The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  With Robert in position, the pace of change quickened. Excellent though much of it was, The Journal sometimes moved at a stately pace. Robert decried the months spent on researching and writing the paper’s ‘long reads’. ‘It’s like the gestation of a llama,’ he complained — that’s 11 months. He ordered more and shorter stories for modern, time-pressed readers, and revamped the newspaper’s static design. And Rupert, having forgotten his dream of becoming publisher himself, told me I was to become publisher as well as CEO.

  Running Dow Jones involved a lot of dry but important work: subscription pricing, printing contracts, advertising rates, web strategy, headcount reductions, potential acquisitions, potential disposals. It was grinding and unglamorous most of the time, but satisfying as the company slowly came through the crisis and The Journal grew stronger.

  There were also unforgettable moments — encounters with dozens of important people, a procession of fame and power. This happens with all great newspapers, but I had never worked at one with such a global reach, or with so many powerful people eager to talk to its editors.

  These meetings are dotted through my calendar. I met Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s cold-eyed prime minister, in a fortified Manhattan hotel in July 2010, and found him chilling in his readiness to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities.

  In September 2008, I sat with Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, as — close to tears — he talked about the legacy of his wife Benazir Bhutto, who had been murdered in a bomb attack nine months before when running for election as prime minister.

  I listened to General Pervez Musharraf, sitting forlornly in The Journal offices as he spoke of his life in exile. In the medieval machinations of Pakistani politics he had been forced to quit to avoid impeachment and been replaced by Zardari. I talked to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, the tall, bony-faced, incongruously soft-spoken head of a conquering rebel army who rose to be his tiny landlocked nation’s president. To some he was its saviour; to others he was a smart-suited tyrant.

  I met General David Petraeus at the height of his military career when he was a potential presidential candidate; he arrived with his gold-braided retinue to talk of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  I knew Harvey Weinstein slightly from parties at Rupert’s. He greeted me one evening in the lobby of the News Corp building on Sixth Avenue as I was leaving the office. He was on the way to a New York Post reception. ‘I always accept a New Pork Post invitation,’ he said, with a little laugh. ‘Got to stay friends with Page Six.’ This exchange took on more significance in 2017 when multiple allegations of sexual assault rained down on him.

  I was wandering through the office one morning, deep in thought, when someone grabbed and pumped my hand. ‘Good morning,’ said George W. Bush, with that familiar tight-lipped smile. ‘Have a good day.’ He was on his way to Rupert’s office to discuss his memoirs.

  I remember the free-market apostles of The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board giving a hard time to Hank Paulson, the US secretary of the treasury, after the Federal Reserve contributed a $30 billion loan to rescue the Bear Stearns investment bank as it was about to be swept away in the financial crisis. Paulson protested it was done to forestall a worldwide financial meltdown.

  And I remember listening to Bill Gates as he slumped languidly in a swivel chair, bulky zip-up sweater under his jacket, making smart observations in the computer geek dialect that relies so heavily on the word ‘super’ — super-smart, super-exciting, super-cool. He spoke with oddly self-effacing pride of the good his charitable billions would do around the world, and I wondered whether he was becoming the first emperor of an age of philanthropic imperialism.

  Early in February 2010, Steve Jobs came to the office to demonstrate his latest creation — the iPad. An Apple advance guard warned against shaking his hand. Jobs had undergone a liver transplant and was avoiding all risk of infection. But as he stepped towards me, gaunt in his uniform of black turtleneck and jeans, he reached out his hand to grasp mine. He impressed me hugely — not least because when I had trouble operating my device, the iPad’s creator gave me his personal tuition. Jobs left behind a half dozen of his new devices for us to develop an app for The Wall Street Journal. But the security-obsessed genius imposed conditions: we had to keep them padlocked to a table in a windowless room with no more than six people given access to them.

  I found myself upstaged by mighty people. The day I was due to speak to the Association of American Publishers, they asked me to put back my speech due to the early arrival of another speaker. I sat at the side of the platform and listened to Bill Clinton talk brilliantly on books and life for almost an hour before surrendering the podium to me. ‘Your turn now,’ he smiled. As I pronounced on the arcane challenges of the digital world, the audience drained away.

  At dinner on Central Park West, a slick and self-important man in his thirties held court about the promise and change that was coming to his homeland. I told him of my happy childhood days in his country. ‘Please accept my invitation to visit,’ he said. ‘You will be my guest. We will visit together where you lived as a child. I know the road. It will be an honour to greet you.’ I declined the invitation to Libya from Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, heir apparent to his father, Muammar Gaddafi. Libya did not fulfil young Gaddafi’s promise.

  Kath and I went to the apartment of the PR guru Peter Brown for a dinner he was holding for Tony and Cherie Blair. Brown apologised to Kath in advance for the seating plan. ‘You are next to Bobby,’ he told her. ‘He’s charming, but very quiet, and has difficulty making conversation. I’m afraid he will be hard work.’

  Barbara Walters, the American broadcaster, nodded in understanding. ‘Just so long as I’m not sitting next to him,’ she said.

