| Rupert Murdoch telling porkies Apr 26th 2012, 06:30 So he gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...prime-minister Quote:
Rupert Murdoch ranged over 40 years at the top of British public life, recounting details of his personal relationship with successive prime ministers from Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron, over four hours on oath in the witness box at the Leveson inquiry. Giving evidence deliberately, Murdoch set out to deconstruct the "myth" that he exercised undue political power, or that he traded the allegiance of his newspapers for political favours, although at times his argument relied on having no recall of meetings with politicians, including an exotic visit by David Cameron to his daughter's yacht in Greece.
Murdoch denied he ever asked Thatcher for favours and insisted he was not "the power behind Thatcher's throne". He told the inquiry he did not try to use a private lunch meeting in Chequers with the prime minister and her PR Bernard Ingham on 5 January 1981 to seal his deal to buy the Times newspaper.
The meeting was at his request, but Murdoch said it was merely to inform her of the proposed purchase of "a great iconic asset". He had requested the face to face meeting but denied it was to demonstrate to Thatcher that he had the "charisma" to take the papers forward and to tackle Fleet Street's notoriously powerful print unions. Displaying disarming candour, he added: "No, I didn't have the will to crush the unions. I might have had the desire, but that took several years."
| Comment from Nick Davies: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012...eveson-inquiry Quote:
in the event, Robert Jay QC kept piercing small gaps in Murdoch's defences. This was partly because Jay had gathered up a prodigious supply of facts, which he fired like slingshot at the castle walls – and partly because the old mogul likes to talk. Jay didn't break in and ransack the place, but he did some damage.
Sometimes the wounds were nothing more than dents in Murdoch's standing, as he acknowledged that it might well be true that he had once listened to Ken Livingstone on television denouncing the "lies and smears of the media" and that he had then declared drunkenly to a roomful of people, "That's me!" Or that he might well have qualified his early approval for Tony Blair by adding that they were not yet ready to take their pants down together.
But sometimes, in the detail behind the denial, he conceded substantial ground. His underlying problem was that he was not listening to Jay and failed to see the subtlety of the allegation that faced him.
Murdoch kept denying that he made deals with politicians, ie, that he simply offered them the support of his paper in return for favours to his business. But Jay suggested: "It operates at a far more sophisticated level, doesn't it?" and went on to quote the reported words of the former Australian prime minister Paul Keating: "You can do a deal with him without ever saying a deal is done."...
...He described how he had once spent an afternoon at Chequers, telling Blair how much he opposed Britain joining the euro, as though the prime minister had nothing better to do.
To this extraordinary degree of access, he boldly added that he does indeed direct the editorial line of the Sun on major issues, including questions about Europe. And, once again failing to hold his tongue, he went right ahead and admitted what this would mean to a man like Blair: "If any politician wanted my views on major issues, they only had to read the Sun." The Sun relentlessly reinforced the anti-EU message.
Murdoch continued to deny that Blair had ever done anything for him, but then conceded that Blair had "gone the extra mile for him" over European policy, to the point where he had acceded to the Sun's demand that the government should agree to hold a referendum before accepting the new EU constitution.
| Here is a comment from Harold Evans, who was the much-respected editor of The Sunday Times. When Murdoch bought Times Newspapers, he offered Evans the editorship of The Times. They fell out and Evans shook the dust Fleet Street (or rather Printing House Square) off his feet. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ry-imagination Quote:
There is a pattern to the Murdoch sagas. He responds to serious criticism by a biting wisecrack or diversionary personal attack. What is denied most sharply invariably turns out to be irrefutably true. As with the hacking saga, so with my charges.
Murdoch is unlucky that his poor memory has been overtaken by documentation. On 16 March 2012, the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge released two discomfiting documents from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. They give the lie to the official history of the Times from 1981–2002. The historian engaged by the Times, Graham Stewart, wrote that Murdoch and Thatcher "had no communication whatsoever during the period in which the Times bid and referral was up for discussion".
On the contrary, the documents reveal that on 4 January 1981, the prime minister and Murdoch had an extraordinary secret lunch at Chequers. The record of the "salient points" of the meeting by No 10's press officer, Bernard Ingham, testifies that, in accordance with Mrs Thatcher's wishes, he would not let his report go outside No 10, which is to say ministers would not be briefed on the meeting.
It must be galling for Stewart that the source he relied on for the falsehood in his history was the man who engaged him to write it. The meeting that Stewart writes never took place was highly improper. Had this secret meeting come out at the time, it would have destroyed Murdoch's chances of acquiring Times Newspapers, the seminal event of his ascent in Britain. Moreover, Ingham's "note for the record" reeks of cover-up in triplicate. It bears some parsing...
...Murdoch also chose not to inform the prime minister of the bid by the Sunday Times' management buyout team, which submitted its offer to the Thomson Organisation on 31 December 1981. The monetary amount of £12m was the same. He conflates the bid by the profitable Sunday Times editors and managers with the less credible bid by journalists of the loss-making Times.
Second, Ingham's note is obviously drafted to deal with the eventuality that the clandestine meeting would one day come to light. On that account, it is ludicrous. We are asked to believe that there was no mention at the lunch of the clear legal requirement for Murdoch's bid to be referred to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
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