That the British House of Commons could unanimously give Rupert Murdoch the two-finger salute turns the rules of the British political game upside down. "Never offend Murdoch" has been the key maxim of elite power in Britain for 30 years.
After a week in which revelations of phone hacking, police bribery, and a cover-up forced the Murdoch-owned tabloid News of the World to close, the Australian-born media baron withdrew an £8 billion bid for full control of British satellite broadcaster BskyB as every party pledged to back a parliamentary motion declaring the bid "not in the public interest." The point was personal. The unmistakable motivation was that Murdoch's power was too great, out of control, and needed to be reduced. Not a single voice in Parliament would speak up in Murdoch's defense after the public, which always had low expectations of its tabloid press, now found that the tabloids were not only aggressive and amoral but straightforwardly criminal too.
For a generation, Murdoch has cultivated his own legend as the man who could make or break British governments. As the chief executive officer and chair of the News Corporation, he owned four British papers: the high-minded Times and its more aggressive Sunday Times stablemate, alongside the tabloid daily Sun and its Sunday sister The News of the World. Murdoch's power play was to use The Sun, Britain's best-selling tabloid, to "call" the big moments of British political transition, making choices which general elections would simply ratify. Prime ministers and party leaders feared his wrath and craved his support. They believed that they could never win or hold power without him.
"It was The Sun Wot Won It" declared the tabloid the day after the Labour party's fourth successive General Election defeat in 1992. The surprise result followed a sustained campaign of character assassination against its leader, Neil Kinnock. Pages and days of "Nightmare on Kinnock Street" propaganda culminated in an election day front page with his head on a lightbulb: "If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights?" The British public decided that Kinnock wasn't prime-minister material.
Having put conservative John Major in, The Sun helped to destroy him six months after the election. On the night that the pound was devalued, Major turned his mind to media management and personally called Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie. The prime minister as supplicant: "I hope you're not going to be too tough, Kelvin," said a nervous Major. ""Well, John, let me put it this way," the tabloid editor replied, "I've got a large bucket of shit lying on my desk, and tomorrow morning I'm going to pour it all over your head." He kept his word.
Yet another iconic front page "The Sun Backs Blair" saw Murdoch's men coronate a young pretender who had flown around the world at a few days' notice to court Murdoch. New Labour had laid the ghost of Kinnock. The pro-European Tony Blair, a week before the 1997 election, wrote in the Eurosceptic Sun to mark St. George's Day, declaring that he "loved the pound."
A decade later, The Sun chose Labour leader Gordon Brown's "Convention" moment -- his keynote speech to the final pre-election party conference in Autumn 2009 -- to again remake the political weather. That night, the airwaves were dominated by The Sun's decision to switch its allegiance from Labour to David Cameron's Conservatives.
Rupert could get what he wanted, pursuing pet political themes but, above all, aggressively advancing his own commercial interests. Yet there was always an element of conjuring trick to his power. Academics could show that Sun readers had been no more likely to switch to Blair than those who did not read any paper. The critique remained academic while leaders and advisers would not risk their careers to test it. Murdoch was more powerful in 1992 -- The Sun had 14 million readers then, but has lost a third since -- as the press had a much larger share of voice in the pre-Internet age.
Andy Coulson, who was David Cameron's communications director, resigned as a Murdoch editor in 2007 when his royal correspondent was jailed for hiring a private investigator to hack the royal household's mobile phones. At the time, News International, one of Murdoch's papers, stuck to the line that "one rogue reporter" had acted alone, as evidence mounted to the contrary, buying off hacking victims with large payouts and confidentiality clauses. The wider scandal was waiting to break for four years, but most of the British press showed little interest in breaking it. This was the very British story of a very clubbable elite, with an informal nonaggression pact between proprietors, and more than a few guilty consciences about what had been going on in other newsrooms too. If the liberal Guardian had not doggedly stuck with the tale, and The New York Times Magazine investigation had not reignited the issue by demonstrating the police's failure to investigate, then it might just all have gone away.
The public was shocked, after the cover-up crumbled, when the issue became about much more than violating the privacy of politicians and celebrities. When the 13-year-old schoolgirl Milly Dowler was murdered, The News of the World did not just hack into her voicemails; they deleted them once the mailbox was full, misleading her family into hoping she may still be alive. As that story broke, the most jaw-dropping moment of all was News International's chilling briefing that considerably worse revelations would follow.
Nobody was off limits. A paper that had always shouted about being "the voice of the victims" is alleged to have violated the privacy of the grieving families of dead soldiers, those killed in the London bombings of 2005, and may perhaps turn out to have done so for 9/11 victims too.
Murdoch made bold moves -- summarily closing down the 163-year-old News of the World newspaper and sacking its 200-member staff -- but this was all tactics and no strategy. News International had always played power politics with intimidating panache under the old rules but knew nothing about how to respond to demands for accountability. Advertisers deserted it within 48 hours under intense pressure on social networks to take a stand.
The scandal has a long way to run with a judge-led inquiry to come. The police may well come out of it worse than the hacks. Nobody can predict how far the culture of the British newspapers will or won't change.
But Murdoch's political power can never return. He used Macchiavelli's maxim, that it is better to be feared than loved, to dominate British politics. Even those who got closest, including Blair, privately bemoaned the Faustian pact. Almost nobody now regrets his fall. But, as the British political class now emerges blinking into the sunlight, many remain astonished that this most dreaded of media moguls should suddenly be friendless in Westminster.
