Rupert Murdoch was devastated by the “closeness” between his then-wife Wendi Deng and Tony Blair, News Corp’s longest-serving editor has revealed in a new book.
The alleged closeness between the mother of his two youngest children and Blair, a man Murdoch had been “financially and politically generous” to, was reported to the family by domestic staff, according to Chris Mitchell, the former editor-in-chief of the Australian newspaper.
“He was clearly lonely and struggling to sleep at night for the first few months after the separation,” Mitchell writes about his employer in Making Headlines. “He rang much more often than he had previously. And he was frank about his sleep problems, sore back and the hurt he was feeling about what had happened between Wendi and Tony Blair.
“It was clear that my boss had been devastated by the closeness he found between his wife and his former friend. I never asked what that was, but it is clear that his Australian family, alerted by domestic staff, rang the bell on whatever was going on when Rupert was out of town.”
Murdoch himself said something similar in an interview with Fortune magazine in 2014. But Blair has always forcefully denied suggestions of an affair with Deng and says he will not speak about the allegations. Deng has declined to comment. Friends of both Deng and Blair have said they were friends and no more and that Blair was a sympathetic intermediary and confidant in a troubled marriage.
Mitchell wrote: “It seemed to me at the time that, in the post-phone-hacking media world, Rupert’s marriage breakdown was treated vindictively and that a man well in to his 80s losing a wife with whom he had fathered two children was given no room to grieve for his loss.”
But, Mitchell says, Murdoch is much happier now in his fourth marriage to model Jerry Hall, “a wonderfully grounded Texan woman with a big heart and big personality”.
Mitchell describes Murdoch as “a loving patriarch and husband, not at all the caricature so beloved of the leftwing media. And of course there was an added benefit to marrying his new bride in Fleet Street. He could yet again thumb his nose at the Guardian luvvies who had tried so hard to bring him down with the phone-hacking story.”
After 42 years in journalism, most of it working for News Corp Australia, Mitchell explains he wanted to provide some balance to the “often hysterical discussion” about the Murdoch family and their media empire, which he says are often denigrated by the Guardian, ABC and Fairfax Media in Australia.
The Queensland journalist, who edited Brisbane’s Courier Mail and the Australian newspaper for 24 years and now writes a media column in the Australian, describes his relationship with the media proprietor as not close but “friendly and trusting” and says they are of a like mind. “The unvarnished truth is that I did not need Rupert directing me,” he says. “All my campaigns were my own and they were usually my own ideas. And of course because our world views are similar I never ran any of those ideas past Rupert.”
The 59-year-old who retired at the end of 2015 writes very warmly about Murdoch, saying his passion for journalism is undiminished well into his 80s and his grasp of accounting is unrivalled in the company. “As he left – this then 83-year-old who still had the world at his feet – I felt great admiration for him and the deft touch with which he had carried 60 years of publishing genius,” he writes of a characteristic visit to his office by Murdoch.
The book, published by Melbourne University Press on Thursday, provides an insight into the political leanings of his sons Lachlan and James. Lachlan worked with Mitchell at Queensland Newspapers when he was 22 and later in Sydney as publisher of the Australian.
Mitchell writes that while James is “very progressive”, in particular on the issue of climate change, Lachlan is very conservative politically and “distinctly sceptical” about the science of global warming.
He recalls a private function at which the former prime minister Tony Abbott impressed him by being passionately committed to saving the lives of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, who he believed had been reformed in jail in Bali. The two men, members of the so-called Bali Nine, were executed in Indonesia for drug offences. Lachlan “argued against Tony’s compassion, saying that Chan and Sukumaran deserved exactly what they were about to get”, Mitchell writes.
“As with his views on gun control in the United States, Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician, Abbott included, and usually to the right of his father’s views,” he said.
Mitchell reveals the often close relationship between editors, politicians and media proprietors, detailing private parties and dinners at which the political and media elite discuss politics and editors are asked for their opinion on policy.
He says Rupert Murdoch was keen to find out all about Labor leader Kevin Rudd before the 2007 election even though he was a fan of John Howard’s. Mitchell relates how he even managed to convince Murdoch to allow the Australian to back Rudd in the final editorial of the 2007 election campaign. He says he later regretted that decision.
“You know, Chris, despite what all the lefties say about me, I have helped elect more than my fair share of Labor governments, and I have often lived to regret it,” Murdoch is quoted as saying.
Mitchell takes some time to debunk a claim by historian Robert Manne and others that “Rupert Murdoch decided to use his Australian newspapers to destroy the government of Julia Gillard” at a conference in the US in 2010.
Mitchell says the Carmel conference with Australian editors and Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, New York Post editor Col Allan and former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks was focused on how to maintain the business in the face of digital disruption not on a campaign to destroy Gillard.
“Julia Gillard had been persuaded by her more paranoid ministers, treasurer Wayne Swan and minister for communications Stephen Conroy, that a perfectly innocent gathering of Australian editors at a golf resort outside Carmel, near Rupert’s northern California ranch, was the beginning of a carefully orchestrated campaign to overthrow the government.
“One session concerned newspaper campaigns, but this was somehow construed by the Labor party as a session to discuss a possible campaign against the government.”
Unsurprisingly, Mitchell is scathing about Fairfax, saying the only great editor was John Alexander who left the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1990s, and unfavourably compares it with the culture of News Corp. “Rupert’s subjective judgment, clearly the best in the print media world, now holds sway over an editor’s fate,” he writes.