Times to the Australian.
‘The most exciting challenge of my life’, he called it. ‘And the rocket boost for my career’, he might have added.
~
Keith Rupert Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1931, the only son of a regional newspaper owner. Bullied at school, his dad arranged a placement for him at the Birmingham Gazette; after a third at Oxford and a stint on the Daily Express, he assumed control of the family business, aged twenty-two, on his father’s death. In 1950s’ Australia he easily stood out as a dynamic operator, collecting several suburban and provincial papers through a policy of aggressive acquisition with debt. By the early 1960s he had founded Australia’s first national daily newspaper and seized a controlling interest in New Zealand’s daily, The Dominion.
His first foray further afield came in Britain in 1968, when he bought the already sensationalist Sunday tabloid, the News of the World, founded in 1843. The following year he paid only £800,000 for The Sun, an ailing mid-market daily that he immediately re-launched as a red-top tabloid, a year later adding topless models on page three. These two were run as stablemates, with relatively few staff and shared printing presses that made them extremely profitable as sales soared. The Sun overtook the Mirror for the first time in 1978.
Not only was the new owner happy to see his papers become more sexual, but their populism also fitted with Murdoch’s idea of himself as an outsider. ‘I’m rather sick of snobs who tell us they’re bad papers, snobs who only read papers that no one else wants’, he said. ‘I don’t believe people who read The Times are better than those who read The Sun, they’re just different’.
This self-propagated mythology of Murdoch as anti-establishment is very strong. Right from the beginning he used his two tabloids to tout his favourite causes. As early as 1970 The Sun called for the abolition of the honours system. And in 1973 the News of the World promoted the memoirs of Christine Keeler, who had brought down the War Minister, John Profumo; the backlash of powerful interests against this serialisation hardened Murdoch’s hostility to the hypocrisy and decadence of the British upper class, as he moved his home to New York and bought his first newspaper in the United States.
This explains why Murdoch so assiduously cultivated Lord Thomson at the end of the 1970s. Founded in 1785 as the Daily Universal Register, the London Times was the British elite’s newspaper of record; the ‘top people’s paper’ as the tabloids put it. As it suffered from falling circulation, chronic labour relations and disaffected ownership, Murdoch saw his chance. Through News International, the company he controlled, the crude Australian claimed the news-sheet of the British toffs. The barbarian was now inside the gates, owner of the castle. And from this bastion, he could and did maximise his power and influence on the country that had at first rejected him.
~
By the time of his eightieth birthday, in March 2011, Forbes magazine listed Murdoch as the very lucky thirteenth most powerful man on Earth. Having just launched the world’s first tablet newspaper, the Daily, and on the brink of his biggest ever deal – the £8 billion buy-out of the BSkyB satellite broadcasting company – while his offspring jockeyed for their share of the inheritance, Murdoch could reflect on a life that had taken him a long way from the Adelaide News.
Yet within a few months, his awesome dominance of the British media, cultural and political landscape was exposed and shattered with a speed, and through a popular uprising, akin to those which had brought down Eastern European dictators in 1989. Industrial-scale illegal phone hacking, along with widespread bribery of Metropolitan Police officers, had been going on for years at the News of the World. When the never-believable defence that it was all the work of a ‘rogue reporter’ was proved to be a corporate cover-up, Murdoch’s life-work slid away from him. The News of the World itself was ruthlessly shut down after 168 years, journalists and senior executives resigned and faced criminal proceedings, and the BSkyB deal was withdrawn in the face of universal opposition in the House of Commons. Murdoch was forced into humiliating public apologies and stripped of his dignity before a Parliamentary Select Committee, where he cut a sad figure, admitting it was the most humble day of his life. Judicial enquiries were set up in Britain and called for in the United States, destroying Murdoch’s reputation, along with his family’s grip on the News Corporation empire that he had founded.
