How Cameron cosied up to Murdoch & Son
The Sun's decision to turn against Labour was the reward for years of shrewd politicking and social networking by the Tory leader and his team. Andy McSmith reports
GETTY IMAGES/ REUTERS
The Sun's decision to turn against Labour has been a welcome boost for David Cameron
It was about 10 minutes to 10 on Tuesday night that mobile phones across Brighton started bleeping. They belonged to the members of the Cabinet and caused many to abandon their dinners and hunch overtheir Blackberrys, urgently discussing what to do next.
Britain's brashest and biggest-selling tabloid newspaper, which likes to sometimes make news rather than merely report it, was at it again. After 12 years of supporting the Labour Party, The Sun was filling its front page the next morning with the headline "Labour's lost it".
As the news spread like bushfire around the sealed-off part of Brighton where Labour is holding its annual conference, the doors opened on a suite in the Grand Hotel where News International, which owns The Sun, was holding a party.
Gordon Brown, who was expected to attend, immediately cancelled his appearance, as did Peter Mandelson, now his First Secretary, but who in a previous life played a central role in the negotiations between Tony Blair and the Murdoch empire in the 1990s which led to The Sun's backing of Labour in 1997. He knows News International's chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, well, and vented his fury in a telephone conversation with her.
Yesterday, Mandelson's people claimed he told her that she and her colleagues were "chumps". Her version of the same conversation had Mandelson using a noun that sounds similar, but is great deal more vulgar.
But while it was a shock to the Labour faithful, the news that David Cameron now has a political asset that has eluded Conservative leaders for 12 years did not come from nowhere. It was the product of months of networking, negotiating, wine drinking, canape quaffing, villa visiting and yacht boarding as the Conservative Party and Britain's biggest media company learned to love and understand each other once again.
Yesterday, one of the happiest men in the country was Andy Coulson, David Cameron's highly paid and much criticised communications director, for whom the front page of yesterday's Sun was the culmination of months of delicate diplomacy.
Four years ago, when David Cameron did not have an experienced tabloid operator like Coulson to advise him, it nearly went horribly wrong. When the raw and newly elected Tory leader first met News International's patriarch Rupert Murdoch, he was intent on projecting himself as a socially tolerant leader with modern ideas who would shake up an outdated Tory Party. In his anxiety to be modern, Cameron described with great enthusiasm how he had enjoyed the new US blockbuster film Brokeback Mountain. Far from being impressed, the ageing Murdoch was appalled that a would-be prime minister should be watching a film containing graphic scenes of gay sex.
In those days, Murdoch had more time for John Whittingdale, the Tory chairman of the Commons committee on culture and media, who had worked for Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, than for anyone in Cameron's shadow cabinet. He also thought that the Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, was more of a Thatcherite than Cameron.
Cameron's master stroke, in June 2007, was to hire Coulson five months after he had lost his job as editor of the Murdoch-owned News of the World when it emerged that the paper had been bugging royal telephones. It was a controversial appointment that opened Cameron to political attack and is costing the Tory party a hefty salary – reputedly £200,000 a year. But it produced dividends, because it meant that the Tory leader had at his side someone he trusted absolutely, who was also trusted inside the social world of the Murdoch clan.
Coulson is a dear friend of Rebekah Brooks, formerly Rebekah Wade, who edited The Sun from 2003 until she stepped up into her post earlier this year. When Wade was arrested in 2005 for allegedly assaulting her then husband, the actor Ross Kemp, it was to Coulson she first turned for help. It is said that each would die for the other.
This link gave Cameron a secure line into the social circle that includes James Murdoch, his sister Elisabeth, her husband the publicist MatthewFreud, Wade's second husband, the old Etonian former racehorse trainer, Charlie Brooks, and Nat Rothschild, of the banking family.
Rothschild, son of Jacob, the fourth Baron Rothschild, is an exact contemporary of David Cameron's most important political ally, George Osborne. As young boys, they were in the same year at a private preparatory school. They met again at Oxford University, where they were members of the elite Bullingdon Club.
