D.D. Guttenplan | The Nation
London Chooses a Mayor—Again
London
Does it matter who wins today’s election for mayor of London? To the candidates, certainly. If Labour’s Ken Livingstone loses his bid to return to the office he held from 2000 to 2008, that will probably mean the end of a political career that began in the Greater London Council, where Livingstone proved such a thorn in the side of Margaret Thatcher that she abolished municipal government all across Britain just to get rid of him. When Tony Blair returned self-government to London, Livingstone returned to the political stage, proving just as annoying to Blair.
Livingstone was a brilliant mayor. It wasn’t just getting through the congestion charge (a toll on cars entering central London)—something Mike Bloomberg and all his billions couldn’t manage in Manhattan. Or the successful introduction of the Oyster travelcards. Or his opposition to Blair and his successor Gordon Brown’s idiotic (and ruinously expensive) devotion to Public-Private Partnerships to finance capital projects. Or the brilliant redesign of Trafalgar Square from death-spiral traffic island to one of the world’s great public stages. Or even the truly statesmanlike way he kept the city together in the wake of the July 7, 2005, bomb attacks. Livingstone understood, more than any other British politician, the way cities worked, what they needed to grow and prosper and why people came to live in them—sometimes at great cost and across enormous distances.
Livingstone was a genius at leveraging the minimal powers granted the office—chiefly over public transport, urban planning and police numbers. He pushed through the congestion charge, he once told The Nation, because it was his only chance for revenue that didn’t depend on Whitehall’s largesse.
But like Ed Koch, the urban politician he resembled in so many ways (apart from their actual politics, which were poles apart), his abrasiveness eventually cost him re-election. Boris Johnson, the American-born, Eton-educated Tory who replaced him four years ago had the great advantage of not being taken seriously. When Livingstone called a Jewish reporter “a concentration camp guard” you could hear the wailing from Westminster to the Upper West Side. When it emerged that Johnson had written an article describing the Queen being greeted by “flag-waving piccaninnies,” everyone just said “Oh, that’s just Boris.”
Yet Johnson’s term has been far from the expected disaster. His self-appointed role as tribune of the plutocrats can be galling, and Londoners who depend on public transport have had to pay more than they might under Livingstone, but as a cyclist I’ve been glad to see the end of the notorious “bendy busses”—sixty-foot-long juggernauts perfect for Amsterdam’s segregated transit lanes but terrifying on London’s narrow streets. Johnson has also proved willing to defy his party on immigration and housing policies that would force the poor to leave London.
Brian Paddick, the gay former assistant police commissioner running on the Liberal Democrat line, managed just under 10 percent of the vote last time around—before his party got into bed with the Tories. This time he’s expected to finish barely ahead of the right-wing fringe UK Independence Party and the Greens.
The result has been a two-man race that has been compared, all too appropriately, with a pair of drunks at a wedding. Although only one of us can vote here, The Nation’s London bureau is divided on which would be worse—four more years of Boris braying on behalf of Britain’s oppressed bankers or four more years of Ken’s overweening arrogance. It wasn’t just the way Ken talked out of one side of his mouth about “rich bastards” who avoid paying their fair share of taxes—and then turned out to funnel his own considerable media earnings through a corporate shell. There was also his long track record of high-handed contempt for even constructive criticism—as borne out most recently, and most painfully, in his disastrous meeting with Jewish Labour supporters desperate for a few encouraging words.
Livingstone’s proposals to cut bus and Tube fares, buy energy in bulk (and pass the savings on to Londoners) and build affordable housing are all clearly preferable to Boris Johnson’s platform of trickle-down economics in which a supposedly resurgent financial sector serves as the engine of prosperity for the whole country. But elections are about more than policy choices—particularly mayoral elections.
For me the Jewish Question proved decisive. I just can’t support a candidate who views me and my kind with contempt—or even calculated disregard. Besides, if Boris does win, the politician with most to fear would be David Cameron.
But the bureau’s British member held her nose and voted for Livingstone, saying she couldn’t bear to help re-elect a Tory mayor. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
James Murdoch Lightly Grilled
London
According to SEC filings, James Murdoch’s base salary as chief executive of News Corporation’s Asian and European operations was $3.4 million. He was also eligible for a performance bonus of between $6 and $12 million. And a further signing bonus of 400,000 shares of company stock—presumably to secure his services from the many rivals bidding for the talents of the Harvard dropout and failed hip-hop record producer.