Without the platform created by owning The Times, however, it is highly unlikely that Murdoch’s reach would have extended so far in Britain, or his fall been so dramatic. He would probably have focused even more on the United States, which delivered 75 per cent of his annual income, and perhaps done better in China. So let us assume that in fact Murdoch was outbid in 1981, say by Tiny Rowland, who did actually acquire The Observer just two years later. What would have happened over the past thirty years to our newspaper industry, our television industry, our public discourse and our politics without the enormous impact of Rupert Murdoch?
~
Back in 1981, journalists still used typewriters, sub-editors revised the text by pen on slips of copy paper, and these were handed to runners who took them to print supervisors who allotted them to a typesetter or tapper. The metal type produced by him (it was always a man) was read and fact-checked on a galley proof by one of an army of trained readers; corrected copy was reset and the metal slugs put into an iron page on the stone, finally ready for printing. This may have been only three decades ago, but it feels as if it could have been three centuries. And we mostly have Rupert Murdoch to thank for that.
Lord Thomson had accused the typesetters of killing The Times through over-staffing, restrictive practices and resisting the introduction of computerised technology. He had taken on the print unions by halting production altogether, but they had called his bluff by striking for almost a year while happily earning their income from other sources. Murdoch learned much from this lesson.
At the time, following deep public spending cuts and the bitter miners’ strike, it felt brutal. But, in retrospect, it was probably the only way to break the stranglehold that the print unions were using to choke the newspaper industry to death. The new production plant was under secret construction in Wapping as early as 1982; brand-new off-the-shelf computer technology was installed; experts from the US taught sub-editors how to typeset on screen; and a new distribution system was set up through 800 brand new trucks and vans, not unionised trains. On 25 January 1986, News International published four million newspapers without the unions.
After Wapping, Murdoch continued to be a creative innovator in the technology of the newspaper industry, his first and truest love. In 1990, he was the first to invest in colour printers, changing the look of papers forever. A generation later, he was the first to charge customers for their news from the internet, by imposing a paywall around The Times website rather than trying to cover costs solely from advertising, and the first to launch a replica newspaper designed specifically for a modern outlet, the online tablet.
~
If Murdoch had not bought The Times in 1981, it would have all been so different. He would almost certainly have treated Britain like Australia, a country of his early development left behind in the search for greater riches elsewhere. And he would probably have switched earlier and heavier to online opportunities. Instead of failing with Myspace, he would have had the time and clout to create a genuine rival to Facebook.
The Times itself would have gone under. Tiny Rowland, like all the other bidders, had refused to guarantee he would keep it open, and when he inevitably failed to solve the industrial relations problems that had brought it to its knees, it would have closed within five years.
Without The Times, Murdoch would have been a bog-standard owner of down-at-heel tabloids that felt as modern and relevant as a saucy seaside postcard. The Sun would have been more of a smutty comic than a powerful instrument to shift public opinion. The News of the World would have been little different in content and impact to the Sunday Mirror.
Murdoch would have had far less motive to force the move to Wapping, so it would have fallen to others to provide the financial investment and political will necessary to impose technological change on an antiquated industry that was essential for its very survival. We know that none of his immediate contemporaries did it. The most likely candidate would have been Conrad Black, the self-regarding Canadian who took over the Telegraph group in 1985. But, as he later proved, Black was too greedy, too pompous and too bullying, not smart or strategic enough to beat the unions.
Without the great leap forward in technology, all newspapers would have declined much faster than they did. They would have fallen back on even more ridiculous gimmicks to bolster sales: more bingo and TV tie-ins in the tabloids, more DVDs of old films in the Sunday press, and more dinosaur wall-charts in The Guardian. There would have been even more features and lifestyle sections, even more comment infiltrating news, and even more dependence on celebrities and sensationalism to attract readers.
With no Times to act as the powerful pivot between left- and right-wing media, British newspapers would have become even more aggressively divided along political lines, as they are in other European countries.
