On the evening before Gordon Brown’s career-defining speech at the Labour Party conference in Manchester, he met James Murdoch, the 35-year-old who is chief executive in Europe and Asia of his father Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate, News Corporation, and whose position includes control of the British newspaper group News International. The two men talked for nearly an hour, discussing in particular the global financial crisis. It is unprecedented for Brown to have spent so long on anything other than refining his leader’s speech on the night before he delivered it. That this meeting took place when it did and for the length it did confirms what many already suspected: James Murdoch has become the most powerful figure in the British media.
Before Tony Blair became leader, Labour politicians would complain about the deep-rooted Conservatism of the British press, and with good reason. In the Eighties, only the Daily and Sunday Mirror, the Guardian and the Observer supported Labour. The Mail and Telegraph titles were robust backers of the Conservatives, as were the Daily and Sunday Express. Murdoch’s market-leading publications – the Sun, News of the World, the Times and the Sunday Times – were Thatcher’s cheerleaders. The Sun and News of the World continued to endorse John Major following his election victory in 1992, even as they chronicled the collapse of his fatigued and divided government. Winning the support of the Sun, in the run-up to the 1997 election, was a pivotal moment for new Labour, the culmination of a sustained campaign to woo Murdoch that began when Peter Mandelson became Labour’s director of communication in 1985. This meant that a Labour administration could operate in a climate where the political weather wasn’t being created by an overwhelmingly hostile press.
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