Those figures are worth bearing in mind when considering Murdoch minor’s response to the admirably precise summary of Robert Jay, the attorney acting as lead inquisitor to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture practice and ethics of the press, which was set up in response to the scandal last summer over revelations that reporters on the News of the World had hacked into the voicemail of various celebrities, politicians and figures in British life. At the time the hacking took place James Murdoch was busy running the British broadcaster BSkyB, but one of the first tasks he faced when he took over News International, the family’s British newspaper interests, in December 2007 was to settle a lawsuit by Gordon Taylor, head of the British football players’ union, whose phone had been hacked. The Taylor claim was significant because it exploded News Corp.’s claim that phone hacking, which first hit the headlines here with the January 2007 arrest of News of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman, had been limited to a lone “rogue reporter.” And in agreeing to a settlement of over $ 1 million James Murdoch was paying way over the odds, leading to suggestions that the payment was “hush money” to keep the scandal under wraps.
In July James told a parliamentary committee he had no idea what he was paying for when he signed off on the Taylor settlement. He stuck to his non-denial denials even after they were contradicted by the company’s former counsel and the News of the World’s former editor—and despite revelations that the company had sought to destroy millions of potentially incriminating e-mails.
“Either you were told about the evidence that linked others at the News of the World…and this was in effect a cover-up,” said Robert Jay, in which case Murdoch’s persistent denials amount to perjury. “Or you weren’t told and there was a failure of governance within the company.”
Jay’s day-long grilling of James Murdoch amounted to an elegant, and progressively restricting, series of variations on that theme. Watching both Murdochs bob and weave their way out of the inept grandstanding that too often characterized the parliamentary committee’s questions during the summer, it was impossible to avoid the thought that this was a job for a prosecutor, not a politician. And though there were few fireworks today—apart from the revelation of a secret back channel between the company and culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, which will probably cost Hunt his job—the forensic constriction of Jay’s questions left precious little room for Murdoch minor’s pretensions to either competence or probity. He may just about stay out of jail by claiming to be an idiot—which is not an option available to his father, who begins two days of testimony tomorrow morning.
The fundamental question for both Murdochs remains, What did they know, and when did they know it? But since the summer the list of crimes to be covered up just gets longer and longer. Besides invasion of privacy and perjury (in maintaining the “one rogue reporter” defense long after Murdoch executives were aware that the hacking culture was pervasive within the company), there is also extortion (muscling singer Charlotte Church out of her £100,000 fee to sing at Rupert’s wedding), destruction of evidence, bribery of police officers and other public officials, intimidation of witnesses and possibly even a connection to murder.
In the summer Labour MP Alan Keen tried to toss Rupert Murdoch a softball, saying, “You’ve been kept in the dark.” But the billionaire press baron refused to play ball: “Nobody kept me in the dark. Anything that’s seen as a crisis comes to me.”
Will Rupert repeat James’s claim—which provoked peals of laughter inside the overflow press tent—that “support of an individual newspaper for politicians one way or another is not something that I would ever link to a commercial transaction”? Does he share his son’s evident disgust that politicians and journalists who availed themselves “of the hospitality of my family for years” have proved such fickle friends? Tune in tomorrow and find out!
Rupert Murdoch Makes James an Offer He Can't Refuse
London
Does Elizabeth Murdoch know how to make gnocchi? Because this was the week when it became blindingly obvious that whoever was scripting Rupert Murdoch’s moves—personally flying in to London to open a new Sun on Sunday to replace the toxic News of the World; tweeting a defense of his fallen favorite, Rebekah Brooks, when it emerged that in addition to presiding over a paper that paid hundreds of thousands of pounds in bribes to policemen she’d also been loaned a police horse to ride; stripping his son James of his power over News International, the subsidiary that runs the News Corp.’s British newspapers and packing him off to work with Moe Greene in Las Vegas (Surely that should be “with Chase Carey in New York”?—ed.)—the swelling soundtrack had to be by Nino Rota and Ennio Morricone.
We still have a long wait for the box set—and the next installment, Murdoch in America: Judgment Day, won’t be released until prosecutors at the Department of Justice decide whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is designed to prevent the payment of bribes to foreign officials by US corporations in order to gain unfair advantage, applies to what Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers told the Leveson Inquiry was “the delivery of regular, frequent and sometimes significant sums of money to small numbers of public officials by journalists” in order to gain exclusive access to “salacious gossip” which the Sun, Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, could then splash all over the front page. Which presumably helped the paper sell more copies than its less-wired competitors.
Akers’s clear, detailed and devastating testimony on Monday meant that the Murdoch organization’s brief counter-attack against Brian Leveson’s investigation into British press corruption, which culminated in Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s former political editor and hatchet-man, whining about a “witch hunt,” was now sleeping with the fishes. Indeed if you were looking for the moment when the phone hacking probe turned from scandal to soap opera you could hardly better Kavanagh’s complaint that Murdoch’s “journalists are being treated like members of an organized crime gang.” Just how far that fall from grace is measured was shown on Thursday, when John Yates, the former assistant police commissioner who resigned over the summer, and who in 2009 decided there was no reason to reopen the phone hacking investigation—and who refused to tell deputy prime minister John Prescott his phone had been hacked—was quizzed about his habit of sharing a relaxing glass—or bottle—of champagne, or a meal at the Ivy, with his good friends at News International.