There would be a much more assertive liberal press. The Independent would not have fallen victim to price wars, would not therefore have gone tabloid or launched the spin-off i, and would instead have remained a journal of conscience. It would have had more success in reforming the Downing Street lobby system through its boycott of Bernard Ingham’s off-the-record briefings in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, although The Guardian would have been denied a purpose in defining itself as anti-Murdoch, it would have taken a more influential stand against the ever-tightening restrictions on civil liberties. Perhaps, over many years it would have published each Friday on its front-page skyline (no doubt alongside adverts for that day’s celebrity-designed wrapping paper) a running count of the number of CCTV cameras in Britain.
The Mirror would have battled a still brash Sun, but one which lacked the powerful political overtones and aura of self-importance it was able to cultivate when Murdoch also owned The Times. So the Mirror would have had the space to maintain its historic tradition of campaigning and investigative journalism in the school of Paul Foot. It might have been the Mirror that broke the scandal of MPs fiddling their expenses, or bankers gambling away our economy. And we would never have heard of Piers Morgan, once Murdoch’s golden boy, who developed his intrusive editorial style at the News of the World before dragging the Mirror and later CNN down-market.
Meanwhile, the Telegraph would have been even more Tory and even more anti-European under Black, as he would not have to fret about any bleed of readers to the middle-ground Times. Conversely, without the competition of a Times that later went tabloid and devoted many of its front-page splashes to social policy stories, the Daily Mail might not have been quite so rabidly right-wing in its editorials. In fact, it would have expressed outrage at the public scandal of taxpayers funding prisons to teach minor offenders how to become career criminals.
In any case, they would certainly all have had lower circulations and weaker holds on our policy debates and public opinion. They would also not be in the vanguard of the rush to new formats on the internet. That role would probably have been played by the television news-gathering organisations, allowing more room for ersatz players like the Huffington Post in the United States to flourish in Britain. There would undoubtedly be no paywalls, and no tablet newspapers, leaving the old business models to gently decline. Perhaps, if Murdoch had not bought The Times, children in schools today might even be taught in their history lessons what newspapers were and the influential role they played until the end of the twentieth century.
~
You could choose between BBC1, BBC2 and your regional ITV outlet. That was it in 1981, a very long way from the literally hundreds of channels that these days are beamed into our set-top boxes, some in HD and even 3D, with red buttons, live pauses and record facilities all built in. And Rupert Murdoch can take much of the credit for that revolution.
Straight after buying The Times, Murdoch told the BBC that he thought the public would be better served if there were as many television channels as there were newspapers.
When cash-strapped Sky Television went to auction in 1983, Murdoch snapped it up for just £1 plus outstanding debts of around only £10 million. At first, he made the same mistakes as others, wasting money on cable and wrongly assuming that the driver for consumer take-up would be movies, which is why he bought Twentieth Century Fox.
It was only once he moved from cable to a satellite system out of Luxembourg, beyond the jurisdiction of British laws on media ownership but facilitating access to British viewers via reception dishes, that he finally saw the way ahead: using the profits from his newspapers to cross-subsidise the purchase of the rights to broadcast football, the real magnet for consumer demand, along with the give-away of satellite dishes.
None of Murdoch’s competitors had his ability to weather the essential heavy losses in the early phase of investment to enable them to lead the drive to satellite broadcasting. And once Sky was in the lead, Murdoch used his power to beat back his rivals. He merged Sky with the rival British Satellite Broadcasting on his terms in 1990. He easily saw off ITV Digital through the aggressive marketing of his premium sporting rights. And he blocked BT, Virgin and every other attempt to set up a pay-TV cable service to rival his monopoly of the satellite platform.
The BBC has long been intimidated by Murdoch’s commercial clout, his freedom from quality standards, the power of his cross-media outlets to impact on public and decision-maker opinion, and his ability to cross-subsidise. It has lagged in the race to digital, but since the resignation of the Chairman and the Director-General following the Hutton Inquiry in 2004, the BBC has been paralysed with fear.