In summer 2008, David Cameron and his wife were flown in Matthew Freud's private plane to meet Rupert Murdoch in his yacht, Rosehearty, off a Greek island. Afterwards, Cameron was flown to Turkey for a family holiday, and Murdoch went on to Corfu for his daughter's 40th birthday.
Osborne was already in Corfu, on a family holiday that acquired notoriety because Peter Mandelson was also in the area, and what was said in private aboard a yacht owned by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska blew up into a political row after they returned to the UK.
The Osborne family was holidaying in a villa owned by Nat Rothschild, in an area of northern Corfu which is so popular with the London set that it is known as "Kensington on Sea". David Cameron and his family had previously holidayed there in 2006.
One guest who has also stayed at the villa said: "It's an old olive press and olive mill that Jacob Rothschild bought about 25 years ago and which Nat now has. It has been extensively added to over the year, in a very simple way, so that it sleeps about 20. It's stunningly beautiful and understated."
He added: "It all seems incredibly cosy. James Murdoch, Rebekah Wade, Charlie Brooks, Matthew Freud, Elisabeth Murdoch, Cameron and Osborne are all very much at ease with each other. There is a mix of the social and the political. It all seems incredibly close."
No one doubts that it was the Murdochs, father and son, who were behind yesterday's announcement in The Sun, rather than the paper's new editor, Dominic Mohan.
"Everybody was involved to a greater or lesser extent," one senior member of the editorial staff said. "Were Rupert and James involved? The answer to that is that they are always involved in something as important as this. Rupert created The Sun. He's not going to just leave it to someone else. It's his baby."
But it was not all socialising – there was some politics. Executives at News International have been particularly exercised by the threat to newspapers posed by the BBC's website. Speaking at the Edinburgh festival in August, James Murdoch, the son of News International's founder, described the BBC's reach as "chilling". He also complained about the media regulator, Ofcom. Keen to oblige, David Cameron has promised to abolish Ofcom and scale back the BBC.
The probability now is that Murdoch's other daily newspaper, The Times, will follow its tabloid stablemate. Although Tories complain about the closeness between New Labour and some Times political writers, the newspaper has its strong links with the Tories too. There is thought to be a job in a Cameron government and a peerage awaiting the Times chief leader writer, Danny Finkelstein, if he chooses to take it. Finkelstein was Osborne's intellectual mentor when the two worked for the former Tory leader William Hague.
The Times editor, James Harding, fits perfectly within the Cameron social set. He and George Osborne were pupils at the same public schools, St Pauls, as teenagers. He and Cameron played tennis together before Cameron became an MP and in 2006 they were reported to be staying together at the Rothschild villa in Corfu. Harding's fiancée, Kate, is the daughter of the financier, Sir Mark Weinberg, Jacob Rothschild's business partner.
But all this back history did not diminish the shock felt at the Labour party conference in Brighton when news of The Sun's front page hit them. It was a shock, above all for Gordon Brown, who has also tried hard to cultivate the Murdoch clan. In the final days of Tony Blair's premiership in 2007, during one of the farewell parties at 10 Downing Street, guests looked across to the lawn behind No 11 and saw Gordon Brown in conversation with Rupert Murdoch. When Rebekah Wade and Charlie Brooks celebrated their wedding in June, on the Brooks family estate near Chipping Norton, Gordon Brown was there, as well as David Cameron.
But the difference is that Cameron moves smoothly through these occasions, giving the appearance of someone who is having a good time, but Brown is too obviously there out of a sense of duty.
Brown still believed that his relations with the Murdoch empire were intact on Tuesday afternoon as he was delivering his speech to the Labour Party conference, his biggest speech of the year. At 6pm, he put in a routine call to Dominic Mohan, who took over the editorship of The Sun last month.
There have been some famous conversations between Sun editors and prime ministers, including the one in which Kelvin MacKenzie told a beleaguered John Major: "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."
But this conversation produced no fireworks. Mohan did not even tell Brown what the next day's Sun was going to do to him.
But that was in the days before the internet, when 24-hour news was in its infancy and The Sun had a formidable reputation as an opinion former. Although its executives still argue that The Sun's eight to 10 million readers are more likely to switch party allegiancethan readers of other newspapers, they are also rather less likely to vote at all. It is estimated that barely half turned out at the last general election.
