What makes Rupert run?

Michael Davie

t is an extraordinary fact that even after I Mr Rupert Murdoch has owned The Times and the Sunday Times for a year, both his own nature and the character of his operation should still be so widely mis- understood. The phrasing of the comments last week by Lord Dacre, for instance, makes it plain that he thinks that Mr Mur- doch is not the sort Of person who could be trusted to use the right knife and fork at Peterhouse high table, where Lord Dacre is the Master. Others besides Lord Dacre per- sist in regarding Mr Murdoch as an out- sider. The reasons, perhaps, are that he flies in and out of England for short spells, and causes an ungentlemanly stir when he does so, often firing someone who did not expect to be fired; that he is thought of as being typically Australian, fitting the stereotype of aggression and blunt uncouthness that some Australians promote for themselves; and that, with his rumpled suits and harsh voice, he looks and sounds like a man who has clawed his way up from the back streets of Sydney.

But the truth is that Mr Murdoch comes from the heart of Australia's establishment. On a social indicator, assuming that it con- sented to register people from the anti- podes, he would rank at least as the social equal of most recent Fleet Street pro- prietors, the Thomsons, the Berrys, the Harmsworths (provided their family legend of royal blood is discounted).

He comes from solid professional Scot-

tish stock. His grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, and his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was one of the most respected men of his day, a confidant of prime ministers, and a pillar of Melbourne society. Murdoch senior first made a name for himself as a youthful war correspondent at Gallipoli. In London, he became a close friend of Lord Northcliffe, when North- cliffe owned The Times. Northcliffe indeed was to some extent his mentor, and the let- ters the two men exchanged about newspapers are still worth reading. When Murdoch went back to Australia to take over the running of the Melbourne Herald, he put Northcliffe's advice to good use, and created a highly successful, serious-minded newspaper (Alan Moorehead and Sam White are both ex-members of the Herald's staff). He also expanded, so that the Herald and Weekly Times group today is still the largest media empire in the country.

Although Sir Keith was always worried about money, he lived in the grandest style. He was a patron of the arts, and founded a chair of fine arts at the University of Melbourne. He surrounded himself with servants, horses, and fine silver. Rupert was sent to Geelong Grammar, which, despite its misleading name, is socially the grandest school in Australia. He was no good at sport, and made some of the masters uneasy by his method of cross-questioning them about the world outside Geelong; this was regarded as a peculiarity. But he made some connections. He was a near- contemporary of two other boys now promi- nent in the Australian communications world, Mr Kerry Packer (another Australian whom the British have not yet got straight), and Mr Ranald Macdonald, the chief executive of David Syme and Co, publishers of the Melbourne Age, and a former chairman of the International Press Institute, who last year was reported to be interested in joining a consortium to buy the Observer. At Geelong, Rupert Murdoch shared a study with a man named Richard Searby. Mr Searby, who like Murdoch went on to Oxford, is still a close associate of Murdoch's. He is now a QC, one of the most prominent in the country, and a man with good contacts in Canberra, among them the Prime Minister, Mr Fraser. He is also a member of the board of The Times, and one hopes that Sir William Rees-Mogg, before accusing that board of acting illegal- ly, the precaution of obtaining a writ- ten opinion from a lawyer as expensive as Mr Searby. Earlier this week, Mr Searby was reported to be on his way to London.

If Mr Murdoch's oldest and closest friend, Mr Searby, can be said to be at the heart of the Melbourne establishment, his

mother, Dame Elizabeth, may be said to be the Melbourne establishment personified. Lord Dacre would feel perfectly comfor- table at her dinner table. She is a woman of good works who is proud both of her hus- band's memory and her son's achieve- ments, though she does not read by any means all his newspapers. Given this background, it could well be argued that Mr Murdoch was at least as appropriate a purchaser of The Times as his two predecessors, Lord' Astor, whose fortune was American, and the Canadian RoY Thomson.

Whether he is a better owner is another matter. As everyone knows, the past 30 years have turned Mr Murdoch into a very tough operator. Collectors of Murdoch anecdotes in Melbourne were' recently delighted by the story of Mr Murdoch's portrait. The leading Australian painter, Mr Fred Williams, does not accept commis- sions, but he lately agreed to paint Mr Mur- doch's portrait. (Mr Murdoch began to buy Williams's landscapes long before Williams was generally recognised.) The idea originated with Mrs MUrdoch; the portrait was to be a birthday present for her hus- band; and she arranged, having secured Mr Williams's agreement, for Mr Murdoch to learn the news from skydivers who parachuted down to the front door of the Murdoch's country property in New South Wales.

Not long afterwards, Mr Murdoch arriv- ed at the Williams studio in Melbourne and, like all people about to have their portraits painted, asked the artist how he wanted him. 'Looking successful,' said Williams. At once, Mr Murdoch thrust his hands into his pockets and jingled his money.

