This afternoon an executive jet will interrupt Tony Blair's five-day US visit to fly him from San Francisco on a short hop to the Monterey peninsula. Waiting for the prime minister will be 500 of Rupert Murdoch's News International executives, plus their partners and VIP guests, who are in conference at the luxurious Pebble Beach golf resort until Thursday.
Blair will stay only two or three hours, give his address on a favorite theme, leadership in the modern world, take questions and probably attend a reception. In an audience of admirers of his unfashionable pro-Americanism he is certain to be well received. Murdoch himself admires steadfastness in adversity. "Iraq means Rupert will never dump on Blair," explains a close Murdoch-watcher.
But Blair knows from experience that he will pay for the applause: his enemies will see it as further proof of a "poodle" relationship with the Australian-turned-American media tycoon, scarcely less malign than the servility he supposedly gives US President George W. Bush, whom he saw on Friday.
PHOTO: AFP
Media gossip, unconfirmed by insiders, claims that if Blair had turned down the invitation, it would have gone to the British Conservative leader, David Cameron, the kind of rising star News International prides itself on cultivating. Given Murdoch's known coolness towards the Tory leader (he thinks "not much" of him, he told CBS TV last week), that seems unlikely. Finance minister and PM-in-waiting Gordon Brown would be a better bet. "I like Brown very much on a personal level," he said on CBS.
Either way a ticket to a Murdoch-fest is one politicians deem worth having and Blair is only one of several star speakers at Pebble Beach, who include former president Bill Clinton and California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. And at least two possible 2008 presidential contenders will be present, the maverick Arizona Republican Senator John McCain and former vice president Al Gore.
These jamborees are staged every few years at a major tourist destination. For Blair it is a swansong. He first spoke at a Murdoch conference in 1995, a year after becoming Labour leader. It was his entry into the big time of first-class travel and VIP suites.
Tomorrow's speech may be a year before he throws off the relative austerity of elected office and joins the Clintonian lecture circuit full-time.
Apart from the speeches, what goes on at a Murdoch-fest? Insiders, who speak on condition of anonymity, say they vary. In Aspen there was golf, hot air balloons and an unfortunate experiment with strippers. Cancun, run by Lachlan Murdoch, was gruelling from 8am working breakfasts to dinner time.
"It depends on Murdoch's mood. If he thinks we've been having too much fun he says `we have have more work, it's not a jolly,'" explains one veteran attender.
Sometimes there are mainly plenary sessions, sometimes working groups charged with explaining their strategy to colleagues or listening to a successful businessman from another field entirely.
The Yahoo! entrepreneurs, who made more money in a few years than Murdoch has in a lifetime, have appeared.
"Rupert is fascinated by big business, he admires successful rivals, even al-Jazeera," says another insider.
The theme at Pebble Beach is new media, and how to achieve synergy and integration with older media. Murdoch came late to the internet and lost millions. Encouraged by MySpace's success, he is back and keen to learn more.
In tomorrow's speech Blair is expected to rehash familiar themes -- the need for democracy and open markets, for greater cooperation to defeat the challenges of poverty, global warming and terrorism, the urgent case for reform of bodies such as the UN.
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