The Murdochs face MPs: a surreal blame exercise
After a lifetime trying to avoid a session like this, you could see Rupert Murdoch’s logic. He wasn’t very good at this sort of thing. Certainly not now he’s 80. His son James kept trying to butt in and protect his father from questions but the MPs were much keener to hear from the patriarch. Why did he come in the back door of No. 10 (because they ask me to), why didn’t he know what was going on at News of the World? (because it’s a 1% pin-prick of the empire, or was).
When James Murdoch did speak, it was a surreal blame exercise. Why hadn’t senior figures at News International known about rampant phone hacking and illegality on their watch (one day someone will do an audit of how many front page scoops were owed to hacking)? James Murdoch blamed the inadequate police inquiry which had reassured him the problems were limited, he blamed his own lawyers, “outside counsel”. They were a “pillar” of the “push-back” – a central reason why News International bosses were in blissful ignorance of how their best-selling paper was getting many of its most prominent stories. He even blamed the Press Complaints Commission – they’d given him a bill of clean health. What else was he to think?
The Committee looked to me a touch baffled by James Murdoch’s insistence that he had signed off £700,000 deal and gagging order with Gordon Taylor without thinking anything odd about the hefty sums. The corker of new information was James Murdoch’s answer, extracted like a wisdom tooth without anaestetic, admitting that News International had carried on paying Glenn Mulcaire’s legal fees long after his conviction.
There was the theatre of MPs getting to ask Rupert Murdoch why he comes in the No. 10 back door fully knowing the answer. The Labour MP who asked, was treated to an answer about Rupert Murdoch being invited to No. 10 by David Cameron within days of the election … he probably didn’t want the rest of the answer, Rupert Murdoch talking about the Browns having been good friends, playdates between the Murdoch children and the Brown children.