And if opinion polls are accurate, Labour under Gordon Brown had already lost the allegiance of a large proportion of those Sun readers who will vote months before yesterday's bombshell. Perhaps a suitable headline for today would be "It was The Sun wot followed the general drift of public opinion and joined the winning side." Not snappy, but accurate.
A question of policy: Cameron and the Murdochs
The media tycoons have much to gain from a Tory administration:
Abolish Ofcom
James Murdoch has complained that the media regulator is unaccountable, and intervenes far too much, stifling creativity (and profit). David Cameron agrees.
The Conservative leadership has been making the right noises for the Murdochs this summer. On 26 June, Ofcom announced it would force Sky to sell premium television football rights for transmission on platforms such as BT. The next day, Sky vented its anger and said it would appeal – with the hint of further legal proceedings. On 6 July, Mr Cameron arranged an unscheduled press conference to talk about quangos and announced that, if elected, he would abolish Ofcom.
Curb the BBC
Its income is guaranteed through the licence system, while the profitability of Sky television and the Murdoch newspapers depend on the state of the market. Mr Cameron is sympathetic.
Wreck the Lisbon Treaty
Rupert Murdoch has never liked the EU, and welcomes anything which holds up further integration. But if, as expected, the Irish vote to ratify the treaty, Mr Cameron may have to disappoint on this one.
Back the troops in Afghanistan
The Sun accuses Labour of not doing so, but it is not obvious what the Tories would do differently. They say they might restore three disbanded infantry battalions, but have not said how to pay for it.
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Comments
Neat use of words, especially as "politicking" rhymes pretty well with what you assuredly meant!
How like Blair Cameron really is: same tactics, same focus ...
So the two party system gives us real and substantial choice, does it!? Interesting experiment in how possible it might be to fool enough of the people all of the time ...
How flippant from a non domiciled to try and decide the outcome of elections in my country, or a european country?
Why don't the Murdochs bozz off to their native Australia, and leave us run our own affairs?
And stupid Cameron et al. flirting with them, can't you learn anything, they will drop you like a hot potato the moment they have no use for you.
This is not Journalism, try Mafia, whack what you dislike, just like that, and the disdain, the scorn and contempt to their readership, thinking they can make them change their minds at the flick of a few page 3 flashes and sports feature -
despicable and disgusting, these guys make journalism filthy, and those who associate with them deeply soiled and dodgy.
All the money in the world cannot make one clean if he has no dignity.
We don't want them back! Evil, evil empire...
Murdoch is only providing his support on the basis that the Tories will give the BBC a kicking and further his family's own commercial interests.
I would heartily like to see Brown go, but to say Cameron is "fresh air" is just nonsense. The Conservative party is riddled with corruption even before it gets into government.
The two pillars of strong, intellectual, and progressive UK are BBC and Ofcom.
I think that Cameron has just lost his middle class support.
This to me is the worst kind of corruption and cronyism going and no way am I voting for the tories.
Aly-Khan Satchu
www.rich.co.ke
Twitter alykhansatchu
Murdoch and other media barons sell newspapers, and they will and they do pander to people's prejudices and bigotry if it sells the product. It is the surrender of principles, if they have any, in tne name of profit.
New Labour has failed because it was too worriedabout how its policies would be perceived in the media, rather than concentrating on a clear long-term policy. Cameron is going down the same road. Anything for a cheap headline.
This approach is not policy it is abdication. Stanley Baldwin, describing the pre-war press barons once said it was "power without responsibility, the role of the harlot down the ages". New Labour has been hoist with its own petard. Cameron and the Tories are going down the same road.
Cameron and Osborne have been sucking up to rich businessmen, and mortgaging the country, for a VERY LONG TIME.
in the Us there are panic alarms everywhere because the mainstream media are losing money and facing foreclosure. GOOD! it shows the masses are turning away from the lies and propoganda and searching for the truth on alternative news sites on the web such as the american free press. obama doesnt like it and wants to bail them out. lol
it was only recently a respected journalist who retired said, "at least now i can have an opinion".
think politics, think wwe wresting. 2 people in a contest. everyone nows the result except the public. a farce
Just you watch as the Tories murder yet another part of the public sector to pander to special commercial interests often from overseasunder the guise of "opening things up to competition", - health, transport, BBC. What a bunch of traitors.
