The Prince of Darkness

Alan Watkins

RUPERT MURDOCH by William Shawcross Chatto, £18.99, pp. 736 In November 1985 Mr Ian Aitken and I went to St Paul's Cathedral for the memorial service for Charles Douglas- Home and took our places at the back of the kirk. The service ended, the Dean and Chapter, together with the Bishop of London, conducted various other dignatories, who included Lady (as she then wasn't) Thatcher, to the West Door. Locoing along somewhere in the middle of this collection, who were, I remember, Proceeding with unseemly briskness, was a morning-suited, grey-faced, lined, in those clays black-haired man. Mr Aitken turned to me and said: The Prince of Darkness.'

I begin with this vignette because, scattered through Mr Shawcross's book, there are references to this phrase or to Others like it — to forms of words which ascribe Mephistophelian qualities to Mr Murdoch. Mr Shawcross clearly believes that such attributions are jocular, fanciful or themselves malevolent. Let me assure h. irn that this is not so. Mr Aitken was not Joking; or not completely. Nor is he easily alarmed. He has, after all, closely observed ,stlle Algerian War, Fidel Castro and Lord neaverbrook, not to mention the Parliamentary Labour Party during the Bevanite period. And Mr Murdoch made exactly the same impression on me. Never h. efore had I seen evil so clearly expressed in a human face. In fact I crossed myself ftlzi gave thanks that the church had not °een struck by lightning during the course Of the service for his deceased editor. , Appearances can, as we know, be decep- tive. We are few of us oil paintings. Mr liviurdoch cannot possibly be as bad as he h°°ks; no one could be. Mr Shawcross, "ciwever, seems to go altogether too far in .,.scribing to his subject a kind of goodness. I Put it in this way deliberately, for it is not, lAr'e are to understand, goodness simpliciter, DM more a rough, well-intentioned bene- volence. This is moral absurdity of a high 2rder. Indeed, as I ploughed through the '90k (for the abundant sections on finan- cial skulduggery of one sort or another and (3.° various scarcely human Australian Journalists are heavy soil), I was reminded °f A. J. P. Taylor's life of Beaverbrook. The most appalling deeds, the most cynical betrayals, the most callous disregard not so much of other people's feelings as of their legitimate expectations: all are related as if they reflected nothing but credit on their perpetrator or were, putting the matter at its lowest, ethically neutral.

Taylor loved Beaverbrook and conse- quently could not see the wickedness of his actions. Mr Shawcross does not, I think, love Mr Murdoch. But he has clearly been charmed by him, despite his unprepossess- ing appearance. The result is that Mr Shawcross tells us more than an official house biographer (which he certainly is not) would have thought it prudent for us to know.

Time and again the story is the same. A newspaper, television station or whatever comes within Mr Murdoch's sights. He sees it as a desirable acquisition or, at least, one that fits into a pattern which already exists in his mind. He borrows money from sever- al of his banks — for Mr Murdoch has banks as most of us have books. This he calls OPM, for Other People's Money, a phrase which Mr Shawcross nowhere mentions. In fact Mr Murdoch's career is a good illustration of Lord Lever's dictum that if you owe the bank £10,000 you are in trouble, but that if you owe £10 million the bank is in trouble. Mr Murdoch then acquires a shareholding of greater or lesser extent. Rumours of a Murdoch takeover are heard. At this stage he confirms his interest but goes on to state that the news- paper or whatever will stay unaltered in character, that the editorial staff will remain substantially unchanged, anyway at the highest level, and that he personally intends to play no part whatever in the direction of the enterprise.

Within weeks, certainly within months, these promises are shown to be false. Mr Murdoch issues instructions to the editor; then he dismisses the editor; then he and his henchmen change the nature of the paper. This change, without exception and including the present-day Times, consists in cheapening the product in a variety of ways. Least harmfully, there is an increased emphasis on sex and violence. Then there is an interest in freaks, accidents and deformations. More reprehensibly, stories are simply made up and then justified as 'jokes' or 'a bit of fun'. Most wickedly of all, vulnerable minorities are singled out for execration and scorn: one section of a community is set against another.

Some of these predilections, the interest in monstrosities, for example, are as old as journalism itself. The more wicked of them, such as the invention of stories and the persecution of groups, derive from the cruder Australian newspapers of Mr Murdoch's youth. Usually these techniques work wonderfully, as they have with the Sun. Sometimes, however, they fail, as they did with the New York Post. The Post was a tabloid, much read and largely written by Jewish liberals. It carried numerous good columnists, notably the excellent Mr Murray Kempton: Its nearest British equivalent was, I suppose, the News Chron- icle. When Mr Murdoch acquired it, the great days were past. He failed not so much because he took it downmarket as because he took it too far down. He did not realise the importance of the department stores' advertising to the New York press. He was appealing to those who stole from rather than to those who bought in these great emporia.