Seizing a further advantage, James Murdoch, Chairman of BSkyB, used a notorious MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2009 to demand greater constraints on the public service broadcaster. At the height of hubris, the Murdochs pressed on with a bid to buy out the rest of BSkyB and entrench their own power in the television industry. With blinkered eyes and grovelling for a political quid pro quo, David Cameron’s government later gave the green light, only to be forced into a re-think amid the scandal spreading from the News of the World.
~
If Murdoch had not succeeded in getting The Times in 1981, he would have been much less interested in Britain in general, and he would not have had the base, the confidence or the funding to pump-prime Sky in particular. There is no reason to believe that he would have become such a significant player in our television industry.
Had Murdoch bothered buying Sky at all, he would probably have cut his losses once he failed to beat British Satellite Broadcasting to the first three satellite channels when they were offered for auction by the government in 1986. Having already bought Twentieth Century Fox, he would have turned faster to the United States and the establishment there of Fox TV. And that would have meant Britain’s technological drive would have been far slower.
Even if BSB had ever finally spotted that football was the content that could trigger the demand for satellite, it was in no position to cross-subsidise the purchase of the necessary broadcasting rights. Football would have stayed on the terrestrial channels; ITV would have won the rights in the 1992 auction. The demand for satellite dishes would have remained sluggish. Without the boost of freely or cheaply distributed squarials, home take-up would have stagnated among the early adopters who alone can never push technological consumerism to a tipping point.
There might have been a longer life for cable services. There might also have been better free-to-air viewing and ITV Digital may have lasted longer. But the date for our national digital switch-over would surely have slipped back from 2012 to at least 2020, and it would probably be around then before we saw anything like Sky Plus, High Definition, 3D or movies-on-demand.
Of course, sports coverage, especially the much-hyped Sky Sports Super Sunday football coverage, would not have been revolutionised. Plodding highlights would have continued to be wrested between ITV and BBC for years. Sky News, an award-winning service with few but extremely influential viewers, would not exist. Rejecting rolling news as too sensationalist, the BBC too would not have a 24/7 service, choosing instead to invest in high-quality, in-depth news and current affairs analysis while boosting its local coverage in the regions. We would not have the absurd rush to speculate about ‘breaking news’ as it happens, so although we might get our reports slightly later we could be more confident that they were accurate. Perhaps the ITV News Channel is the best that we could get.
BSB lacked Murdoch’s reach into the United States, from where he pillaged content for Sky in Britain. Instead, BSB sustained a more traditional model of television, where power was held not by the broadcaster but by the producers of programmes. This would mean that we would be in thrall far less to content imported from the United States. The West Wing, The Sopranos and The Wire would still have made it across the pond. But Sky Atlantic, pumping over-promoted but sub-standard comedy and drama into our living rooms, adding to the impression that American culture is in some way superior, would not have been born. And HBO seasons would have been rivalled in quality and cultural impact by BBC and Channel 4 series. The British television production industry would be one of the most creative and resourceful in the world, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
This in turn would have had a beneficial impact on arts as well as current affairs, with a premium on stimulating analysis and investigative journalism, rather than the race to be first with breaking sensationalised stories. Melvyn Bragg would still have a home on terrestrial channels. Question Time would not feel the need to have gormless celebrities on its panel each week, and Panorama would still be a flagship programme with properly resourced journalists. We would not be drowning in a dirty tide of game shows, cooking programmes, so-called reality output, house-buying porn and cringe-making celebrity-based challenges.
Quality, not ratings, would be the watchword with our public service broadcasters. Viewed through this prism, and without the colossus of Murdoch’s empire standing on its shoulders, the BBC giant would not have been brought so low. Instead of getting caught out rigging the phone-in vote to name Blue Peter pets (so Match of the Day might still be offering prizes for its famous Goal of the Month competition) and exaggerating its accusations against Tony Blair’s claims for going to war in Iraq (we would never have heard of Andrew Gilligan), the BBC would still be guided by Reithian values.