From the idiotic ( The One Show) to Radio Four political interviews the leftie view is always on offer to the great unwashed. All the lovies that are endlessly troted out are Labour supporters, because as we all know, writing catchy pop songs or acting in a soap makes you a political scientist.
The reason the "hang um and birch um" section of the Tory party don't like Cameron is because he has ingratiated himself with these media lovies and now gets some kind of a hearing for his party. Also of course, unlike you Mr London, the BBC cannot go on defending the so called govenment that gave us £900million of debt.
From the idiotic ( The One Show) to Radio Four political interviews the leftie view is always on offer to the great unwashed. All the lovies that are endlessly troted out are Labour supporters, because as we all know, writing catchy pop songs or acting in a soap makes you a political scientist.
The reason the "hang um and birch um" section of the Tory party don't like Cameron is because he has ingratiated himself with these media lovies and now gets some kind of a hearing for his party. Also of course, unlike you Mr London, the BBC cannot go on defending the so called govenment that gave us £900billion of debt.
Don't tell me that even a sensible "righty" like yourself would opt for Fox News as the model for current affairs coverage here?
Why should Murdoch, a foreign national, non domiciled in Britain be allowed to have any imput into our voting system. Who cares about his opinions which are only self-serving to grow his empire. He has already ruined sports coverage in the country. Time to kick him into touch and let him concentrate on Australia and the USA where his appalling Fox News has already destroyed serious news coverage. The last thing we need is a version of the moronic Fox News in Britain.
****MEDIA BARONS*******
*****GOVERNMENT******
****POLITICIANS*****
****ARMY********
***POLICE*****
*CRIMINALS**
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TAXPAYER
And which they will probably get, if the British electorate next year supinely and unreflectively swaps one tarnished shifty and discredited lot of politicians for the mirror image bunch on the opposite side of the Commons
Andy McSmith and Bruce Anderson should get together for a nice chat and figure out who's got the insight.
I'm a foreigner interested in whether or not the Britishers with Attention Deficit Disorder will all vote Tory. I've never seen a country (been all over) where people read only the headlines and look at the pictures. Of course, I've never seen headlines that are all opinion, not news.
The land of Shakespeare.
Only a half-wit does not understand that this decision was taken because Rupert Murdoch loves being on the winning side, and Mr Murdoch believes the next general election to be all over bar the counting.
Fact: News and Journalism has been 'Dummed-Down' enough by News International and Co!
The article reads like a 'Mafiose Who's Who!'
Question: Do we really want to be governed by the 'Cosa-Newscorp-Nostra?'
Reality has finally dawned on the damage wrought by Brown as Chancellor and Prime Minister; it's payback time. I suspect the Sun won't be the only paper to ditch Labour
But I shed no tears for for the worn out Labourites. The best we can hope for is a hung parliament but for even that to happen Gordon will have to fall on his sword, and quickly. Fat chance!
The SUN newspaper is nothing more than a rag - now a a tory rag - very schoolboyish and typical of an old colonial - Australian pighead - Rupert Murdoch. Having worked for one of his Australian newspapers I speak with experience when I say that Murdoch has always sought political insight and power. This dirty underhanded deal with the tories has placed both the Sun newspaper and the Tories on a path to ruin. Many working class readers of the Sun will now desert the rag in favour of the Mirror. This dirty deal will fail the greedy Murdoch.
The coverage during the Iraq war was a scandel. Every time a yank column stopped to take a leak they were
"held up in another Stalingrad ect ect". It was clearly wishful thinking.
Whatever devious motives are behind Murdochs moves, it is not for the BBC to be so impartial. I don't give a toss what John Humphreys thinks about the Afghan conflict, he is there to report fact not the left wing view point.
BY THE WAY THERE IS A COMMENT ON HERE FROM ME SAYING OUR DEBT IS £900MILLION THATS WISHFUL THINKING ALSO.
erm sort of comes to the same thing does it not?