Sometimes, also, Mr Murdoch's initial promises fail to carry conviction and he is repulsed. One of the many oddities of Mr Shawcross's book is that he asserts about once every 20 pages that Mr Murdoch is a man of his word. He then, with the same periodicity, produces the most convincing evidence to demonstrate that this is the one thing he is not. About halfway through this over-long work (in this regard, as in others, clearly designed for the United States market), it occurred to me that Mr Shawcross was using 'man of his word' as a term of art, as Mr Murdoch would presumably use it. What it meant was that Mr Murdoch kept his word to the banks — made his interest and other payments on time.

In 1976 he was repulsed in his attempted acquisition of the Observer. This was the first and in some ways the most impressive of the reverse coups mounted by Mr Donald Trelford. I should perhaps explain

that, while a regime or an editor may be displaced as the result of a coup, either may remain in position as the result of a reverse coup. Mr Trelford is the undisput- ed master of the reverse coup. On this occasion he obtained early intelligence in New York of Mr Murdoch's intentions. He mobilised the editorial staff to repel him. They were overwhelmingly on Mr Trelford's side, though one of them, now departed from the paper, had a different view, saying that if Mr Murdoch took over 'we'll have money coming out of our ears'.

This was certainly the view of the print- ing unions, who looked forward to Mur- doch's acquisition of the Observer with keen anticipation of riches piled up in this world rather than in the next. In the crucial week of the troubles I presented a What the Papers Say programme which was less than sympathetic to Mr Murdoch. As a conse- quence the Grand Imperial Wizard (or whatever he was called) of the paper's printing unions protested forcefully to the general manager about the unhelpful nature of my contribution to the discussion. When Mr Murdoch later moved his opera- tions to Wapping — one of the few undisputably beneficial actions of his career — I had little compassion for the brothers from the chapels who, having first sucked up to him, thoroughly deserved the misfortunes that came their way.

Mr Murdoch's intention was to install Bruce Rothwell, Australian by origin, a former Mailman who had become a Murdochman, as editor-in-chief. The new editor was to be Anthony Shrimsley. He intended to dismiss me as political columnist of the paper. I know this because he offered the job to Mr Frank Johnson who, as a good friend, promptly informed me of his intentions. Shrimsley and Rothwell are now dead. So at the time I had both a general and a personal objec- tion to Mr Murdoch's acquisition of the newspaper. I spoke up against it at several meetings. Mr Clive James protested more colourfully. He was the hero of the hour. He said, as Mr Shawcross correctly records, that he had journeyed all the way from Australia precisely to escape Mr Murdoch. It was also he who said (Mr Shawcross is doubtful about the provenance of the simile) that giving the Observer to Mr Murdoch was like handing over your beautiful 17-year-old daughter to a gorilla. Lord Goodman and Mr David Astor, however, continued to favour Mr Murdoch. He is one of those unlikely, philistine, aggressively masculine friends that Lord Goodman tends to make, the late Sir Max Aitken being another example. Who else was there? Lord Goodman asked. If there was a knight on a white charger, he said, galloping to rescue the Observer, that would be a different matter. But no such gallant figure was in sight.

In the meantime, Mr Murdoch had retired hurt. If the Observer staff did not want him, he said, that was their

misfortune. Professional watchers of the press confessed themselves mystified. Mr Murdoch had not previously allowed his plans to be impeded by the objections of what he called journos. In fact he put in a second offer which was rejected, a knight on a white horse having appeared through the enterprise of Mr Kenneth Harris in the form of Atlantic Richfield.

Mr Shawcross can be a perfectly good writer of serviceable English. In this production, however, he appears to be an Australian writing for Americans. It is a combination of a showbiz biography with an old 'Insight' report. He has clearly worked very hard. His wonderment at the marvels of electronic technology is reminis- cent of the old Boys Own Paper. Sometimes Woman's Own strikes a note, as in the following passage on the second Mrs Murdoch:

Once at the Sydney Mirror, it was not hard for her to get to know the journalists — for she was both beautiful and ambitious. Douglas Brass, the editorial director of News Ltd, took her under his wing. Anna, says, Blanche d'Alpuget, another cadet journalist and later a novelist, was determined to do well. Blanche introduced her to rich `yachties' [eligible yeachtsmen: parenthesis supplied], and attempted to wean her from her strict Catholicism.

Did she present Anna with a copy of Calvin's Institutes? Was she successful? Mr Shawcross does not tell us. But she seems to be an exemplary wife to Mr Murdoch during the odd moments when they are together, confining him to white meat and small quantities of white wine. It is to Mr Auberon Waugh, quoted without comment, that we owe the intelligence that before every transworld journey he has an enema. What a miserable, poverty-stricken life he has chosen for himself!

Making a Will

And once again we must entrust to those who view us by appointment from their desks the shape or lack of shape of destined loss, the terror our politeness masks.

Draft follows proof-read draft until even our deaths are discourse — not our own but waiting for us in a well- groomed file; today, the needful thing is that we sign.

We do and, to a legal nod, soon leave scenes of conclusion put on hold while sunlight hurts us like a chance reprieve and we resume the lives that we have willed away to children whom we buckle up as though for the first time, who, as we drive, we know will one day glimpse the inner shape or lack of shape of what we tried to give.

Michael O'Neill