Earlier in the week the Welsh singer Charlotte Church settled her phone hacking claim against Murdoch for £ 650,000. “You are fighting a massive corporation with endless resources, a phenomenal amount of power, and it is just made really difficult,” said Church, who told the Guardian the News of the World “published a story about an affair her father had had and approached [Charlotte’s mother] Maria Church to tell her they had a “part two” of the story which they promised they would withdraw if she gave a first-hand account of her suicide attempt. They also asked to take photographs of her arms.” In November Church told the Leveson Inquiry that as a 13-year-old girl she’d been pressured into waiving her £100,000 fee to sing at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding to Wendi Deng in exchange for favorable treatment in his newspapers. (In case you were wondering, the statute of limitations for extortion under New York law is five years.)
Even in such a busy week it is worth taking a minute to reflect on what amounts to the firing of James Murdoch by his father. And here, tempting as it is to wallow in the family saga, the real action is taking place far from public view. Sidelining James may make for dramatic headlines, but what Murdoch is clearly trying to avoid is not the “Sicilian Vespers”—the baptismal bloodbath at the end of Godfather Part 1—but, to change metaphors, a Saturday Night Massacre. As older readers will recall, that was when a besieged and paranoid Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which in turn triggered the resignation of Attorney General Elliot Richardson, ultimately hastening Nixon’s resignation. The casting is straightforward: Murdoch as Nixon and Joel Klein, the former Justice Department trust-buster now heading News Corp’s Management and Standards Committee, as Cox. And in a post-modern masterstroke, the part of Roger Ailes, Nixon’s media strategist and the author of “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News” will be played by… Roger Ailes, Murdoch’s American muscle and president of Fox News.
In the past few weeks Klein’s committee has been desperately throwing underlings overboard in an attempt to protect the Murdochs. So far the strategy has worked—at least in terms of arrests. Certainly sending James to New York makes it unlikely his sleep will be disturbed by Scotland Yard.
But there is still the risk that at some point Murdoch himself will tell Klein’s committee they have done enough to help the British police. Or that—and this is made far more complicated by US election year politics—Klein’s former colleagues at the Justice Department will start issuing subpoenas. When that happens perhaps Klein—and certainly James Murdoch—might want to brush up on the Code Corleone: “Fredo, you’re my older brother, and I love you, but don’t ever side with anyone against the family again.”
When Will the Justice Department Get Serious About Murdoch?
London
The US Department of Justice, on its website, helpfully offers links to the text of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in fifteen languages, from Arabic to Urdu. The English version is sixteen pages long, and probably ought to be in Rupert Murdoch’s iPad so he can skim through it during his flight this week from New York to London, where the British branch of his media empire made more headlines on Saturday. That was when British police arrested another five journalists from the Sun, Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, including the paper’s current news editor, deputy editor, chief reporter and chief foreign correspondent, making a total of ten current and former Sun staff who have been arrested in the past four months. A few hours after the arrests Tom Mockridge, who replaced Rebekah Brooks (arrested in July) as head of News International, Murdoch’s British newspaper subsidiary, read out a memo to staff quoting his boss’s “total commitment to own and publish the Sun.”
That such an assurance should have been necessary is a sign of just how bad things have been going for the economic migrant media mogul lately. And like all such assurances—older Nation-istas may recall George McGovern’s assurance that he stood behind vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton “1,000 per cent,” while younger readers can doubtless fill in their own examples of iron-clad promises made to be broken—no sooner are the words spoken than hopes begin to fade. The press here this morning was already full of pundits urging Murdoch to shun the Sun.
Although the paper sells 2.75 million copies a day—and makes tens of millions in profit a year, cross-subsidizing its up-market stablemates the Times and the Sunday Times—the temptation to offload it must be considerable. The latest arrests were triggered by Murdoch’s own Management and Standards Committee, an in-house group chaired by a prominent British barrister and which is supposed to ensure that the company cooperates with British authorities investigating phone hacking, payments to police and other public officials, and other public enquiries. The committee, which reports internally to Joel Klein, the former Justice Department official hired by Murdoch to run his education division, turned over some 300 million e-mails, expense forms and other internal memos to the British police, and it was that document dump that triggered Saturday’s arrests.
But as the Guardian’s Nick Davies, the reporter who broke the hacking scandal this summer, explained last week, what makes this handover particularly dangerous for the Murdochs is that this data, “which was apparently deliberately deleted from News International’s servers,” might also “yield evidence of attempts to destroy evidence the high court and police were seeking.” Destroying such evidence, or perverting the course of justice, as it’s known here, is a felony in Britain. But it is also a crime under the FCPA—§ 78m (b) 5, which states: “No person shall knowingly circumvent or knowingly fail to implement a system of internal accounting controls or knowingly falsify any book, record, or account.”