~
‘I call my cancer Rupert,’ the playwright Dennis Potter controversially said just days before his death in 1994, ‘because that man Murdoch is the one who, if I had the time … I would shoot the bugger … there is no one person more responsible for the pollution of what was already a fairly polluted press.’
Since the News of the World illegal phone hacking scandal broke, this encapsulates what is probably a consensus shared by the nation: that Murdoch’s media have been in the forefront of trashing journalistic ethics, invading personal privacy, mixing news with entertainment to create the bastard child of infotainment, and generally degrading the quality of public discourse in Britain.
For years, Murdoch’s papers have been accused of bursts of homophobia, sexism and racism to sell papers. He has been more than willing to allow his media to initiate populist campaigns, often aimed at the very lowest common denominator, which have distorted complex public policy issues, sometimes leading to perverse public attitudes and poor policy-making. This has been true on broad fronts like pushing an aggressive authoritarianism on crime and migration (with a reckless disregard for the facts), and on narrow issues such as how to resettle convicted paedophiles once they have served their sentence (the News of the World campaign for a so-called ‘Sarah’s Law’ led to attacks on innocent paediatricians on the south coast).
Murdoch’s media has long been charged with fomenting the celebrity culture that now debases our public life, as well as increasing our collective prurience – creating a nation of Peeping Toms – and undermining the rights to privacy of the rich and famous. And this is all in the bogus name of confected public interest. In large part a response to this obsession with real or invented scandal, there has been a huge rise in libel actions. At one extreme, Elton John received a record £1 million in damages from The Sun in 1987 after it alleged he had had sex with under-age rent boys. At the other, even the Queen successfully sued The Sun – for breach of copyright when it published the text of her annual Christmas message two days before broadcast. The invasions of privacy that Murdoch’s red-tops pioneered – starting with reporters rifling through rubbish bins – has in turn led to the widespread use of super-injunctions, through which wealthy and powerful people aim to protect themselves, even from legitimate journalistic enquiry.
Few have been the victim of Murdoch media intrusion more consistently than the Royals. As early as 1952, soon after Elizabeth II’s coronation, Murdoch wrote: ‘I personally entirely deprecate this thoroughly new theory that the Monarchy is above criticism’. In 1992 alone, there was Squidgygate (when The Sun set up a special phone line which enabled callers to eavesdrop on a 30 minute tape-recording of a private conversation involving Princess Diana) and the Fergie toe-sucking scandal (when The Sun splashed with zoom-lens paparazzi photos of a topless Duchess of York). Many assume that Charles Spencer had the Murdoch red-tops in mind when he effectively blamed the intrusive media for the death of his sister.
This pattern of behaviour – the total disregard for morality or laws – metastasised into the systemic hacking of mobile phones, pinging (using mobile signals to track people’s whereabouts), blagging (journalists pretending to be someone they’re not in order to access private information) and bribing of Metropolitan Police officers. With up to 4,000 cases, the victims were not restricted to celebrities, but included murdered teenager Milly Dowler and relatives of those killed by terrorist atrocities or on active service in Afghanistan and Iraq; frankly, it could have been anyone. The outrage was revolutionary and this disgrace will undoubtedly dominate Murdoch’s obituaries.
Yet it is not that Murdoch was uniquely to blame for all of this. It is that his papers were usually the worst offenders, and in setting the standards lower and lower he had the clout to drag the others down too. The whole system has been corrupted, and he must bear much of the blame, along with the failure of public agencies, which were too cowed by his commercial power and hold on public opinion to do anything about any of it.
