Man who made millions out of paying people to ask difficult questions finally faced questioners he could not cope with
Rupert Murdoch is in trouble. In two days as a witness at the Leveson inquiry he has blocked and blasted, smeared and smiled, and, at the end of it, this most powerful of men still has his ankle caught in the snare of scandal. He is vulnerable.
This is a man who is used to getting his way. He is not used to being confronted by people who have the power, the skill and the simple effrontery to challenge him ? and to keep on challenging him. On Wednesday morning, he walked in with all the protection that his advisers could give him in the previous days of detailed briefings and endless rehearsals. By Thursday morning, there were times when he had lost the script, lost the plot and he simply sat there, with nobody to help him and no way out.
Just after 11.30am, there was one riveting and typical exchange, in which he tried all the manoeuvres which would normally have allowed him to create some diversion to avoid answering a question. And all of them failed.
Robert Jay QC, for the inquiry, wanted to know how Murdoch had reacted to a letter from Max Mosley, whose involvement with prostitutes was exposed by the News of the World, pointing out that a high court judge had found that one of his reporters had engaged in blackmail to try to persuade a prostitute to tell what she knew about him. Was that acceptable behaviour?
Murdoch went first for a standard manoeuvre. Ignorance. He hadn't read the letter. "I was out of town or something." Jay pushed on, suggesting he must have been aware of the judge's comment. Murdoch tried a different manoeuvre. He turned tough. So what if his reporter had threatened to reveal the prostitute's identity if she didn't co-operate? "I'm not as shocked as he is by that." Then, without pausing, he threw in a smear, oddly aimed at the former lawyer for the Sunday Times, Alastair Brett: "I'm more shocked by the behaviour of Mr Brett in not telling the truth of a lot of things."
On any other day with almost any other opponent, at least one of these diversions would have worked, but Jay was not deflected. "Don't worry about Mr Brett. Have you read Mr Justice Eady's judgement?" Murdoch tried ignorance again. "No." Jay started to summarise the judge's conclusion, that "your journalists, or at least one of them, had perpetrated blackmail of these two women". Murdoch tried a quibble. "Two women, or one?" Jay simply ignored him. Murdoch tried a bigger quibble: this wasn't blackmail, it was just a journalist doing a favour for the prostitute. Jay was just beginning to reply, when things got much worse. Lord Justice Leveson joined in, like the headmaster walking in on a rowdy classroom.
"I'd like to go into that for just a moment please, Mr Murdoch." Leveson bristles with intelligence and a courteous indifference to the status of his witnesses. Was Murdoch really saying that it was acceptable for one of his journalists to threaten to embarrass somebody by exposing their identity "even though there may not be a public interest" and then to offer them money if they agreed to co-operate?
"I don't know that she was offered money, but ?"
"She certainly was offered money."
"Well, I accept that for the moment, if you say so, I just ? "
"Look, Mr Murdoch, I wasn't there. I've only read the judgment. But I ought to make it very clear to you that I find that approach somewhat disturbing, because I don't think Mr Justice Eady is using too strong a word if he describes it as a form of blackmail. And, therefore, if it is the culture and practice of the press that this is acceptable, I would like to know that. I really would."
So it was that this most powerful man was compelled to agree that he would go off and read the judgment, which he claimed not to have read; and to submit in writing his view about whether or not it is acceptable for reporters to engage in blackmail.
This was the pattern of the day. The man who has made millions out of paying people to ask difficult questions, finally faced questioners he could not cope with. This is not just a matter of Murdoch losing various arguments in court. The potential danger to him goes wider in at least two ways.
First, as he found himself pushed into one corner after another, he fell back on aggression as the easiest form of defence and proceeded to create or, at least to confirm, the enmity of a string of people who may well now choose to join the attack on him. He went out of his way to smear the Daily Telegraph, took several swipes at the Daily Mail and gratuitously insulted Le Monde. He laid into former friends, including Gordon Brown and Paul Dacre; and former employees, including the former Sun editor David Yelland, his former in-house lawyers Alastair Brett and Tom Crone, and even his former housekeeper ("a very strange bird"). If any of them strikes back, he may live to regret that tactic.
Second, Murdoch may have finished his evidence, but Leveson has not yet finished with him. Later this year, Leveson will produce a report over which Murdoch will have no control at all. Murdoch has stood by his denials on a cluster of core questions ? that he never knew about illegal activity at the News of the World, that he does not approve of unethical journalism, that he never sought favours from politicians and never received any. Over the last two days, the media mogul has done his best to enforce those denials on his troublesome inquisitors.
The great underlying question ? whose answer will settle finally the reputation of Rupert Murdoch and perhaps the future of his business ? is whether those denials are to be believed. It is Lord Justice Leveson and not Murdoch who will deliver the verdict. Even the head of News Corporation sometimes must have to stand naked.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/26/rupert-murdoch-reputation-leveson-verdict
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