Going to the theatre is a joy. When you are a character on the stage, less so. Over the past couple of months, I have been depicted in two plays. Having worked for Murdoch for years, I clearly enjoy pain and so, at my own expense, I went to see both. First up was a one-man show called Monstering the Rocketman at the Arcola in Dalston, which detailed how the Sun (me!) had accused Elton John of being involved in rent boy sessions. Our source, it turned out, had sold us a pack of lies, made more painful by the fact that the news editor, the reporter and I spent 90 minutes cross-questioning this stoat to satisfy ourselves he was telling the truth. It’s easy to be misled. If Carl Beech had come to us, I suspect we might well have fallen for his VIP paedophile lies in the same way lefty LBC presenter James O’Brien did. (Not that there was ever an apology from him.) After the Elton John story blew up, I remember sitting opposite his lawyer and I asked him what he wanted. He told me he’d like to carve the word ‘Bollocks’ on my forehead. That wasn’t possible, but £1 million in libel damages was. Murdoch took it quite well. After 20 minutes of uninterrupted phone abuse from New York, he never mentioned it again. His great strength is his ability not to talk about something. For instance, to my knowledge he has never said a word to anybody about Muriel McKay, who was abducted and murdered after being mistaken for Anna Murdoch. Astonishing.
As for the play, it had received decent reviews at the Fringe (that’s not difficult), but clearly the marketing message hadn’t got through to east London. The joint was half-empty and, unusually for Dalston, the audience was exclusively white. The only laughs I heard were when Sun headlines were mentioned: ‘Paddy Pantsdown’ got a decent guffaw. After 30 minutes I had had enough.
Next stop was In The Print at the King’s Head, Islington, where Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky had put together a docudrama about Murdoch and union leader Brenda Dean battling it out over the future of 5,000 jobs at Wapping. This was better. I was painted as a tabloid gobshite (didn’t take a casting director for that), Andrew Neil was camp and self-involved (the only man I know with a receding wig) and the Murdoch figure tough but pragmatic. Correct. Best line went to Kinnock saying Arthur Scargill went from a big union and a small house to a small union and a big house. My line that if I bent over any further I’d be in Gay News is no longer accepted in polite society. With a little more drama and a little less doco, this show could move to the West End. I’m afraid Rocketman won’t take off.
A Sun editorial a few weeks back carried this headline: ‘Those who turned a blind eye to Mandelson’s flaws cannot escape accountability.’ Hardly a controversial statement, but from my experience not one that should be made by the publishers of News UK – or indeed the editor of this esteemed magazine. When I was a columnist on the Sun, I was told by a chum that he had been staying in a hotel when Peter Mandelson had joined him in the reading room. Mandelson picked up a copy of the Financial Times and read it with great intent. What he didn’t realise (and my chum did) was that the FT was a week old. Clearly the great man (ex-cabinet minister, EU commissioner) was not keeping up with the news. It was not the most fascinating item, but it did fill a hole in my column. Punch editor Alan Coren – father of the fine Times columnist Giles Coren – used to say that he couldn’t let the screech of brakes pass by without dashing from his house to see if there was an inch in it.
Unbelievably, my item triggered great rage from Mandelson. After the column, my ‘tipster’ received a phone call from a News UK executive who had just heard from a furious Mandelson. The conversation took a dark turn. The exec told my friend that he was wrong to have passed the information to somebody like me (a disgusting journalist of which there are too many hanging around the building) and that he must never reveal something like that to me again. Clearly the exec doesn’t recognise that their job is to bat away complaints from people like Mandelson, not admonish those who supplied the information. It may partially explain why the Sun has gone from four million copies sold a day to just 350,000. What knowledge did Mandelson possess that would make the exec make such a call? No one senior at News UK ever raised the article with me. A wise decision.
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