by Alex Massie
David Cameron is not having a very good crisis. The British Prime Minister avoided the House of Commons earlier this week and looked weak and shifty when he should have been leading from the front. He'd have to take some lumps but he'd take them in the proper Prime Ministerial fashion, damnit.
The mood in Downing Street is said to be pretty dire this morning. No wonder. Labour have outflanked the Tory leadership on the Murdoch crisis, putting down a parliamentary motion calling for the Dirty Digger to abandon his bid to purchase the 61% of satellite broadcaster – and money machine – BSkyB. The government now says it won't oppose the motion; a recognition that dozens of Tory MPs were deserting the good ship Rupert.
Cameron's relationship with the tabloids has been a complicated one. He does not, on the whole, share their instincts or preferences. He's not as judgemental or intolerant or indecent as the tabs. Nevertheless, the Sun has bullied the government into a number of u-turns on criminal justice matters (a pleasing irony you must agree) and Cameron's experience with the Murdoch empire is the kind of cautionary tale from which you could make a pretty fine radio or television drama.
Peter Oborne, who is sympathetic to Cameron but who has been one of the few conservative journalists banging on about all this for months, explains:
To begin with, Cameron was wary of Murdoch. His first meetings with the tycoon went badly. After one meeting, a senior News International figure complained to me: “We told David exactly what to say and how to say it in order to please Rupert. But Cameron wouldn’t play ball. I can’t understand it.”
Cameron had made the deliberate decision to gain power without Murdoch’s assistance. Urged on by his senior aide – and probably his closest political friend, Steve Hilton – the future prime minister kept his distance.
But this strategy led to disaster in the polls. David Cameron was mocked and ridiculed in the Labour supporting Murdoch press, and by the summer of 2007 matters reached a crisis. There was talk that Gordon Brown, newly elected as Labour leader and Prime Minister, would call a snap election that autumn which he was widely expected to win handsomely.
It was at this point that George Osborne, then shadow chancellor and also Cameron’s closest strategic advisor, entered the fray. The immensely ambitious Osborne – who was already cultivating his own links with News International – made the case that Cameron should hire Andy Coulson.
Coulson was a brilliant News of the World executive, hand picked by Murdoch himself to go to the very top of the News International organisation. But his career had met with a setback a few months previously when he had been forced to resign as editor after the royal reporter Clive Goodman was sentenced to jail for hacking into the mobile phones of members of the royal household.
Cameron accepted Osborne’s view that there was no need to worry about this blot on Coulson’s record. This turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. Disastrously, Cameron imported Coulson into his inner team of advisors. In the short term, Coulson proved to be an excellent decision. He gave sound strategic advice, which helped Cameron see off the threat from Brown and enjoy a remarkable recovery in the opinion polls. But Coulson also performed one other function. He helped draw Cameron deep into the inner circle that surrounds Rupert Murdoch. In particular Cameron allowed himself to become a member of what is now known as the Chipping Norton set, a group of louche and affluent Londoners who centred around Rebekah Brooks’s Oxfordshire home, barely a mile from Cameron’s constituency residence.
[…] There are members of the Cameron circle who have always warned against the consequences of the Murdoch alliance. Chief among them is Steve Hilton, who, according to friends, has been driven to despair by the Murdoch influence inside Downing Street. Another sceptic has been Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, who sadly has been too weak to speak up.
Fundamentally David Cameron, like many of us perhaps, has something of a split personality. I have known the Prime Minister for 20 years and feel certain that he is genuinely filled with sound and decent values imbued in him by his parents, in particular his mother, a former Justice of the Peace.
But there is also another side to the Prime Minister: a sharp-suited media operator who will do what it takes to get to the top. Sadly, as last year’s election loomed, it was the ambitious and amoral side of David Cameron that took command. He is now living with the consequences.
Such are the compromises required by ambition and many of them are, as they always have been, squalid and even shameful things. At present he's looking frit and it's not a look that suits him any better than it does the rest of us.
If parliament contends Rupert Murdoch is not a "fit and proper person" to own a manjority stake in BSkyB how can he sensibly be considered a fit and proper person to be its single largest shareholder either? And if that test is failed how can he be thought suitable to own his newspapers either? And if that proves the case then what about the owners of the Daily Mirror or the Daily Mail? Once you begin pulling at these threads the whole bloody thing unravels pretty quickly.
So the Prime Minister needs a new strategy that's just a little bit better than punting everything over to an enquiry that won't report until October at the earliest. That's a start since the bodies must be buried somewhere but Cameron now needs an imaginative, bold and persuasive Reverse Ferret of his own.
The Dish 