~
If Murdoch had not taken control of The Times in 1981, he would have had far less influence on public discourse. Standards would undoubtedly not have slipped so far so fast, at least in mainstream coverage, as they have not in other European countries. It is noteworthy that national radio, a medium in which Murdoch has no interest, has not suffered the same slump. Trivia and sensationalism, law-breaking and lying may well have continued to find a home in the margins, but the most influential media would have felt the commercial freedom to uphold higher ethics.
Crucially, there would have been more balanced coverage of complex policy issues, which in turn would have led to better public policy-making. Of course, there would be a place for populist campaigning. The Sun might still have encouraged vigilantes after the Tony Martin case, for instance, while the Mirror would have highlighted the lessons of Terry Matthews, a hapless minor offender who, when put in prison, was indoctrinated into organised crime and later murdered a police officer. But there would also be limits. The Sun might even still be widely read on Merseyside, as it would not have told lies about the behaviour of Liverpool football supporters after ninety-six of them tragically died at Hillsborough in 1989. Most importantly, the context for public policy debates would have been less dominated by one voice, less hysterically skewed, more keenly contested, and therefore with a healthier chance of better policy outcomes.
There would have been faster moves to change public attitudes about, and outlaw, sexism, racism and homophobia. In 1986, Clare Short would still have failed in her bid to ban Page 3, which might still exist but would surely be seen as a cheap and dirty anachronism. Throughout the 1980s, the government’s AIDS awareness campaigns would have been more successful, possibly saving more lives.
If war was politics by other means for Clausewitz, then sport has long been war by other means for much of the populist British media. Without the cloak of respectability conferred by sharing a stable with The Times, The Sun’s xenophobia would have been ignored like that of a deranged aunt. The hoary old stereotypes and insults would still have screamed out – ‘Let’s Blitz Fritz’ at Euro 96, for instance – but the widespread reaction would have been embarrassment, as the other tabloids failed to respond in kind.
Football itself would not play such a central role in our national culture. The Premier League may have been created anyway, thanks to a breakaway of the leading clubs, but without the vast sums of Murdoch’s money that inflated players’ wages and egos as well as ticket prices. There would be no ‘Skyjacking’: more matches would kick off at 3 o’clock on Saturday afternoons, and football would not dominate the TV as well as the back and front pages of the papers. Ironically, this lower profile would have bred a different kind of success. English clubs would not have attracted so many foreign superstars or got to so many Champions’ League finals, though there might have been a wider variety of domestic league and cup winners. There would have been more home-grown players, creating a better England team, led by a manager whose vocabulary stretched to more than 100 words, capable of lifting the World Cup in 2010.
In the wake of the illegal phone hacking scandal, it should not be forgotten that the News of the World scooped many major and legitimate investigations. Even without The Times under Murdoch’s control, Mazher Mahmood would have continued to pose as a ‘fake sheikh’ for the News of the World or perhaps the Sunday Mirror, rightly winning awards for undercover stings that have brought more than a hundred criminals to justice. John Higgins would have been revealed for his apparent willingness to throw snooker frames for cash, several Pakistan cricketers would have been caught out as bribe-taking match-fixers, and Wayne Rooney would have been exposed for earning huge sums from the notion that he had a model marriage while simultaneously paying prostitutes. Pictures of the idiotic Prince Harry fancy-dressed as a Nazi would still have been published. In fact, good journalism would thrive – in the newspapers that survive, in broadcast and increasingly online.
Without the power that Murdoch derived from owning The Times, however, there would have been a more strictly drawn line of public interest. Either the newspapers would have behaved more responsibly, kept in check by a code of conduct properly enforced by an effective system of self-regulation, and the Press Complaints Commission would not have been held down by the very strongest interest that it is meant to be monitoring (how can it be that Neil Wallis, Deputy Editor of the News of the World at the time the phone hacking was at its height not only went on to work as PR adviser for the Metropolitan Police force but back then also served on the PCC Code of Practice Committee?); or there would have been proper external regulation.
