Thursday 3rd May

And I don’t mean Rupert Bear, a real childhood friend; unbeknown to me at the time a different Rupert was weaving his insidious web and building on the legacy he inherited from his father along with a ruthlessness and determination almost unparalleled in the business world.  So, who really is this Rupert, is he truly the malignant meddler in politics, the grand puppet master and decider of elections or has he merely given us, the public exactly what we wanted, page 3 girls and five hundred channels of dross on the TV.  The truth as always may lay somewhere in-between.  Like those great newspaper magnates who went before him, Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, he undoubtedly knew the power of the popular press, and like Robert Maxwell he courted political leaders and tried to push his own political agenda to the fore.  However it was when he discovered such a like-minded individual as Margaret Thatcher that things turned really ugly; there is no doubting that they made an unholy pact, she would let him take over the Times and expand his empire without restraint and he would crush the print unions.  And both got what they wanted.  But then things get a bit murkier, Murdoch decided that Blair would be a better bet than John Major, and then that Cameron and Osborne would suit him better than Gordon Brown.  How much was ever really discussed or promised we will probably never know, it was much more a case of politicians being only too aware of the importance of keeping Rupert on-side, as Neil Kinnock discovered to his cost.  But in his defence it has always been so, the political influence of the Mail and the Express were always insidious and undemocratic.  It was in the marrying of his business and his political machinations that we reached the lowest point of all.  In fact the phone-hacking scandal in itself wasn’t that awful; journalists have used underhand and illegal methods for years – it was just that nobody had the balls to go after them.  So, what do we think of Rupert now, his reputation has certainly been tarnished, but he will undoubtedly survive, and make more and more money until the day he dies, which may not be that far off.  And for a while there will be more regulation of the press, and politicians will be more careful about who they are seen with, and who they e-mail.  But sooner or later another Rupert will emerge, maybe in Cyberspace, maybe in Telecoms, who knows, except that it will happen.  As Lincoln said ‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.’  We just have to have the balls to stop the next Rupert before it gets to this sorry state.