Although Davies’s reporting exploded the “rogue reporter” defense, until now the Murdochs have just about managed to maintain plausible deniability for themselves. But the traditional prosecution strategy of picking off the guilty underlings and then flipping them up the corporate ladder has gotten uncomfortably close to James Murdoch—and that was before the company started throwing employees off the train, which is how even longtime Murdoch minions like Trevor Kavanagh, the Sun’s former political editor, see this weekend’s arrests.
As the evidence mounts that much of Murdoch’s journalism was built on illegal invasions of privacy and corrupt relationships with police, three questions remain in urgent need of answers: Why should British authorities permit an in-house News Corporation committee, regardless of how fragrant its members may be, to serve as gatekeepers of the company’s records—especially when there is abundant evidence of efforts to destroy or delete incriminating evidence? In light of the latest arrests relating to corrupt payment to government officials, and bearing in mind actor Jude Law’s claim that his phone was hacked on his arrival at JFK airport, when will the Justice Department get serious about its own investigations? (There is also the lesser question of whether we are really to believe that methods which consistently delivered tabloid gold for editors and reporters in Britain would be too sleazy to tempt the high-minded hacks at the New York Post?)
And finally, what did the Murdochs know and when did they know it? Unlikely as it might have seemed in July, we may be about to find out. As more News Corp. executives come to believe they are being sacrificed to protect Rupert’s succession plan, the probability increases that someone who knows the answer will decide to cooperate with authorities. This gives the Justice Department, in particular, enormous leverage. In 2009 Siemens paid $800 million in fines for violating the FCPA—which also provides for possible prison sentences of up to five years. Amid the steady drumbeat of revelations from London it is important to keep an eye—and ear—on Washington. That’s where you’ll hear the sound of the other shoe dropping.
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Makes a Non-Denial Denial
London
If corporations really were people, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation would be breaking rocks. That’s the take-away from yesterday’s astonishing ruling by Geoffrey Vos, the judge presiding over the phone-hacking civil trial here. In agreeing to settle with thirty-seven victims yesterday the company clearly hoped to be able to draw a line under the scandal, which has already seen the closure of the world’s best-selling English language tabloid, The News of the World, and both Rupert Murdoch and his son James forced to give evidence before a Parliamentary select committee. With the trial scheduled to begin on February 13, the Murdochs must have hoped that if they could make the case go away by paying off the plaintiffs then the steady drip of information about News Corp.’s criminal activities—which include phone hacking, payments to police and breaking into e-mail accounts—might stop before it lead higher up the corporate chain of command.
The company’s first problem is that the thirty-seven victims who agreed to settle include many of the most famous boldface names—actor Jude Law, who had his phone messages hacked and was himself the target of physical surveillance by Murdoch’s men for a period of years received £130,000 (over $200,000); his ex-wife Sadie Frost got £50,000 (over $77,000); last May Law’s ex-girlfriend, Sienna Miller, was paid £100,000 (over $150,000) to settle her claim—it didn’t include all of them. Singer Charlotte Church, for example has yet to settle. So far just over half of those victims who have actually filed suit have agreed to settle. And there are literally hundreds of additional victims whose names have not yet been made public.
But a much bigger problem is that the documents already disclosed because of the civil suit suggest that in addition to routine invasions of privacy and bribery, Murdoch executives may also have been guilty of destroying evidence in order to cover up the company’s crimes. And as Richard Nixon and his henchman learned the hard way, it’s the cover-up that gets you in the end.
When News Corp.’s lawyer, Dinah Rose, told the judge, “There comes a point when we’re three weeks away from trial and…we can say enough is enough,” arguing the company had already turned over sufficient evidence to the plaintiffs, she sounded like any corporate lawyer used to getting her way. But Vos wasn’t buying. In ordering News Corporation to turn over three of their executives’ laptops and six desktop computers he said News Group, Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, “are to be treated as deliberate destroyers of evidence.”
“I have been shown a number of emails,” he said, “which show a rather startling approach to the email record.” Three days after Sienna Miller’s lawyers wrote to News Group asking the company to preserve any emails relating to phone hacking, “a previously conceived plan to conceal evidence was put in train by [News Group] managers,” the judge said.
Even as they apologized for the violations of privacy that led to yesterday’s settlements News Corporation’s lawyers were careful not to make any further admission of guilt. The corporation told the judge he could approve levels of compensation “as if senior employees and directors of [News Group] knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence.”
Take just a minute to think about what the company might have meant by using the word “director” there. Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who later served as David Cameron’s spin doctor wasn’t a company director. Nor was Clive Goodman, the “rogue reporter” whose arrest started the whole scandal. But Rebekah Brooks, the Murdoch favorite who went from editing the Sun to running News of the World to running both papers’ parent company, was a director. And so was James Murdoch.