  Kath handled this by encouraging her silent neighbour’s appetite for vodka martinis, and pretty soon Robert de Niro was expounding loudly to Tony Blair about the failings of America’s public education system.

  These were the moments that relieved the toil behind the scenes as Dow Jones was mired in the recession.

  There were also trips around the world, both enjoyable and numbing. I am happy never to repeat the suffocating formality of meetings with government officials in Beijing, sipping green tea, listening to their vapid droning, longing to escape. After I quit, I took Kath back and we saw the real Beijing, wandering lost through the city streets, drinking cheap beer and eating spicy backstreet food.

  I went across America, and across Europe, and to India, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia. These trips were exhausting, packed with back-to-back meetings, lunches, speeches, and dinners.

  Sometimes I failed to keep up the pace. I arrived in Hyderabad, India, in December 2009 to make a speech to the World Association of Newspapers. The speech contributed to our crusade against free newspaper content online. I talked about the hardship confronting print — ‘algorithm and blues’ — and warned against the internet’s false prophets — ‘beware of geeks bearing gifts’.

  Pleased with my speech, I sought out old colleagues for a reunion drink, putting from my mind the important midnight conference call I had with Rupert and a dozen News Corp executives. When midnight arrived — by this time I had not slept properly for 24 hours — I linked in to the call and settled on my hotel bed, the receiver resting by my ear. It was 45 minutes later when the text message chirp on my mobile woke me. It was apparently the latest of a series I had received from Robert Thomson and Rebekah Brooks: ‘Wake up. Rupert’s asking you a question’; ‘Wake up … We can hear you snoring’.

  I had answered most of Rupert’s questions with heavy breathing. ‘I think we’ve lost Les,’ he had said. Awake again, I made minor contributions before Rupert wound up the call. ‘You can go back to sleep now,’ he told me.

  In Tokyo with Rupert, we were swept into the city in a caravan of black limousines. The cars sped along within inches of one another until Rupert’s, at the
head of the line, braked sharply and ours smashed into it. Robert, a former Tokyo correspondent, married to an elegant Chinese woman, and so steeped in the ways and manners of the East that he could seem like an Asian trapped in a Caucasian body, whispered instant advice: ‘Whatever you do, when we stop, don’t get out of the car and check the damage. This is a deep, deep humiliation for our driver, crashing into the car of such a famous and important man.’

  I obeyed Robert’s instruction, but of course Rupert hadn’t been privy to it. He leapt from his back seat to check what had happened, running his hand across the dents, beaming at our adventure. Robert, fearing for our stricken driver’s wellbeing, spoke to him in Japanese, using soothing tones and making many bows.

  By 2011, I had been running large companies for a quarter of a century. I had signed a five-year contract that would expire at the end of 2012, when I would be approaching my sixty-ninth birthday. By then, I would have been in full-time employment since I was 15 — for 53 years. I told Kath that, even if asked, I would not continue as a full-time executive; that it was time, finally, to ease up and put together that portfolio of part-time work.

  But my plans for a tidy retreat would soon be in ruins. Five years before, when I was still executive chairman of News International, a News of the World reporter, Clive Goodman, had pleaded guilty to hacking into the mobile voice messages of members of Prince Charles’ household. When Goodman and his accomplice, a private investigator, were sent to prison, many people, including me, believed the case was closed. We were wrong. Back in Britain a bomb was ticking.

  CHAPTER 26

  Thirteen days in July

  Burford is an ancient Cotswolds town of honey-coloured cottages on the edge of the tame curves of the River Windrush in Oxfordshire. The hills surrounding Burford are softly contoured and covered by a patchwork palette of greens, as impossibly perfect as a computer-generated image from a Hobbit film.

  At Burford’s heart is a priory with a long history of tranquillity, prayer, notoriety, and power. By 2011 — behind its Jacobean veil of towering chimneys, sharp gables, and golden masonry — the priory had joined the twenty-first century. It was now the seat of modern influence, as well as dubious modernity; the Gregorian chants echoing through the old chapel came from an iPod, and the candlelight dancing on the altar walls was battery powered.

  A rich and important couple owned Burford Priory. She was building her own reputation beneath the shadow of her family’s name; he was a world-class practitioner in the business of important connections. Since their marriage 10 years before, his public relations business had prospered; his wife’s family was one of the best-connected on earth.

  Elisabeth Murdoch was 42 and Matthew Freud 47. They were what facile headlines describe as a ‘golden couple’, and the evening of 2 July 2011 would be the social apex of their life together. That weekend, they staged an epic party in the grounds of their new home. The couple had spent millions refurbishing the Priory, and they wanted a housewarming for the ages.

  But the party would also become an unintended farewell for a powerful axis of British life. That night, we danced on the brink of a cataclysmic chain of events that would shatter this world and the lives and friendships of many guests and hundreds of others. It would also see the death of a 168-year-old newspaper with the biggest circulation in the English-speaking world.