These days, when old friends and associates of Mr Murdoch are asked what he is after, as he flies from London to New York to Australia and back again, running his newspapers, his television sta- tions, his publishing firms, his movie business (which produced Gallipoli), his sheep stud, his mineral interests, and his airlines (the other day when people in Lon- don were talking about his cash flow pro- blems in Britain, he bought a small airline in Seattle), they often reply, "Well, power and money, I suppose.' That was not always the answer. When Mr Murdoch was an undergraduate at Worcester College, Oxford, two of his tutors, Asa Briggs and Harry Pitt, both at that time Labour voters, anticipated that their pupil, also Labour, would return to Australia and inherit his father's newspaper empire and become a strong, populist in- fluence: a counterweight, as it were, to the Australia represented by Sir Robert Men: zies, with his anachronistic devotion to the white Commonwealth, the Crown, and the British connection.

Lord Briggs is now Provost of Worcester and Mr Pitt is the Dean. One wonders wilt they think of their protege now. He cannot be said to be regarded by many in Australia as the champion of the rights of the people,

though he is a brilliantly successful news- Paper owner. After the last state election in South Australia, his paper there was cen- sured by the Australian Press Council for the anti-Labour distortions in its election news coverage. The leader of the Federal Labour Party, Mr Bill Hayden, who is very Much the moderate, never even using the word 'socialism', has made some very strong criticisms of Murdoch and his Papers.

At the same time that Mr Hayden deplores Mr Murdoch and his ways (and the Murdoch press is very sceptical about the Federal Opposition), things are very dif- ferent at the New South Wales state level. The NSW Labour Premier, Mr Neville Wran, is described as a fine politician and leader, indeed a statesman. It may not be wholly coincidental that Mr Wran gave Mr Murdoch, in partnership with the promi- nent racehorse-owner, Mr Robert Sangster, a licence to operate a Lotto gambling game within the state.

Any thoughts of becoming the people's champion may have been casualties in the battles Mr Murdoch had to fight when he returned home from Oxford after his father's death. His father had been chief ex- ecutive, not owner, of the Herald group; and Rupert inherited only one paper, in the Pretty but, in newspaper-owning terms, relatively unimportant city of Adelaide. To break into the big markets, he had to take °n a set of established tycoons, now all ex- tinct, for whom selling their grandmothers would have been less a matter of ethics than of the best price. BY the time he arrived back in England, to take over the News of the World, a fami- IY like the Carrs, the proprietors, must have seemed to him to be easy meat. His subse- quent success with the Sun, and his ex- perience at London Weekend Television, did not leave him with any very marked respect for the general run of Fleet Street Proprietors, or board members, or managers.

He may have thought, when he took over the Times, that he would run it like any other newspaper, and that the new tough and professional spirit in which he and his "tanagers ran Times Newspapers would s°0n have effect on their finances. Yet the evidence is that, in the words of one man Thomson, concerned with the take-over from lhomson, 'he was as tough as nails in the negotiations, but then became seduced by the excitement of owning The Times. He has been trying' to get the cuts now that he should have got when he was buying.' It would perhaps not be surprising if, while his new editor, Mr Harold Evans, was Putting together a changed staff and paper, Mr Murdoch regarded The Times with special indulgence. He is not immune to the °Pinions of others. Some two years ago an °Id Melbourne friend of his ran into him at a Party in New York. The friend, from a background, well-established Melbourne tnckground, has long worked for church-

based charities, and he asked Murdoch

what he was going to do with the second half of his life, implying that it could be spent more usefully than the first half. Mur- doch broke off the conversation and the friendship. He must be conscious that he has disappointed the early hopes that some people had of him. Whatever stuffy people in Melbourne might think of his other papers, they could hardly fail to respect him as the proprietor of The Times. He would not have wanted to shut it down.

There is a further point to be made about Mr Murdoch, and this has to do with the way that his affairs, the past year or two, have regularly become entangled with those of governments. In the United States, he negotiated a large loan, on good terms, from the US Export-Import bank. In Australia, he lately acquired control of a television channel in Melbourne as a result of Federal Government action. In Britain, he might not have acquired Times Newspapers in the first place had the Government referred the matter to the Monopolies Commission, as it later refer- red the Lonrho bid for the Observer. This week, once again, a government has been in a position to influence the future of an im- portant part of his empire, over the ques- tion of the titles of. The Times and Sunday Times Simultaneously, on the other side of the world, the government of Papua New Guinea has accused Ansett Airlines, of which Mr Murdoch is part-owner, of finan- cing an opposition campaign aimed at tak- ing over the Papua New Guinea airline, Air Nuigini.

It is hard to think of any other newspaper proprietor in recent Years whose businesses have at key moments so depended on government action, whether favourable or hostile. The nature of Mr Murdoch's private dealings with governments, if any, is not known. On one occasion, leaving the Prime Minister's offices in Melbourne with two newspaper colleagues, we passed Mr Murdoch and Mr Searby on their way in. The Prime Minister's press officer was evidently embarrassed by this encounter. But we never discovered what they were do- ing there.

. Whether Mr Murdoch is interested in the exercise of political power, like Northcliffe or Beaverbrook, is doubtful, despite the suspicions of some people. A former employee remembers asking him about his motives, and the answer perhaps went to the heart of the matter. 'I'm a gambler,' said Mr Murdoch. 'I like to be in everything.'