What do you do with a global firm now worth $50bn, run by its family founders who control most of the votes but only 13% of the equity, when the CEO turns 80 and the empire is clearly too large for its management? That was the central issue highlighted on Tuesday in the Wilson room in the Commons. It was convenient for the old man, when asked for evidence he stumbled over and couldn’t provide, to dismiss his ignorance on grounds that he’d “lost sight of” the details because News of the World had been less than 1% of the total enterprise. Amnesia can be a useful ally in a cover-up, as it was for Reagan in the Iran-Contra fiasco. But here it was probably genuine. The truth revealed starkly yesterday is that the Murdoch empire is now too large for the Murdochs to be able to govern effectively. Continue reading
Tagged with Rupert Murdoch
Police collusion, government complacency almost as serious as NoW law-breaking
The police have a great deal to answer for over this media crisis and one resignation, however honourable, does not exculpate their collective liability. Three months ago the Guardian highlighted that “we now know that in dealing with the phone-hacking affair at the NoW, they (the Met) cut short their original inquiry, suppressed evidence, misled the public and the press, concealed information, and broke the law”. Police HQ failed to change course or to intensify investigations or to act decisively on the damning information they hade been sitting on for years. The stunning Guardian revelation nearly a year earlier, in July 2009, that there were “thousands” of victims of NoW hacking came from a very senior police officer close to Sir Paul Stephenson. Why did the police do nothing to follow it up vigorously and immediately? Continue reading
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Different rules apply?
For the record, here’s the extract from Sir Paul Stephenson’s resignation statement which has enabled Yvette Cooper to pinpoint the critical question which now has to be asked about phone hacking — why different rules apply to the Met police commissioner and the prime minister over their respective phone hacking links: Continue reading
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Hackgate: notes on political crises
Westland didn’t bring down Thatcher, Major took on the Maastricht Bastards and lived. Not even the combination of illegal war against Iraq, the Kelly suicide and cash for peerages was enough to force Blair to quit. Prime ministers, it seems, invariably ride out a little local difficulty.
I do not see anything in either the extent or the seriousness of Hackgate that leads inexorably to the conclusion that the Coalition is on the point of imminent collapse. Blog posts and newspaper columns from both the more impressionable variety of younger leftist and diehard Tory rightwingers who never had much time for Cameron anyway should probably be disregarded.
The British electorate repeatedly demonstrates a surprising willingness to forgive and forget. Remember the MPs’ expenses scandal, when it was widely suggested that the next parliament would be chock-a-block with the likes of Esther Rantzen and Simon Heffer, elected on independent tickets? It never happened, of course.
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What the downfall of the Mafia State should tell us
Amid all the reportage of the crumbling of the Murdoch empire, one important matter has been glossed over. Why did it happen at all? It wouldn’t have but for three events. The first is the tenacity of the Guardian, despite all the fob-offs from the police, the politicians and News International over a period of 5 years. Second was the stunning revelation on 4 July that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked into and some of the messages deleted to make way for more, which could only have been leaked from the notes of Glen Mulcaire, the NoW private investigator, held by the police. This started the wave of national revulsion against the Murdoch tactics. Third was Ed Miliband’s decision to cut loose from the Murdoch stranglehold and stage a Parliamentary debate to demand that the BSkyB bid be delayed till the public inquiry and police investigation were completed, which Cameron was then forced to back. Without each of these triggers the fall of Murdoch might well not now be happening. Continue reading