Most likely, the PCC would have been scrapped and external regulatory authority would have been vested by Parliament in Ofcom, with genuine powers of policing and sanction. The first whiff of criminal phone hacking or police bribery would have prompted a thorough investigation and tough action, preventing the secondary scandal of a corporate cover-up.
Either way, the rapid decline in journalistic standards would have been arrested and public discourse better respected. There would have been, at the least, less widespread phone hacking, nor such institutionalised corruption of the police to get at private information, and we would never have heard of Andy Coulson or Glenn Mulcaire. It would also be much less likely that judges would have felt empowered to issue super-injunctions, building privacy laws for the rich and powerful by back-door case law. The distinction between legitimate enquiry and moral-free invasions of privacy would not have been so blurred, and elected politicians would not have been so afraid to challenge unelected media barons when they appeared to over-step the mark.
~
Murdoch’s recently acquired Times published a famous letter in 1981 signed by 364 senior economists, arguing that the government’s monetarist policies had no basis in economic theory, would deepen the recession and should be abandoned. Yet The Times’ new proprietor decided that his anti-establishment and free-market approach chimed with that of Margaret Thatcher, who he championed in 1983 and 1987.
By 1992, after the poll tax had removed Thatcher, and dithering over Europe had already started to weaken John Major, the race was so close that BBC exit polls initially called it for Neil Kinnock. At the start of the election campaign, Labour announced plans to introduce new cross-media ownership rules, forcing Murdoch to break up his empire by either selling his papers or abandoning Sky. No wonder that by polling day The Sun’s front page pleaded: ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’. After Major in fact won a wafer-thin majority of just 21, the myth of Murdoch’s power over politics took deep root. ‘It’s The Sun Wot Won It’ was both the boast of the red-top tabloid and the lament of Labour’s red-topped leader.
All calculations were transformed by Black Wednesday, 18 September 1992, as Britain was humiliatingly ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. That night, Kelvin MacKenzie, the editor of The Sun, spoke to the prime minister and arrogantly told him: ‘Well John, let me put it this way. I’ve got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk and tomorrow morning I’m going to pour it all over your head.’
This was the context in which New Labour decided to prioritise courting the media, especially News International. In 1995, Tony Blair famously flew halfway round the world to fawn over Murdoch at a News Corporation conference in Australia. Although this has subsequently been widely ridiculed, it was completely understandable at the time. With almost no media accountability, proprietors like Murdoch as well as successful editors like Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail were a significant barrier to politicians, especially from the left, being taken seriously by the public. But in going so far to seek this anointment, Blair – like Gordon Brown and David Cameron after him – deepened the capture of the political system by Murdoch and the media class.
The obeisance worked. The Sun switched its support, and Blair won three successive general elections without having to worry about criticism from Murdoch. Cameron learned these lessons, paid the necessary homage, and won the crucial support of Murdoch in 2010. No wonder Murdoch was invited through the back-door of 10 Downing Street to be thanked for his support.
The Australian-born US citizen’s hidden hand was revealed at the last general election in other ways too. It was Sky that forced Gordon Brown to accept the leaders’ debates. And after Nick Clegg starred in the first of them, David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, explained: ‘Make no mistake, if the Liberal Democrats actually won the election – or held the balance of power – it would be the first time in decades that Murdoch was locked out of British politics. While it would be wrong to say the Lib Dems were banned from Murdoch’s papers … I would say from personal experience that they are often banned – except where the news is critical.’
The anti-establishment tycoon appeared to own not just huge swathes of our media, and sections of the Metropolitan Police force, but large parts of our politics too. This is not so far from a mafia.
~
Even without the authority of The Times behind him, Murdoch would no doubt still have deployed The Sun for Thatcher. But, in 1983, Michael Foot, Tony Benn and the longest suicide note in history would still have done for Labour’s chances. And, in 1987, Thatcher was in her pomp and Labour had yet to begin the long road to reform, so the Tories would still have won again. As Alastair Campbell would later have written in Volume 14 of the Reliable Witness Edition of his Diaries: ‘Of course the feral beasts help shape the context of political battle. That’s why we need to deal with them actively. But voters are not stupid. It is usually their views of the real political situation, not a false perception fostered by Rupert Murdoch, which determines elections.’
