a beating with the clue stick

Danwei reprints a review of Bruce Dover’s book on Murdoch in China, commissioned and then spiked by the Far Eastern Economic Review, now owned by a certain Rupert Murdoch. There’s the usual fun and games, but also this:

Evans lasted a year, resigning in high dudgeon over the editorial independence the man Britons call “The Dirty Digger” - pace his Australian antecedents - supposedly guaranteed to secure the purchase. Evans’ splenetic book “Good Times, Bad Times” became a best seller and his joust with Murdoch did his career no harm – he later ran Random House, edited some worthy U.S magazines and penned magisterial histories. Like Murdoch, he became a naturalized American. Unlike Murdoch, he was knighted by the British establishment in 2004 for “services to journalism.” There are other tomes posing as Murdoch insiders like ex-Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil’s ‘Full Disclosure’ and the hugely funny ‘Stick It Up Your Punter: The Uncut Story of the Sun Newspaper’ but they are better assessed as snapshot newspaper biographies.

Well, Stick it up Your Punter is the best book on British journalism ever written (and that’s official, folks!). Good Times, Bad Times, though…I can’t be the only person who came out of reading that sympathizing with Murdoch at putting up with Evans - an endlessly self-regarding, pompous jackass - for as long as he did,.

There’s a very revealing bit in Good Times, Bad Times where Evans agonises long and hard about voting Tory in 1979, before taking the fateful step. Margaret Thatcher’s historic mission, it seems, was to chasten the Labour Party into being the kind of party that Harold would be pleased and proud to vote for again. Yes, Harold’s Party had been taken away from him, and Margaret’s job was to get it back for him and then depart.

Well it turned out that Thatcher had a few ideas of her own about what it was she intended to do, and these involved handing the Times to Murdoch. Poor Harold: he put his personal trust in Margaret and she shamelessly betrayed him. Couldn’t she see that the path of duty compelled her to enthrone Harold as the conscience of the nation?

With opponents that clueless, it’s hardly a surprise that Murdoch succeeded as he did in Britain. Over in Beijing, the hard men recognized Murdoch as a kind of clownish, aspirant version of themselves. They kept a firm grip on the clue stick and beat him with it, savagely and unmercifully.

Comments

[ejh]

Stick it up Your Punter is the best book on British journalism ever written

Well, probably not. It's basically a Life And Bon Mots Of Kelvin Mackenzie, which it's why it's so much fun, but it doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know.

[Phil]

I met Chris Horrie once, in the company of Robin Ramsay (of Lobster). We were talking about various specimens of the Great and Good who we thought might be state assets of one kind or another, as you do, and John Tusa came up. According to Chris H. there was a very funny exchange with John Tusa in one of William Donaldson's Henry Root books - supposedly Henry Root denounced Tusa as a typical BBC pinko who'd sell the country to the Kremlin for half a crown, prompting Tusa to get extremely shirty and let slip a couple of hints about his past in the process (I've done more to protect this country from Communism than you can imagine...)

Robin and I both had the same reaction: we went through all the Henry Root books at the first opportunity. (Donaldson didn't bother with contents pages, so this was a bit of a chore.) No Tusa. Rather disappointing.

[ejh]

Now Gavin Esler or Mark Urban...