#Leveson :James and Rebekah revealed the arrogant Murdoch way of business

There was a telling lack of judgment on display when James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks burst into the Independent to berate me

 

James Murdoch has been giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry about the day he and Rebekah Brooks arrived at the Independent office. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

As far as I recall – yes, I think that's the phrase – it was late afternoon and I was sitting with the Independent's art director working on that night's front page. I looked up to see first Rebekah Brooks and then James Murdoch in the middle of the paper's newsroom, and heading my way.

Murdoch was holding a copy of the Independent. It was a week or so prior to the general election of 2010, and we were running a promotion that asserted the (non-controversial) fact that the British electorate were capable of making their own minds up and would not be manipulated by vested interests.

A series of slogans made up a mini-campaign on billboards and on the front page of promotional copies of the newspaper. "Trade union money won't decide this election. You Will", proclaimed one. "Lord Ashcroft won't decide this election. You Will", said another. And, yes, we dared also to present the proposition that "Rupert Murdoch won't decide this election. You Will".

My main feeling on being approached in this manner by James Murdoch – "What are you playing at?" he said, brandishing the paper – was one of embarrassment: I was embarrassed for him, I was embarrassed for the people around me, and, of course, I was embarrassed for myself.

I took him and Brooks into the room where we held our conferences. (Of course, I should have insisted that our exchange took place in the full hearing of our newsroom, but that was something I have to file under l'esprit d'escalier.)

I sat on a sofa, Brooks perched on the arm of another sofa, and Murdoch walked and talked. He was excitable and angry. "You've impugned the reputation of my family," he said at one point. He called me "a fucking fuckwit" and became furious at my bemusement that he should find our campaign so upsetting, given that one of his newspapers famously claimed that it did indeed decide elections.

Brooks said very little, but, when her boss's rage blew itself out, chipped in with: "We thought you were our friend". Their use of language and the threatening nature of their approach came straight from the "Mafioso for Beginners" handbook.

Murdoch referred to "my family" constantly, something he echoed in his Leveson evidence today. Referring to this exchange, he said that I had been the beneficiary "of my family's hospitality for a number of years". Set in the context of his many dissemblings and obfuscations over recent months, the fact that this is a bald-faced lie is neither here nor there, just a casual slur despatched with little regard for the facts. (For the record, I went to Elisabeth Murdoch's 40th birthday party in September 2008, the only time I can be accused of "availing myself" of Murdoch hospitality.)

His statement does, however, reveal a much wider and more significant truth: the Murdoch way of doing business. If you come to our parties, if you join us on our yachts, if you are at our cosily-arranged dinner table, we might expect something in return, but we certainly don't expect you act in a way contrary to our interests. And if our largest-selling newspaper supports your political party … well, it's not difficult to guess the rest.

In retrospect, that incident in the Independent newsroom was the first sign of a fissure in the edifice of News International. Little more than a footnote in newspaper history it may be, but what it betrayed was a breathtaking lack of judgment and discretion, the head of the country's most powerful media organisation straying on to the sovereign territory of another newspaper to berate the editor over an incontestable truth in an advertising campaign. It's the same lack of judgment, together with a monumental arrogance in the wielding of corporate power, that has led us to where we are today. Which, of course, is the eve of the appearance before Lord Justice Leveson of Rupert Murdoch, the capo di tutti capi.


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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/24/james-murdoch-rebekah-brooks-simon-kelner-independen?CMP=twt_gu