Is Murdoch about to lead us up the garden path again? | Catherine Bennett

At what must be a busy period for Rupert Murdoch, as he struggles simultaneously to detoxify Fox News and to grab control of Sky, he made time, last week, for opening day at the Chelsea Flower Show. Wearing a panama hat, displaying a widely unsuspected interest in herbaceous borders, he could have passed unnoticed among Chelsea’s many other mulch-loving old gents had he not been hand in hand with the fourth and latest Mrs Murdoch, Jerry Hall.

The couple paused by a show garden for a tender snog. “Their love’s still in bloom!” the Daily Mail reported, conscientiously. The impact of this delightful image on 86-year-old men was only exceeded by the horror that overtook unattached middle-aged women, thereby forced to confront, if this wreckage is what Jerry Hall is content to cling to, the state of their own romantic prospects.

From a business point of view, however, the spectacle, along with the end of Page Three, more recently the sacking of the Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie, and that of various sexual predators who prospered until recently at Fox News, may have contributed to ongoing attempts to prove that British broadcasting has nothing to fear from nice Mr Murdoch’s renewed bid to own 100% of Sky.

His first attempt, in 2011, was frustrated following the discovery of criminal activities, including the hacking of the murdered Milly Dowler’s phone at his News of the World, when Rebekah Brooks was News UK’s chief executive. MPs concluded he was “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”.

Persistent doubts about the Murdochs, despite the exoneration of Brooks, the closure of the News of the World, various prison terms for the guilty and a restructuring of their business, are such that the last culture secretary asked Ofcom to produce a public interest report on the Sky bid, now delayed until 20 June. Much depends, this time, on the Murdochs convincing Ofcom of their commitment to upholding UK broadcasting standards, as required by the Communications Act. They must also show that they are “fit and proper” people to take on the responsibility.

On the second point, Murdoch, the doting hubby and lupin fancier, now looks usefully unlike the man Harold Evans depicted as a “cold-eyed manipulator”, one capable of running Thatcher, Reagan, Blair, Brown, Cameron and now the Trumps. How can a benign Chelsea Flower Show patron have any connection with the cynical operator who polluted so much of British and US journalism; whose enthusiasm for destroying reputations, when he arrived at the Sun, earned him the entirely unaffectionate nickname, the Dirty Digger? It’s like doubting Alan Titchmarsh. It flies in the face of Gardeners’ Question Time.

And if Murdoch looks, to eyes unclouded by erotic passion, to be a little on the shambling side nowadays, then that, as with his “doddery” performance before the parliamentary committee and subsequent forgetfulness at Leveson, can only add to a very helpful impression of harmlessness. He couldn’t, he told Leveson in 2012, recall anything about a Chequers lunch with Mrs Thatcher, following which her government failed to refer his Times bid to the Monopolies Commission. Other than she’d said: “Why don’t you come to lunch on Sunday?”

Leveson, tasked by Cameron with investigating the culture and practices of the press, ended up effectively reprieving Murdoch, whose own newspaper, through its criminality, had precipitated the entire inquiry. That Murdoch had unaccountably dodged so many press regulations in both the US and Britain did not, Leveson concluded, indicate any deals with politicians nervous of being brought down by employees such as Kelvin (“It’s the Sun Wot Won It”) MacKenzie. “He denied,” Leveson wrote, “on several occasions that he made any express deals with politicians and the available evidence does not prove that he ever did.”

Besides, Murdoch told the inquiry, he never interfered editorially at his broadsheets. That must have started much later; maybe as recently as this year, when the plainly no longer doddery – or amnesiac – Murdoch arranged for his friend and employee, Michael Gove, to interview another associate, Donald Trump, for the Times. It was the interviewer who quite forgot, after posing – unbelievably – for thumbs-up pictures with his subject, to mention that Murdoch had – even more unbelievably – sat in.

If Ofcom is confident that Murdoch has abandoned his habit of luring politicians into insanely injudicious relationships, as godparents, family friends, riding companions, party guests, his assurances about standards may be harder to stomach. Not merely because he has said: “You tell these bloody politicians whatever they want to hear and once the deal is done you don’t worry about it. They’re not going to chase after you later if they suddenly decide what you said wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Otherwise, they’re made to look bad and they can’t abide that. So they just stick their heads up their asses and wait for the blow to pass.”

Pending the Ofcom report, an illustration of Murdoch’s potential impact on Sky and on broadcast news is luridly available on his Fox channel, that triumph of fake news, partisanship, tendentious speculation, shock jock bigotry and sexual harassment – and Trump’s favourite channel. Here, unrestrained by the kind of UK standards James Murdoch attacked as “authoritarian”, unhindered by the sort of regulator Cameron (in his “yes he Cam!” days) obligingly proposed to disable, every day demonstrates the threat to a part of our public life Murdoch has failed, thus far, to contaminate.

The recent Fox dismissals, some for racism and others, including that of the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment, appear more a typically crude effort to act fit and proper – and reassure advertisers – than any repudiation of the house style.

“Roger and I,” Murdoch wrote in a tribute to Ailes, who died shortly after he was forced out, “shared a big idea which he executed in a way no one else could have.” The relevant idea being achievable only because Mark Fowler, Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, and “one of the great pioneers of the communications revolution” (in Rupert Murdoch’s words) trashed, in 1987, the US Fairness Doctrine. It could otherwise have prevented, say, Fox’s enabling of Sean Hannity’s conspiracy theorising, Fox’s nurturing of the birther myth, Fox’s undeviating devotion to Donald Trump.

That Fowler considers that outcome exemplary emerged in a letter to the FT, following that newspaper’s warnings about Murdoch and broadcasting standards. “It’s high time to apply the freedom of the print press to broadcasting in all its forms,” Fowler wrote, last week. “The same logic applies to the “fit and proper” test; why single out only broadcasting?”

By way of an answer, this column can only direct him to a piece by Monica Lewinsky, also published last week, in which she describes how it felt, in 1998, to be the story that put Murdoch’s Fox on the map.

“Their dream was my nightmare. My character, my looks and my life were picked apart mercilessly. Truth and fiction mixed at random in the service of higher ratings.”

And that – how could it not be? – is the dream for Sky.