ANALYSIS:RUPERT MURDOCH came to the Leveson inquiry to bury as a myth the belief that he is the grand puppet-master, with politicians from all parties in his thrall. Instead, he painted himself as the man forced to bear their repeated pleadings.
Tony Blair had flown to Australia to see him. David Cameron, en route to a family holiday in Turkey, had come to Italy on a Murdoch family jet to see him, though the publisher could not remember which of two of the family’s yachts was used for the encounter.
Politicians, he said, always wanted to press their case with publishers, “not just me”, indicating that he had found it wearisome, though it is unlikely to be something that he will have to deal with in future.
Looking tanned and fit, Murdoch arrived early at the Royal Courts of Justice, just 24 hours after company emails disclosed to Leveson revealed its degree of access to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt during its bid fully to control BSkyB.
So far, he has not been pressed on this, or the phone-hacking scandal that engulfed and then destroyed the News of the World and could yet threaten his very position at the helm of News Corporation.
Instead, the Leveson lawyer, Robert Jay, has opted slowly to build up the picture of his influence over four decades on British life, with, perhaps, tougher questioning to follow during a three-hour session today.
Throughout, Murdoch displayed charm, chuckling about his own mistakes, and admitting that he had been more than a little drunk at a party when he shouted “That’s me” as they all watched Ken Livingstone blame Labour’s 1992 defeat on the right-wing press.
However, a few old scores were quietly settled, including one with the former Times and Sunday Times editor, Harold Evans, who had become “the only editor of the Times that we ever asked to leave” because he had been faced with “a staff insurrection”.
In Evans’s history, he had fought for independence in the face of Murdoch’s duplicity after he had bought the titles in 1980. In Murdoch’s, Evans had been willing to prostrate himself in a bid to survive.
“I said to him, ‘Harry, that is not my job. All I would say to you’ – and this is the nearest thing I ever came to an instruction, was – ‘Please be consistent. Don’t change sides day by day’,” he declared.
Last night, the 30-year feud continued with a denial of all claims by Evans.
Editorial support from his stable of newspapers had never been offered in return for political favours after elections, he said, to the evident disbelief of Mr Jay, who has previously displayed his dislike of the tabloid press so beloved by Mr Murdoch.
He had never asked Margaret Thatcher for help when he bought Times Newspapers; nor had he asked Tony Blair to persuade Italian prime minister Romano Prodi in 1998 not to block his purchase of a TV satellite firm owned by Silvio Berlusconi.
Commercial interests had never dictated editorial attitudes, he insisted. He had backed Blair in 1997 because the Conservatives were tired. He changed back to the Conservatives in 2009 because the same could then be said of Labour after 13 years in power, to Gordon Brown’s fury.
Brown had called him after the Sun had abandoned Labour on the morning of his speech to Labour’s 2009 conference, he admitted; but he rejected
the description given of the conversation up to now, where Brown is said to have “roared for 20 minutes”.
“He [Brown] said – and I must stress no voices were raised; we were talking more quietly than you and I are now – he said, ‘well, your company has declared war on my government and we have no alternative but to make war on your company’. “And I said, “I’m sorry about that, Gordon, thank you for calling”.
“End of subject,” he said, adding that he did not think Mr Brown “was in a very balanced state of mind”.
