Rupert Murdoch waited years for a pliant government - now he’s got one
We are living in the age of the nonagenarian: the Queen continues to gain popularity against her elected officials, and Rupert Murdoch has been given everything he’s ever asked for, just a few weeks from his 91st birthday.
In between meetings in Saudi Arabia, Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, announced the removal of legal restrictions designed to prevent the media mogul from interfering in the editorial independence of the Times and the Sunday Times, hurdles put in place by Margaret Thatcher when he bought the newspapers in 1981.
Murdoch has long railed against these restrictions, which he described as state interference, but which allowed him to avoid a deal-busting referral. It took until July 2019 for his complaints to gain any traction, the same month Boris Johnson became prime minister.
This shows how much has changed in the past decade: I was told that when Murdoch’s directors wanted to discuss these restrictions after the phone-hacking scandal, they were rebuffed. Now he has got what he wanted all along. Having weathered scandal and breakup, Murdoch really is like the fictional character he is most often compared to; like Succession’s Logan Roy, he is not just still standing at the end of season three, but continuing to win.
Murdoch’s strength stands in marked contrast to the prime minister, a former journalist once sacked by a Murdoch publication for falsifying a quote, who suddenly needs his friends in the media more than ever. The revolving door between Downing Street and Fleet Street has already seen Johnson’s director of communications become deputy editor-in-chief of the Sun, a paper which failed to break any major “partygate” stories. Some publications featured extensive stories and headlines about the
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