Supping with the devil

Tony Blair, sneaking a glance at the table settings as he sat down with Rupert Murdoch, would have been comforted. The cutlery was at least no shorter than is conventional in discreet Mayfair hotels. He needs a long spoon who sups with the Devil.

Not that he or his wife, Cherie, would have detected any overt devilry in the table talk of Murdoch and his wife, Anna, nor in that of Gus Fischer (chief executive of Murdoch's News International) and his wife, Gillian. Yet Blair knew, when he accepted the September dinner invitation, that he had to be cautious. He is aware that Murdoch's political and journalistic friendships are seldom all they seem. True, his kiss can turn the humblest of creatures into a prince - but after a second quick peck he invariably finds himself a frog again.

One of the many editors discarded by Murdoch in his 41 years as a newspaper proprietor has described the process: "I found him very charming. He charmed me right out of my underwear." Another victim, Harold Evans, wrote of his decision to accept the editorship of the Times: "Murdoch is like the philanderer who convinces each new girl that she's the one who'll change him."

During the past 15 years Labour has had no adversary more rabid than Rupert Murdoch and there are many things for which much of the party will not forgive him. For some elements it is the crushing of the print unions at his Wapping plant in 1986 that cannot be forgiven. For others who see that as water under the bridge, it is simply the horrible non-stop monstering by all his media.

So news of the Murdoch/Blair dinner, when it emerged last week, caused raised eyebrows and speculation about who would get what from whom. The straightforward answer is that any party leader must covet the support of someone whose papers sell more than five million copies a day, while an entrepreneur with interests in the highly regulated media industry is only being prudent in wooing a potential Prime Minister who could have the power to ease or toughen the regulations. But even so ... The dinner was arranged after Murdoch had confessed to the German magazine Der Spiegel: "I could even imagine myself supporting the British Labour leader, Tony Blair." Editors of three of his five national papers confirmed that, by happy chance, they too had opened their formerly closed minds on the question; the other two maintained a puzzled silence.

Three weeks later, the leather-faced tycoon was in London and hosted a party for about a hundred people. Blair was among the guests. Next night the two men met for dinner with their wives.

The Murdoch camp plays down the significance of the meal. Jane Reed, News International's head of corporate affairs, says: "Absolutely nothing of exclusive interest to News International was discussed. This is the last time Mr Murdoch spoke to Mr Blair."The Labour leader's office confirmed there was no discussion of the party's policy towards Murdoch's media interests.

However, Gus Fischer has met and talked with Blair at least once since. Reed explains that Fischer makes it his business to meet leading politicians "in the course of his day-to-day work". She adds: "He would be failing in his duty as chief executive of a leading UK company if he did not."

All of which sounds sweetly reasonable - until you recall that two-and-a-half years ago the Sun, flagship of the very same leading company, had summed up the last general election campaign in these less than sweet or reasonable terms: "We don't want to influence you in your final judgement on who will be Prime Minister! But if it's a bald bloke with wispy red hair and two K's in his surname, we'll see you at the airport." The next day, after Neil Kinnock's defeat, the paper boasted: "It was the Sun wotwon it!"

There had been signals that News International was seeking to repair its relations with the left well before Murdoch's Der Spiegel interview. At Labour's 1992 post-election conference in Blackpool, Andrew Knight, then the company's chairman, had lunch with Patricia Hewitt, Kinnock's former press secretary, who had just become head of the new Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think-tank closely linked to Labour.

They spoke about media regulation. Before the election, Labour had said it planned to close the loophole in the rules on cross-media ownership that had allowed Murdoch to own half of Sky, the satellite television service, as well as his vast newspaper holdings. Other newspaper proprietors are indignant that the rules forbid them a significant stake in non-satellite television companies and there is a campaign, headed by Associated Newspapers (publisher of the Daily Mail) to have the rules eased.

Hewitt told Knight she was thinking of initiating a study of the subject in the IPPR and asked whether News International would consider helping to fund it. Knight and Fischer agreed to put in some £25,000 - a quarter of the budget then projected. Other backers include British Telecom, London Weekend Television (now owned by Granada) and the Cable Television Association.

The project is due to be completed next year and its findings are likely to influence a future Labour government, not least because James Purnell, the man heading it, used to work in Blair's private office. News International and the other backers will have no overt influence on the IPPR's conclusions but they do have regular meetings with the researchers and gain early access to interim reports.

