Newscorp’s true power in the land is only now emerging

Sir Paul Stephenson

 

New revelations from the Metropolitan Police show that Newscorp dined regularly with senior Met officers while Hackgate was being covered up. It also emerges that David Cameron was a specially flown-in guest at Elisabeth Murdoch’s 40th birthday party in 2008.

Met police Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson and his deputy Tim Godwin dined thirteen times with senior Newscorp officials during the period when the force was responsible for investigating News of the World phone-hacking. These included a dinner with Murdoch man Neil Wallis in September 2006, when he should have been regarded as a genuine suspect, and another in September 2009 when the Met’s John Yates dined with the NoW’s editor Colin Myler. Shortly after the dinner, Yates decided not to reopen the case.

During this same period, the Met took a number of as yet unexplained decisions which, effectively, let Newscorp off the hook. Having arrested Royal correspondent Clive Goodman, the police chose not to interview anyone else; and police never requested a production order, via which they could’ve seized all the NoW’s office paperwork.

A whiff of collusion permeates the revelations, but that culture of close cooperation is no different to the then Conservative leader David Cameron’s relationships with senior Newscorp executives and the members of the Murdoch family during the period in question. Records show that Mr Cameron accepted a second free flight from Murdoch son-in-law Matthew Freud, in order to attend a birthday party for his wife Elisabeth Murdoch on Rupert Murdoch’s yacht in August 2008.

As The Slog revealed yesterday, Elisabeth Murdoch will from now onwards play a central role in trying to ensure that Newscorp’s full takeover of BSkyB proceeds to a successful conclusion. In theory, the decision to allow or disallow this rests with the MMC, and Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt. But from a long series of articles published both here and elsewhere, it’s clear that Newscorp believes in getting all the agencies of government onside….to ensure that consiserations other than the social good are brought to bear on such decisions.

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It’s clear that even without a successful takeover of BSkyB, Rupert Murdoch’s tentacles  extend into just about every area of British life. He is a man who always has, and always will, interfere in the affairs of the land he so dislikes for having teased and looked down upon him during his time at Oxbridge as a young man.

A confirmed republican, his journalists hacked Royal phones at will, a crime for which Clive Goodman went to prison. But the close liaison with the Met suggests strongly that Murdoch’s influence there stopped further investigations taking place – when it’s becoming increasingly obvious they shouldn’t have done.

Murdoch has influenced every election since 1979, and probably decisively on at least two occasions. Prime Ministers have flocked to his Court, in return for which Newscorp journalists allegedly hacked the phones of politicians too.

From its inception, he has bankrolled soccer’s Premier League and been given a monopoly of access to live games. The FA has traded the grass roots English game in return for Murdoch’s billions. Newscorp seems to have repaid that gamble by hacking the phones of senior FA officials and players.

And last but not least, his tabloids The Sun and the News of the World have swollen their circulations by intrusively feeding on the lives of so-called celebs. The list of public showbiz figures now sueing the NoW for phone-hacking is so long and complex, the BBC website devotes a whole page to it – and you can follow its  regular updates here. But before that came to light, others were paid off and silenced after complaining of the same offence.

The easily recognisable elements of Rupert Murdoch’s style occur over and over again in his UK track record: lies, bullying, legal bribery, schmoozing top officials, illegal privacy invasion, falling standards of journalism, a preference for monopolies in his favour, and a steadily declining quality of editorial content.

The idea that he could be thought a potentially responsible owner of a huge television conglomerate in Britain is beyond parody. The fact that Jeremy Hunt has given Newscorp ‘more time’ to do something or other is suspicious. And if the BSkyB takeover is allowed to proceed, everyone with a scintilla of objectivity will believe – with justification – that the decision is corrupt.