James O'Brien

In April 2023 the IMF adjusted its forecast for the British economy upwards. In terms of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it would still be the worst performing in the G7 group of developed nations but not by as big a margin as it had forecast in January. In March, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), another intergovernmental organisation founded to stimulate economic progress and international trade, found that the UK would have the second worst performing economy in the whole of the G20. Only Russia, heavily sanctioned and at war in Ukraine, was forecast to perform worse. Frighteningly, the IMF actually had Russia performing better than the UK in the same period. Either way, the picture is obviously bleak and the only way to pretend otherwise is to pretend that these organisations are somehow deliberately misrepresenting data to embarrass the United Kingdom. It is remarkable how much credence these paranoid fantasies, and that’s being generous, are still given.

ON 21 NOVEMBER 2014, Andy Coulson was released from prison after serving barely a quarter of an 18-month sentence for conspiracy to intercept voicemails – or ‘phone hacking’ as it is colloquially known. Coulson’s crimes were committed when he was editor of Rupert Murdoch’s first UK newspaper acquisition, the News of the World. He resigned from that post in January 2007 shortly before the paper’s royal editor, Clive Goodman, became the first of several Murdoch journalists to be jailed for phone hacking. Just six months after that, in July, Coulson became the Conservative Party’s director of communications, and when David Cameron became prime minister in May 2010, Coulson became director of communications for the UK government. On the eve of Cameron’s Tory conference speech in October 2009, Coulson’s former lover, Rebekah Brooks (née Wade) – acquitted co-defendant in the phone-hacking trial, boss at Murdoch’s News International, and recently married to an Old Etonian friend of Cameron’s – texted the Tory leader: ‘I am so rooting for you tomorrow and not just as a personal friend but because professionally we’re definitely in this together!’

Coulson resigned from Cameron’s government in January 2011 as the phone-hacking scandal gathered pace. It did so almost entirely due to the tireless journalism of the Guardian’s Nick Davies and the advocacy of the Labour MPs Tom Watson and Chris Bryant. Unlike the New York Times, most of the UK media and the entire Conservative government remained ambivalent, cowed or downright hostile toward the story until Davies reported that the News of the World had illegally targeted the missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family, allegedly interfering with police inquiries into her disappearance.

At his trial in 2014, Mr Justice Saunders told the court that the News of the World’s initial failure to tell police that their journalists had ‘hacked’ the voicemail of Milly Dowler – later found to have been murdered – came from a desire to ‘take credit for finding her’ and sell newspapers. When he described that delay as ‘unforgivable’, he was being somewhat optimistic. In March 2017, the public relations firm that Coulson set up after leaving prison, Coulson Chappell, was awarded a contract to enhance the reputations of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. The Guardian’s media columnist Roy Greenslade wrote at the time: ‘His main brief is thought to be to promote the papers as truthful and authoritative.’

It later emerged that Slack had thrown a leaving party at Downing Street on the eve of the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral that descended into a drunken debauch with reports of a suitcase full of alcohol being wheeled on to the premises. At the time, gatherings of two or more people indoors and six or more people outdoors were prohibited under lockdown rules forged in the very building where Slack and around 45 colleagues celebrated. Records show that the last two members of staff left at 3.11am and 4.20am, shortly before cleaners arrived to start dealing with the wine spillages and pools of vomit. It all struck a stark contrast with a now famous image of the late Queen sitting alone in St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle the same day, as attendees at her husband’s funeral studiously observed lockdown regulations with guests from separate households sitting two metres apart.

The full details of Slack’s party were published in Sue Gray’s report on lockdown-breaking in Downing Street in September 2022. Even though details of the party, including damage to a children’s swing and slide set in the Downing Street garden, filled two pages of Gray’s report, the Sun’s initial reporting omitted all mention of deputy editor Slack’s involvement. It is not known whether Slack, Cain or Doyle were among the 83 people fined by the Metropolitan Police over the various illegal gatherings, but Slack remains a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), a gong given to him by Theresa May.

Six years after Rupert Murdoch had himself appeared before MPs investigating phone-hacking and declared: ‘This is the most humble day of my life,’ and five after the investigation concluded he was ‘not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company’, the greatest ever threat to his stranglehold on UK politics and media had apparently been seen off

The Dominion disclosures, as with Leveson’s, will not detain us unduly here. They certainly did not create the ecosystem in which the moral corruption of Boris Johnson or the serial incompetence of Liz Truss could be ushered into power. Rather, they illustrate the nature of the beast that all aspiring British prime ministers of the last 50 years, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, have felt obliged to woo and indulge

the slow decline of British journalism that began when Murdoch bought the News of the World in 1968 and the Sun in 1969.

Brown, it should be said, was being at least a tad disingenuous in suggesting that keeping Murdoch sweet had been a uniquely Tory preoccupation. In the same week he delivered this speech, David Cameron was reported to have met with Murdoch executives on 26 separate occasions during his first 15 months in office, but Brown, and his predecessor Blair, had hardly kept their distance. Lance Price, who worked as adviser to Tony Blair between 1997 and 2001, has written that Murdoch ‘seemed like the 24th member’ of the cabinet, adding ‘His presence was always felt.’ And when the Sun told Brown that they knew his son Fraser had cystic fibrosis, he worked with the newspaper to ensure sensitive coverage. Nor did he mention in his speech reports that his wife, Sarah, had hosted a ‘slumber party’ at Chequers for Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch’s wife Wendi and his daughter Elizabeth. But it is clear that seeking support from Murdoch’s titles, or at least seeking to avoid attack, is different from actively promoting his commercial aims, especially with regard to the BBC, Ofcom and the proliferation of pay-per-view sporting events.

On 18 February 2017, Donald Trump delivered a speech in which he cited Sweden’s purported problems with immigrant-related violence as a justification for his continuing demonisation of immigrants. ‘You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden,’ he said. ‘Sweden. Who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible.’ There was just one problem with this race baiting. There had been no ‘incident’ in Sweden the previous night. The Local, an English-language Swedish news website, went as far as to state: ‘Nothing spectacular happened in Sweden on Friday.’ Reuters reported that Swedes were using the Twitter hashtag #LastNightInSweden to post ‘pictures of reindeer, Swedish meatballs and people assembling the country’s famous IKEA furniture’. The former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt wrote on Twitter: ‘Sweden? Terror attack? What has he been smoking? Questions abound.’ Trump tried to answer those questions the following day when he tweeted: ‘My statement as to what’s happening in Sweden was in reference to a story that was broadcast on @FoxNews regarding immigrants and Sweden.’ Tucker Carlson, whose show Trump had been watching, gave an interview to his own network in which he acknowledged the non-existence of any actual ‘incident’ but insisted nonetheless that Trump was right to draw attention to problems being caused by immigrants in Sweden, even though Reuters had reported that official statistics showed the crime rate had fallen since 2005 as the country took in hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn countries such as Syria and Iraq

In his deposition to the court, Murdoch told a Dominion lawyer that he had the power to keep election deniers off Fox News but chose not to. Asked why he continued to allow Mike Lindell – the CEO of a pillow company, major advertiser and one of the most prominent disseminators of election fraud lies – to make outlandish claims on Fox News, Murdoch explained that it was a financial not a political decision and agreed that ‘it is not red or blue, it is green’. This last is a reference to political allegiances – Republicans are red and Democrats blue – being completely subjugated to the colour, literally, of money.