The idea behind News Corporation’s non-denial denial was to get the settlements approved quickly without actually admitting anything. But Vos’s ruling was crystal clear: “The day you can say ‘that’s enough’ is the day I give judgement—although you can’t even say it then because of the number of other cases waiting in the wings.”
A year ago I’d have said the Murdochs stood a good chance of shutting this whole thing down with a wave of the checkbook. Yesterday’s ruling made it pretty clear that isn’t going to happen. And while it would still be a reckless man who’d bet against Rupert Murdoch, the odds against James Murdoch taking a fall just got a little shorter.
A Gifted Player Can Change the Game
On Monday night the London bureau’s youngest member and I were sitting very high up in the stands watching what looked to be a pretty desultory draw between our team, Arsenal, currently in fourth place in the Premier League of English Football (soccer to you), and Leeds, currently languishing in eighth place in the second tier Championship League. The teams were competing for a chance to win the FA Cup, the oldest domestic tournament in football, but the reason we were there on a school night was the chance of witnessing the return of Thierry Henry, the club’s captain a decade ago and a player of immense charm, dignity and talent. Though afflicted with uncomprehending parents, the YM had been to a couple of Henry’s matches before the player was sold to Barcelona in 2007, and even named his cello “Thierry” in homage to his hero.
Now playing for the New York Red Bulls, Henry was on-loan to his old club during Major League Soccer’s off-season. As he came on to the pitch 50,000 fans stood up and cheered. And when, after less than ten minutes, he scored the match’s winning goal, the stadium erupted.
Alex Salmond is no Thierry Henry. Built more for the golf course or the race track, Scotland’s First Minister was expelled from the Scottish National Party as a student for membership in a far-left splinter group. Eventually rising to party leader, he was elected to Parliament in 1987 and to the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999. However, in 2000, seeming bored by Edinburgh politics, Salmond resigned as party leader and returned to Westminster as a back-bencher, where he strongly opposed the Iraq War. Returning to leadership in 2004, Salmond became First Minister in a minority government, supported by the Greens, in 2007, but in 2011 won re-election in a landslide victory that gave the SNP a majority on a platform promising Scottish voters a referendum on whether the country should become completely independent.
During his four years leading a minority government Salmond kept university tuition free for Scottish students, while older Scots enjoyed government-paid nursing care. But last week David Cameron tried to derail the SNP’s strategy of a slow, stealthy march towards independence, pointing out that under devolution any change in the British constitution, such as independence for any part of the United Kingdom, has to be approved by Westminster. And with opinion polls showing that a majority of Scots don’t currently favor full independence, Cameron said he’d only give permission for a referendum if it happened in the next eighteen months and was restricted to a simple in or out.
What’s interesting is what happened next. Salmond’s deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, denounced Cameron’s announcement as “a blatant attempt to interfere” on the BBC. “The more a Tory government tries to interfere in Scottish democracy, I suspect the greater the support for independence will become,” she said. By the end of the week the truth of that point was so obvious Cameron pulled back, allowing surrogates such as Education Minister Michael Gove, a Scottish-born Tory, and Danny Alexander, chief minister at the Treasury and a Scottish Liberal-Democrat, to take up the fight. Alex Salmond, though furiously insisting this was an issue for Scotland to decide, commited himself to a referendum in 2014—the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, when Scottish troops defeated the English under Edward II.
A lot can—and probably will—happen between now and 2014. The clearcut economic case for Scottish independence based on North Sea Oil and entry into the Euro is a lot cloudier now that the oil is running low and the Euro looks more like a suicide pact. Salmond and his colleagues used to talk a lot about Iceland as proof that a small country, well-educated country without much of a manufacturing base could thrive on the periphery of Europe, but since Iceland went bust you don’t hear so much about the “arc of prosperity” that was going to connect Iceland, Ireland and a newly independent Scotland.
And the British parliamentary politics of the issue are fiendishly complicated. The Tories, whose full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party, are constitutionally committed to preserving the Union with Scotland. Yet with, as a current joke goes, fewer Scottish Tory MPs than there are giant pandas in the Edinburgh zoo, the temptation to hand Salmond his hat must be considerable—especially since without Scottish votes Labour would shrink from a minority party to a marginal one. Which lends Ed Miliband’s efforts to persuade Scottish voters to stay in Britain the stench of desperation.
Last week Miliband gave what was billed as a major speech on the economy. But anyone looking for genuinely effective opposition to Cameron and the coalition would have done better to look further north. Salmond may be trickier than he looks—he’s apparently Rupert Murdoch’s favorite British politican, though that could have more to do with the Australian tycoon’s long-standing preference for winners who will take his calls over losers who will take orders. But listening to Nicola Sturgeon on the radio, and watching Salmond effortlessly tie Cameron in knots on television, I couldn’t help thinking, “At last. Somebody who knows how to play this game.”
