How Murdoch’s anti-elite crusade was forged in England
London | When Rupert Murdoch, the ultimate powerbroker and insider, used his retirement note to rail against “elites” and their “open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class”, it underlined a contradiction that has stalked him for more than half a century.
Murdoch with the first copy of his UK tabloid Sun as it came off the presses on November 16, 1969. UPI
It was in England in the 1960s that the budding media mogul came to think of himself as an outsider – even as he took over a clutch of venerable English mastheads, a feat which papered the way for his rise to pre-eminent power and influence over the British establishment.
As a brash Australian arriving in the 1950s at Oxford – the university that was then still the British political elite’s finishing school and a custodian of the English class system – Murdoch was always going to be seen as an arriviste or parvenu.
It must have rankled that despite his intellect, confidence and wealth, there would so often have been a side sneer at this upstart colonial – the “cataclysmic chauffeur from the Outback”, as the Oxford student newspaper called the car-owning undergraduate.
So when he took control of the The News of the World, The Sun and later The Times, he turned them into battering rams against the self-satisfied smugness of the English establishment elite.
The day he walked into The Sun’s offices, the paper ran a leader column stating the mission that has defined him for decades: “We are not going to bow to the establishment in any of its privileged enclaves. Ever.”
Bit by bit, he almost single-handedly eroded Britain’s cosy culture of deference, setting his reporters loose against patrician politicians and even the Royal Family.
Yet even as he
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