Yet in 1992, uniquely, the main two parties were so closely matched that a dominant media intervention could have effectively determined the outcome. Without The Times to back The Sun, and with other media evenly split, no external force was powerful enough to push John Major over the line. Neil Kinnock might still have screwed it up himself, with even more displays of over-confidence than just at the Sheffield rally. But it is likely that he would have gone on at least to prevent Major reaching his majority, and quite probably to form a government of his own.
As Kinnock then floundered with the ERM crisis, however, most media and crucial swing voters would quickly have turned against him. As he would have confessed much later in his memoirs: ‘At that time, we just weren’t ready for the realities of power’. It is possible that he would have gone on to lose the following election to an unreconstructed Tory party under, say, Michael Portillo, and recent political history would have been utterly different. But it is more likely that, as Gordon Brown (at the time, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, blocked by John Smith as Chancellor) dithered over what to do, Blair (Home Secretary) would have been impatient enough to mount a coup in time to win the following election as New Labour, leading us back to a familiar story.
Though emboldened by the urgency of his dramatic assumption of power, Blair would still have failed to redress the slide to anti-Europeanism in Britain that had begun when pro-Europeans complacently believed the argument to have been done and dusted after the 1975 referendum. It was not just fear of Murdoch that stopped him; it was fear of the voters. Britain would still be outside the euro, and the furore over the signing of the so-called European Constitution would have been no less vicious and politically divisive.
Without a new and relevant appreciation of the country’s changed role in the world since the loss of Empire, repeatedly harking back to 1945 and 1966 for its memories of glory, Blair would certainly still have felt obliged to cuddle up to the United States. We would still have been sucked into Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11.
And at the Treasury, Brown would still have harboured his self-defeating grudge at missing out on the top job. So although there were many major achievements, New Labour’s domestic reform agenda would still have been checked. When Blair was finally forced out, Brown as his inevitable successor would still have appeared to be victim, not commander of events, despite his deft touch in international forums in preventing the collapse of the global financial system.
These were the decisive political issues of New Labour’s years in office, and although the influence of Murdoch was apparently visible in the repeated acts of deference paid to him by successive prime ministers, in fact events would all have panned out much the same even if his role in Britain had been much smaller. Even with The Times, he just was not as directly powerful over our politics as he, and many others, believed.
By 2010, Labour was burned out, having failed to fulfil its massive potential. David Cameron and the Tories would still have won most seats. There may have been no televised leaders’ debates, yet the Liberal Democrats might still have held the balance of power. For without the active apathy towards them of the powerful Murdoch media, neutered by the lack of the establishment Times in his portfolio, the third party would have gradually been making solid progress for the past twenty years.
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As the thirteenth most powerful man on the planet, Rupert Murdoch has consistently been one of the two or three most powerful people in Britain in the thirty years since he bought The Times. As such, he must take the responsibility – both the credit and the blame – for at least shaping much that has happened here over that time. Without the authority that flowed from his ownership of the Establishment’s paper, his awesome media empire and his influence would have been much diminished.
While the course of elections would have unfolded more or less as history teaches us it did, all of these governments would have fared better without the spectre of a super-charged Murdoch hanging over them. Britain would have had a less powerful but better quality media: higher standards of public discourse; far fewer incidents of illegality and corruption; more balanced public attitudes and more considered public policy.
All this would have come at a cost, however. We would have had a less technologically advanced television industry, albeit with a stronger local production sector, and there would have been an even faster decline in our newspaper industry. A price worth paying?
William Shawcross, Murdoch: The Making of a Media Empire (Touchstone, 1997)
Michael Wolff, The Man Who Owns the News (Vintage, 2010)