Christopher Hitchens, RIP
It was not a slow news day. US troops handed over the last military base in Iraq. Golden Globe nominations were announced in Hollywood. The International Monetary Fund warned the world was heading into a “1930s-style slump.” But the top item on the Google News feed—and the New York Times and Guardian web sites—was the death, hardly unexpected, of Christopher Hitchens. Which I suspect would have given him considerable pleasure.
And might still. By no means the least of the consolations now available to the unbeliever, and to those who live outside the lines of conventional virtue, is the thought that if we turn out to be mistaken in our Cartesian wagers, and find ourselves in the long, long chute to a smoke-and-brimstone-filled afterlife, Christopher will be there at the bottom to welcome us with a drink and, why not, a cigarette.
Trying to absorb the news this morning, I kept thinking of the Zanzibar Club, near the old New Statesman offices, where I first met Christopher in 1979, bearing an introduction from Amy Wilentz, late of these pages. “Tell him I said he’s a worldly wise man who will tell you everything you need to know,” she wrote to me. So I did, and he probably did, though after a futile effort to match him scotch for scotch—I gave up after 8, though Christopher kept on a good while longer, until he rose, steadily, and explained apologetically that he still had a column to write—I couldn’t remember much wisdom.
What remained indelible, though, was his wit, his bonhomie, his beauty—he looked like I’d always imagined Puck, or like a pre-Raphaelite fairy gone slightly to seed—and his kindness. At the time I was a graduate student with a single Nation book review to my name, yet Christopher insisted on introducing me to everyone in the club—which turned out to be pretty much everyone on Fleet Street—as a “distinguished American critic,” and on getting me an assignment from the Statesman.
Five years later he got me out of trouble in Cyprus after I’d crashed a rented car into a police Land Rover, telling the authorities I was “an influential American journalist”—a fib that not only gained my freedom but resulted in a free hotel room as well.
The last time I saw Christopher was in the summer of 2009, when he materialized at the edge of the audience after I’d done a reading at Politics and Prose in Washington. There had been a kind of froideur between us over various matters, some personal and some political, and I was deeply touched that he’d come. After we exchanged kisses, he asked if I was free for dinner and I explained that I was going out with my cousin and her daughter, who’d just finished her first year as a midshipman at Annapolis. After we parted, my young cousin said, “It’s so cool that he came.” And it was.
Agreeing—or disagreeing—with all of Christopher’s positions over the years was impossible. But he was always very easy to love. The last e-mail he sent me to was to correct my mistaken attribution of a quotation. And the last e-mail I sent to him was to ask him about a phrase he’d written in Vanity Fair: “Heroism breaks its heart, and idealism its back, on the intransigence of the credulous and the mediocre, manipulated by the cynical and the corrupt.” If we are all lucky, I wrote, “and you recover, I’d love to ask you to unpack that epigram someday. But frankly I’d settle for your being well enough to tell me to go fuck myself.”
Read D.D. Guttenplan’s review of Christopher Hitchens’s Hitch-22.”
The Masque of the Red Ink
London
Just in case you missed the irony of holding a festival devoted to the most conspicuous form of conspicuous consumption while the world wobbles on the brink of economic catastrophe, the organizers of the Frieze Art Fair, which opened last night in Regent’s Park, have commissioned a collaboration between the German artist Christian Jankowski and the Italian boatyard CRN for a 65-meter superyacht. Buy it as a boat, and built to your own specifications it will cost you €65 million. Buy with added “art” status (but no other special features beyond a handsome certificate from Jankowski designating the yacht as floating “sculpture”), and the price jumps to €75 million.
With its big egos, huge wallets, and itty-bitty outfits, satirizing the art world is not exactly hard work. Personally, I have a soft spot for the Frieze, and not just because a couple of years ago the organizers paid me to give a talk on the WPA arts project, which gave a paycheck—and the promise of a future—to some of America’s greatest artists and writers during our last Depression. I also liked the blend of naked hustle and “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show” spirit shown by Frieze founders Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, who managed to get the notoriously stuffy Royal Parks Agency to let them put up a tent in 2003, and through salesmanship and sheer willpower have turned the thing into an international phenomenon (coming to Randall’s Island in May).
I took our daughter, who turned 16 yesterday, and we had a grand time gawking at the de Kooning and Chuck Close and Claes Oldenburgs visiting from New York, and at the gorgeous Grayson Perry vases. The point of the fair is commerce, not culture, and for every museum-certified great artist there are a hundred relative unknowns. Some of them are wonderfully silly, like Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s life-size—and lifelike—statue of a chimpanzee, standing on a pile of weighty books trying to reach a banana. And some are wonderfully charming, like Pawel Althamer’s pensive metal and goat-hair Billy Goat 2011.