  The Freud-Murdochs were famous for their parties, although they were really his parties. Liz Murdoch’s career had been measured, impossibly, against the success of her father’s, but now she was making her own way in the television industry. Freud, however, depended on his reputation as a party giver. It was a tangible asset of his public relations business, and the Murdoch brand gave it immense added equity.

  Freud mixed people for a living. His magic ingredients were politicians, celebrities, big-money business people, and journalists. His business idea worked best in London because of the kind of town it is. He had tried the formula unsuccessfully in the United States. The people he needed were spread across a continent and centred in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington DC. They were much harder to shepherd together. In Britain, London is the cross-pollinating heart of power.

  An invitation to a Freud-Murdoch party was an assembly bell for these people. Politicians need to meet other powers. They also need to maintain support — and Murdoch support mattered to them. Journalists like mingling with people who make news, but they are also susceptible to seduction, some more than others. Freud was good at seduction, really good; he selected his journalist guests with care. The celebrities were easy; he had started his career as a show business PR, and they liked and trusted him.

  The final, crucial ingredients were the actual money earners — corporate clients. They came from less glamorous worlds: the soft drinks business, supermarket chains, clothing stores, and chocolate makers. Freud introduced them to power and glitter, and they lined up to pay him for it. His company did important, duller, work for them, but this was the shiny bait that made it fun to be his client. Where else could a supermarket boss listen to Sting, strumming out a midnight song? Or watch Mick Jagger on the dance floor, towered over by his 6-foot 3-inch then-companion, L’Wren Scott? Or see Tony Blair chatting to Bono? And they could count on a sighting of the ultimate tycoon whenever Rupert Murdoch was in town.

  I stood with George Osborne at his first Freud party, before he became Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, and well before he turned newspaperman himself. There were Labour government ministers there, too; the guest lists were carefully ecumenical.

  ‘We’re just Freud’s props,’ I told him. ‘The important people are the paying clients. Just wait until he brings over some business big shot from PepsiCo he wants to impress by introducing you.’

  Five minutes later, Freud appeared. ‘George, I want you to meet the chief marketing officer of PepsiCo Europe,’ he said.

  Osborne gave me a quick smile, but he also played the game, exhibiting intense interest in all the marketing director had to say. The geeky stiffness of Osborne’s public image was a political handicap, but also misleading — in fact, he could be charming and entertaining company, and was famously fond of good wine.

  Freud had spent years as a collector of important people, and the gathering on 2 July 2011 would be his climactic work. Bono was there, as was the actress Helena Bonham Carter and her then husband, the director, Tim Burton. Lily Allen the singer was there with her husband, and many other celebrities wandered the elegant gardens.

  There were politicians of all hues: Michael Gove, then education secretary; Ed Vaizey, the minister responsible for media policy; David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, who had been beaten by his brother Ed to the Labour Party leadership and was indiscreet that night about his brother’s suitability for the job. Sitting on my left was Douglas Alexander, who had been a youthful cabinet minister in the defeated Labour government.

  Media was there in force: Mark Thompson, then director general of the BBC (Rupert loathed the BBC, but it was an important customer for his daughter’s programmes); Piers Morgan, with his rowdy social style, even more ebullient at the start of his CNN days, which would not end well; Jeremy Clarkson, the chain-smoking, blunt-talking television personality and columnist; Jon Snow, who liked to tell people his left-leaning Channel 4 News was The Guardian of the airways; Robert Peston, a former Financial Times journalist who had become a famous face on BBC News. Peston’s closeness to some at News International, including managing director Will Lewis and corporate affairs director Simon Greenberg, would later lead to speculation that he was being spoon-fed selective stories about the phone-hacking scandal to show the ‘Murdoch machine’ in a positive light.

  Kath and I arrived with Rebekah Brooks and her husband, Charlie; we were guests at their Chipping Norton home. Brooks and I were already feeling the heat of the phone-hacking affair, but I could never imagine what was to come.

  Rupert
was not at the party. Maybe he had unavoidable business; maybe he was kept away by certain names on the guest list, or the growing tensions with his independent-minded son-in-law. Freud often displeased Rupert, not least when he appointed himself family spokesman and gave The New York Times candid views of Roger Ailes, then head of Fox News: ‘I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder, and every other global media business aspires to.’

  Present or not, Rupert’s aura was the lure for many of the guests. The Freud-Murdochs were his social ambassadors in London. Prime Minister David Cameron was a regular visitor to Burford, but he was also absent that night. His communications director, Andy Coulson, had resigned six months before. Coulson had been editor of the News of the World when phone-hacking was going on at the paper, and doubts were growing despite his denials.

  The deep-pocketed clients bathed in the excitement, and Freud was exultant in tight leather trousers — fractionally too tight — marching guests through his vast new home. Someone said it had 22 bedrooms.

  We represented that night the component parts of British life at the top: rival politicians, competing company bosses, warring television moguls, and enemy editors. It was a summit meeting, a high gathering of the New Establishment, a sea of shiny-faced excitement on a hot summer’s night, and, for all our clashing interests, there was a wary camaraderie, a fraternity of self-importance, that held us together. We were all happy participants in this tournament of egos.