Does all this mean that Murdoch, at 63, is undergoing a profound political conversion? Is he abandoning his long commitment to the right to return to his youthful socialism? It can safely be said that he is not. Throughout his career his political allegiances have been dictated not by ideology but by his commercial interests. His papers have customarily supported politicians in power or likely to attain it.

The process can be traced back to his early days in Australia. There, by switching sides strategically, he has been allowed at various times to own larger slices of the newspaper and television industries than the rules appeared to permit.

The ill-fated Gough Whitlam was the first Australian Labour leader to become Prime Minister with Murdoch's support. That acquaintance, too, began with a dinner - in Canberra in 1967 - followed by an invitation to Whitlam to visit Murdoch's ranch at Cavan.

By 1972 Murdoch's papers had switched to Labour and Whitlam duly won that year's election. Three years later they turned against him, backing the Governor-General's decision to dissolve parliament and force new elections, in which the Murdoch papers gavevigorous support to Whitlam's opponent, Malcolm Fraser. By 1983 he was supporting the Labour government of Bob Hawke - who conveniently raised no objection when Murdoch won control of well over half the Australian press by buying the Melbourne Herald group.

At the end of last year, on one of his quite rare visits to Australia, he invited the present Labour Prime Minister, Paul Keating, to his house in Canberra. Murdoch is part of a consortium bidding for a national cable television franchise and the Government's goodwill would be helpful.

His introduction to political dining in Britain came in 1969, soon after he had acquired his first British paper, the News of the World, when Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, invited him to Chequers. (Wilson was briefing Murdoch and two other press barons about his plans to tackle the trade unions: plans that he quickly abandoned.)

After that first meeting, Wilson was invited to lunch several times at the paper's headquarters in Bouverie Street, London. In the 1970 election the Sun, which had been a Labour paper when Murdoch acquired it from the Mirror Group, gave Wilson its backing; but it subsequently drifted to the right and by 1979 was sounding the trumpet for Margaret Thatcher.

In 1981, two years after the Conservatives came to power, Murdoch was allowed to double his British newspaper holdings by acquiring the Times and the Sunday Times without a reference to the Monopolies Commission. In 1987, a few weeks after helping to secure another Tory victory, his purchase of a fifth national newspaper, Today, was similarly nodded through without an inquiry. In 1990, Sky's merger with British Satellite Broadcasting gave him a 50 per cent stake in a British television company, a privilege allowed to no other newspaper proprietor.

In the United States, his political and media interests have similarly meshed. His papers pursued a long vendetta against Senator Edward Kennedy, because he was seeking to enforce the rule that Murdoch could not own both a newspaper and a television station in New York. (He was eventually obliged to surrender the New York Post but has subsequently been allowed to re-acquire it.)

So extensive are his media holdings that he is able to make an impact on politics at many levels. His book publishing company, HarperCollins, has struck a £3m book deal with Newt Gingrich, the influential "new right" leader of the Republican majority in the US Congress, forging a link with that important centre of power.

By making approaches to Tony Blair, then, Murdoch is acting true to form. Even if he does not believe that Labour will win the election, the move is useful as a signal to John Major's government that his support cannot be taken for granted next time.

"I see it as a warning to the Government that if it does anything to damage him he is capable of giving it a good clobbering," says an observer who knows Murdoch well.

"It's threats with menace."

As for Blair, aware as he is of the fickle record of his new suitor, the potential gains probably outweigh the risks. Alastair Campbell, the former political columnist of Murdoch's left-leaning Today and now Blair's press secretary, is keen not to overstate the possibility of winning support from the formerly hostile Sun and Times.

"We seek good relations with all sections of the media," he says. "And we certainly hope for fairer and better treatment than was given to Labour during the Kinnock years. There have been some signs that News International is softening its hostility - orperhaps it's more a question of raising its hostility to the Government. There was a big change in mood at the time of John Smith's death."

Even if Murdoch's main titles can scarcely be expected to give Labour their wholehearted support at the next election, it will be a bonus if Blair can merely be spared the vicious treatment meted out to Kinnock last time.

Roy Hattersley, Labour's former deputy leader, says: "I think the Sun probably did win it for the Tory party. We lost because people didn't like Kinnock and it was papers like the Sun that put people against him. I did a television programme about a month afterwards in which we asked people why they had voted Conservative. They produced meaningless slogans taken straight from the front page of the Sun."

So the Labour leader was probably right to decide to break bread with the man who controls that front page - even someone who holds such a prominent place in the demonology of the left. At the very least, he might end up with a decent book contract.