But the piece that Zoe and I both particularly loved, and which I wanted to let Nation readers know about, was in one of the more out-of-the-way stalls. Khalil Rabah’s 50,320 thousands names is an oil painting made of five rectangular canvas panels, each of which depicts what appears to be a set of hanging files. The serene colors and the way the paper and wood lean against each other, and the grid made by the piles of books and paper all serve to draw you in; the effect is both very beautiful and also quite haunting. What are these files? And then, after searching out the title card, whose are these names?
And so I learned that Khalil Rabah lives in Ramallah, and that the names in his painting are of Palestinians who live in buildings listed in the Registry of Historic Buildings in Palestine. The painting is part of a larger project called The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind. With any luck that, too, will make its way to New York this spring.
Hugh Grant's Awfully Big Adventure
Liverpool—Mechanical applause is the normal soundtrack for British political party conferences, and when Ed Miliband delivers his speech to the Labour faithful this afternoon he can expect a response every bit as rousing as the homage given to the Beloved Leader Kim Jong Il at his party conference. But the sighs that wafted towards the speaker at last night’s panel on “Hacking, privacy, libel and the future of the press” were of another order entirely. “Isn’t he goooorgeous?” said the distinguished campaigner for prisoner’s rights seated a few places from your faithful correspondent. Like all Hollywood stars, actor Hugh Grant looks slightly diminished off screen, but the glamour that remained was clearly enough not only to fill the room but to delight his audience, even though he opened his remarks with a scolding.
“Your years of association as a party with the Murdoch press—I’m not really sure that suited you. I’m not sure that was your best look,” Grant told the delegates. The actor, who addressed a similar meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference last week, and is scheduled to speak to the Conservatives on the same topic next week, said the other panelists “dragged me along as a kind of bait.” That is far too modest. In fact, Grant has been not only the handsome face of phone-hacking victims in Britain but one of the most agile and aggressive campaigners mobilizing public opinion in Britain—first to oppose Rupert Murdoch’s plan to buy the remaining shares of the satellite broadcasting company BSkyB and then to demand a public inquiry into illegal invasions of privacy and the conduct of news organizations, phone companies, politicians and the police.
That inquiry, chaired by Sir Brian Leveson, a senior judge, is already beginning its work. “I suspect that an awful lot of dirt will come out very quickly,” said Grant. Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture minister, promised his support for laws limiting cross-media ownership. But Brian Cathcart, a journalism professor and founder of the Hacked Off campaign, which organized last night’s meeting, warned that while Murdoch’s News of the World may have been the most egregious offender, “this is not just about one newspaper or one proprieter. This is about a very damaged culture.”
Showing the steel behind his smile, Grant reminded his audience that in June Miliband had joined in the revelries at Murdoch’s garden party. But he also congratulated the Labour leader on being “the first…to snip the umbilical cord with Voldemort.” Miliband’s courage had moved Grant from “floating voter to Labour-curious.” However the actor wondered whether “those Labour MPs who sounded so wonderful on July will still be so wonderful when the next election comes around. Don’t let us down!” he urged.
The Murdochs: Power Without Responsibility
What did we learn from the Murdochs’ testimony? That, at 80, Rupert Murdoch is losing his grip—or wants to appear that way. The billionaire tyrant’s saurian response to his tormentors on the parliamentary select committee showed a man who struggled with names, dates and details, and who needed to be rescued by his son James (who seemed almost pathetically eager to do so). But the picture that emerged of a father far too busy struggling (and by yesterday’s evidence, failing) to keep track of a global media empire to have any knowledge of what his underlings’ underlings were up to on one lowly British tabloid was profoundly at odds not only with Murdoch’s track record as a manager in total command of every detail of his empire, but even with portions of his own testimony yesterday. When MP Tom Keen tossed him a softball: “You’ve been kept in the dark, Rupert Murdoch,” he blasted it right back: “Nobody kept me in the dark. Anything that’s seen as a crisis comes to me.”
James Murdoch’s portrayal of the dutiful son who arrived on the scene too late to have been involved in any wrongdoing—but just in time to sign off on the multimillion-pound payoffs to a handful of hacking victims—was more convincing. Though here too it is worth noting that the legal opinion from Harbottle & Co., the high-priced London firm that News International used to handle the invasion of privacy claims, which James waved around like a doctor’s note getting out of a particularly unpleasant school trip, has been undercut by the firm’s statement yesterday that its advice had been wrongly summarized, but that the firm’s request to be released from confidentiality to explain exactly how had been turned down by News International.
