More than a decade ago, US writer Neal Gabler published Life: the Movie, arguing that events of the greatest moment — from news to high politics — had come to be experienced as mass entertainment, that we followed moments of real life as if they were merely a story played out before us, complying with an unseen script.
Even before Rupert and James Murdoch appeared before a House of Commons committee, the hacking saga had acquired that same quality. People admit to being hooked on the story, watching the nightly news as if it were another episode on a DVD boxed set of the latest acclaimed TV drama. And this story has complied with the rules of the high-class thriller almost immaculately, with its layers of intrigue, its hint of a conspiracy going right to the heart of the nation’s most powerful institutions, its low-life villains — in this case, the tabloid reporters and private detectives they hired — dominating the early episodes, gradually replaced by bigger and bigger players, until the trail of suspicion leads to the very top.
If anything, the hacking story has suffered from being a tad over the top, cramming too much action and too many eye-popping characters into too little time. Most dramatists would be happy with a plot that unmasked skulduggery inside the world’s most powerful media organization. That would be plenty. But this one has taken in the Metropolitan Police (Met), felling the commissioner and one of his most senior lieutenants, and seems to be getting ever closer to Downing Street. These resignations — if they had come singly would have dominated the news for a week — have come in clusters, with three of the biggest last weekend. The pace has been dizzying.
Tuesday saw a climax of sorts, albeit with a set-piece scene that seemed to have been written for the stage, rather than TV. Facing an inquisitorial panel of MPs was a media mogul once deemed omnipotent on several continents. That fact alone was dramatic: the Wizard of Oz brought before the munchkins, forced to defend himself from the lawmakers he had once intimidated and disdained. Before the low — and contemptible — act of pantomime, the attempted foaming, this was a tableau bursting with drama, both public and curiously domestic.
So yes, we had a global corporate titan forced to explain himself. But we also had a young wife in a bright pink jacket, nervously watchful and protective of her much older husband. The video of her right hook on the foam-pie assassin was played for laughs in some TV coverage, but it looked like an eruption of tension that had been bottled up for nearly three hours. Wendi Deng won plaudits, even from her husband’s most dogged accusers: She was the Tiger Mother, defending her man.
More epic still, almost Shakespearean, was the dynamic between father and son: Rupert placing his hand on his son’s arm, as he sought to interrupt; James, anxiously watching his father floundering, desperately trying to intervene and take over. Cynics wondered if the whole show was phony — if old man Rupe was faking semi-senility under Tom Watson’s questioning in order to extract sympathy and make credible his claim to have been in the dark about the News of the World’s darkest practices. He did rally remarkably as the session went on, remembering circulation figures from the mid-1990s and alive to the legal meaning of the phrase “wilful blindness.” (One recalled Ernest Saunders, who avoided full punishment for the Guinness affair by an apparent lapse into Alzheimer’s disease, from which he miraculously recovered.)
The effect of all this was, incredibly, to make Rupert Murdoch — for decades the villain of left-leaning nightmares — a figure of vulnerability, even pity. By the end, the MPs were praising the old man’s guts for turning up. But that may not cut much ice with News Corp investors: Indeed, what we may have witnessed in the cramped Wilson room of Portcullis House was the last hurrah of Keith Rupert Murdoch and the de facto transition to his son. James, with his transatlantic business patois — all “pro-active,” “going forward” and “financial quantum” ie, cost — drove journalists mad, but it will have reassured the money men, persuading them that it’s time for a generational shift.
If Rupert Murdoch lost his power to scare, then what remained of the reputation of the Metropolitan Police was pushed further into the mire. Each one of the Met trio who appeared sought to shove the blame onto the desk of a colleague claiming that they had barely done anything wrong, which was curious given that two of the three had resigned. The revelation that 10 of the Met’s 45 press officers were ex-employees of News International, coupled with the utterly casual way in which Neil Wallis, the former deputy editor of the News of the World, was hired, only confirmed that Scotland Yard and the newspaper group had become so intertwined, the force had come to resemble News International’s security wing.
As for the politicians, it was a good day for parliament — feeling its strength as if for the first time. Now that MPs have grilled the powerful before the gaze of the world’s media — as their US congressional counterparts have done for years — they might develop a taste for it. If they do, they will need to sharpen up their interrogation skills. Watson delivered a masterclass, asking short, precise questions that bamboozled Rupert Murdoch utterly. But too many of the rest were vague and general, allowing James to regurgitate the Harvard Business School textbook and run out the clock.
That brings us to the man who was not there on Tuesday, but whose fate may depend on these events. The most excitable commentators — and interestingly these have been Conservative bloggers rather than Guardian types — have wondered if this crisis could end with the toppling of British Prime Minister David Cameron. They have been tweeting away merrily about who might follow, with some MPs said to be “buying shares” in Home Affairs Minister Theresa May. My own view remains skeptical: What we know so far certainly damages Cameron — making him guilty of extremely poor judgement in hiring a man who had to quit the News of the World over hacking — but it does not yet threaten his survival.
That said, two developments could hurt him very badly. The first was the revelation that Wallis had acted as an informal adviser to Andy Coulson even as Coulson was installed at Cameron’s side. That means that the News of the World was not in Coulson’s past, as Cameron has always insisted, but that the connection lingered. Now everyone will want to know what advice Wallis gave: Did he pass on valuable information on Labour that had been acquired illegally? If he did, that would surely be terminal for Cameron.
Nor does the e-mail exchange between his chief of staff and the Met, released on Tuesday, help. It suggests a degree of collusion between the Met and Downing Street that, even if designed to keep the PM safely out of the loop, looks suspect.
The Camerons spent a recent holiday watching DVDs of the compelling Danish political drama, The Killing. He won’t feel like watching it now: He’ll feel he’s living it instead.
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