BoJo’s fall costs the Murdochs another prime minister

For the Murdoch family to lose one prime minister is a misfortune. To lose a second is just plain careless. 

Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson weren’t just any prime ministers, either. These were valuable assets invested with long-nurtured relationships. 

It’s stuck the family with two big challenges: how to fill the political hole where Johnson was standing just a week ago, and how to fracture the surprisingly durable Albanese honeymoon.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this: back in the early COVID days, the Murdochs’ political allies were three-for-three across the Anglosphere countries where the family’s companies operate, seemingly entrenched for years to come. 

In management speak, it demonstrated the family’s “core competence”: how to match political alignment with transactional opportunities. It’s been a family skill since Rupert’s dad, Sir Keith, made Joseph Lyons Australia’s PM in the 1930s. Rupert followed on in the 1980s, leveraging ties with Reagan, Thatcher and Hawke to build the global business.

Recently, the family has been relying on Trump, Johnson and Morrison to get their companies through the internet’s disruption, minimising regulation and shaking down big tech for a hand-out.

The relationships go back a long way: Trump became a celebrity in the 1980s courtesy of Murdoch’s tilt to gossip in the New York Post. Morrison first won Liberal preselection off The Daily Telegraph’s reporting (subsequently found to be, in part, defamatory at the Tele’s expense).

Johnson has been a long-time family ally, standing up for the Murdochs as London mayor over the News International phone-hacking scandal, sticking fast even once it came out that he, too, had been hacked, shrugging it off with a “they all do it” insouciance. He was a regular guest of Rupert Murdoch, hunkered down in the English countryside through COVID.

He “got Brexit done”, removing the risk of unhelpful European regulation. And he made sure the Leveson report into the hacking scandal got NOT done. A decade on, the family’s UK papers enjoy more freedom than ever after Johnson’s culture secretary, Nadine Dorries, removed the 1980s restrictions on the Murdochs interfering in the editorial content of the London Times and Sunday Times. 

Still, as Jerry Hall also discovered this past week, nothing lasts forever with the Murdochs. The family papers stood by Johnson through partygate, yet continued polling and byelection results suggest that, post-COVID, the larrikin populism of a Johnson (or a Trump or a Morrison) no longer holds the same appeal with the public. And that could mean — gasp — a Labour government committed to higher taxes targeted at so-called “non-dom” billionaires.

What to do? Two weeks ago, in rhyme with Australia’s parliamentary harassment scandal, Murdoch’s Sun finally found an “exclusive” that challenged Johnson: a report that the Conservative Party’s deputy chief whip Chris Pincher had drunkenly groped two men and was sent home in a taxi.

One after another, senior (and not so senior) ministers who had tolerated all the other Johnson scandals resigned. Johnson was forced onto his sword. “Thanks for Brexit, Boris” The Sun front-paged in as close to an obituary as is possible for a living person.

On Friday, Hacked Off activist and actor Hugh Grant tweeted out the process from here: 

Dear World, You may be wondering what happens next in terms of the British constitution. The answer is that 3 newspaper owners – all of whom are non domiciled in the UK for tax purposes – get together and choose our next Prime Minister or “Poodle”. The Queen then anoints them.

— Hugh Grant (@HackedOffHugh) July 7, 2022

Malcolm Turnbull could have told them that, although we’re simpler folk in Australia and delegate it to just one media owner.

The weekend speculation has all been around who the Murdochs will back. Will it be a fellow billionaire (or at least the husband of a billionaire) in recently resigned chancellor Rishi Sunak? Or will it be Foreign Affairs Minister Liz Truss? Both have spent the past three years cosying up to the Murdochs. Time for the pay-off?

Meanwhile, here in Australia, the News Corp media have taken their first stab at undermining the new government, with an astroturfed “Airbus Albo” meme. On social media, it flopped, reopening instead Morrison’s Hawaii holiday and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s current holiday in the United States.

But don’t expect News Corp to stop trying.