On the whole, the Murdoch strategy of running out the clock was successful—even before the doubtless unpleasant distraction of wiping a shaving cream pie off Murdoch senior’s face, which cost Murdoch a small portion of his majesty but also kept Tom Watson, by far the most dangerous member of the panel, from being allowed to ask a concluding set of questions. There were two small but genuine revelations: that News International continued paying the legal fees for Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator jailed in 2007 for hacking into mobile phones belonging to members of the British royal family (and who also hacked into the voice messages of the murdered school girl Milly Dowler) long after his conviction, and that Rupert Murdoch himself never even considered resigning or in any way accepting responsibility for the illegal actions of his employees.
What happens next? There are currently at least ten separate British investigations, including an independent inquiry headed by a judge, police investigations into both phone hacking (“Operation Weeting”) and the issue of police corruption and illegal payments to police officers by Murdoch’s newspapers and other British press organizations (“Operation Elveden”), as well as an examination by the media regulator Ofcom about whether the actions of Murdoch employees on the News of the World throws into question the family’s fitness to retain control of its British broadcast operations.
An optimist might think that with so much smoke surely a barbecue is in the offing. But the adage about too many cooks is probably just as relevant. One problem facing any regulator or national legislature genuinely trying to come to grips with Murdoch is that News Corporation is a truly global company. The most recent GAO report shows the company operating 782 foreign subsidiaries—of which 182 are in such notorious tax havens as the British Virgin Islands (sixty-two), the Cayman Islands (thirty-three) and Luxembourg (four). The career of Les Hinton—or indeed James Murdoch—demonstrates the ease with which Murdoch shuffles managers from continent to continent. Tracking the flow of News Corporation assets around the world is far more difficult.
And as I’ve said before, News Corporation is no ordinary business enterprise. The thousands of journalists on the company’s books—and the untold number of private investigators, “blaggers” and other practitioners of journalism’s black arts paid off the books—mean that in addition to men and money, News Corp. also has global reach in amassing information, particularly the kind of titillating personal information that can put a troublesome regulator or meddlesome legislator on Page Six of the New York Post or the front page of the Sun. That’s why the most significant comment on the scandal before Nick Davies managed to get the British public to pay attention was from the anonymous MP who, when asked why Parliament kept allowing Rebekah Brooks to refuse repeated invitations to testify, replied that they felt too intimidated by the threat of what might be done to them by News International journalists if they insisted. Combine that threat with a corporation whose unabashed largesse to its friends—from the £ 5 million Harper Collins paid for Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs to the $4.5 million the company offered to pay Newt Gingrich to the $1.25 million paid to Sarah Palin for Going Rogue—seems to transcend business logic and you have assembled a powerful set of incentives for accommodation.
Really getting to the bottom of News Corporation would require a global effort, with global focus—and far more determination than anything shown either by Attorney General Eric Holder’s tepid assurance that the Justice Department would look at any evidence of phone hacking in the United States or David Cameron’s government, whose links with News Corporation go far beyond sharing the occasional egg nog at Christmas.
So far no government has come close to the commitment of resources by either the Guardian, which heroically and practically single-handedly kept this story alive, or even the New York Times, whose collaboration with the Guardian—a move straight out of the classic muckraking playbook, and used, for instance, by longtime Nation contributor Fred Cook in his battles with Robert Moses—finally gave the story legs.
Even if News Corporation observed an invisible line off the eastern shore of Long Island, and restricted its illegal intrusions solely to the British Isles, Americans have every reason to be concerned with a company that, every day, and in perfect compliance with all relevant laws, serves up via Fox News something far less fragrant than shaving cream into all our faces. Perhaps the most revealing exchange yesterday came on a topic far removed from phone hacking, when Rupert Murdoch, digressing (or showing his sharp teeth) on the recent scandal over MP’s expenses—Will Lewis, the Daily Telegraph editor who led the investigation, is now an executive at News International, Murdoch’s British arm—identified his vision of an ideal democracy: Singapore. Murdoch senior described the country—which, according to Amnesty International, routinely jails government critics and human rights activists “for exercising their right to freed of expression” and whose media “continue to be tightly controlled by restrictive censorship laws”—as “the most open and clear society in the world.”
Still, it would be a huge mistake to personalize the issue. Rupert Murdoch’s personality and prejudices are not the problem; nor are his son’s strengths—or shortcomings. Murdoch’s approach to news has changed little since Robert Sherill’s masterful portrait of a media monopolist in these pages sixteen years ago! Putting Rupert or James Murdoch on trial might be emotionally satisfying. And the fact that the company has lawyered up, adding US antitrust superstar Joel Klein to the board and putting Ollie North’s mouthpiece Brendan Sullivan on retainer, suggests a prudent awareness of just how disliked the Murdochs have become.
But Rupert Murdoch has never been a popular figure. Indeed one newspaper profile noted that “he has inspired a hatred and scorn that have seldom been equaled in the history of press ownership.” That was back in 1995—in the Wall Street Journal, today just another outpost of the Murdoch empire.
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