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Les Hinton, former News International executive, photographed at his home in London.
Les Hinton, former News International executive, photographed at his home in London. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
Les Hinton, former News International executive, photographed at his home in London. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

Les Hinton: ‘What’s Murdoch like? I’m very fond of him’

This article is more than 5 years old

Hinton was Rupert Murdoch’s right-hand man at the height of the phone-hacking scandal. He resigned over it and feels he was made a scapegoat, but remains an admirer of the tycoon

Les Hinton used to insist he would never write a memoir. The idea of adding his own title to volumes already devoted to his former boss, Rupert Murdoch, filled him with, if not foreboding exactly, then a certain feeling of futility. “I knew a lot of any such book would have to be about Rupert,” says the man who was for a long time known as Murdoch’s henchman. “But if you’re not joining the chorus of disapproval, how do you write about him in a way that doesn’t sound sycophantic? Who wants to sound like they’re the victim of a personality cult?” He runs a hand over his beard. “He deserves a lot of the criticism, by the way. There are no men who have achieved the kind of success he has who have not bruised a lot of people. He earned a lot of his enemies. But he’s also misunderstood. If I was going to write about him, I wanted to try and do it straight down the middle and for a long time I couldn’t really see how to do that.”

But perhaps there was another way. What if the Murdoch years – he worked for the Australian-born tycoon for the vast majority of his 50-year career – were only a part of his book? What if Hinton began instead by describing his childhood in postwar Bootle, on Merseyside? This idea began to take hold even before his traumatic departure as chief executive of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, in July 2011, shortly after the full scale of the phone-hacking scandal had been revealed to the world (the hacking had taken place in the years when he was executive chairman of News International, the publisher of Murdoch’s British newspapers, now called News UK). “I was going to the Labour party conference in Blackpool,” he says. “I was in a chauffeur-driven car, as I always was in those days, and we went past this kid looking out of the window of a bus. A working-class kid. I felt this weird connection: that’s me, I thought.”

In the end, then, he did settle down to write a book: The Bootle Boy, in which Rupert Murdoch does not appear at all until page 89, when he happens to enter the room that houses the only television at the News, the Adelaide tabloid where Hinton began work as a copy boy at the age of 15. On this occasion, the two do not speak. Hinton is so scared that he hides behind a sofa until Murdoch leaves. Some days later, in the reporters’ room, there comes another encounter: Murdoch, “plump-cheeked” and smoking a cigarette, asks Hinton to get him a ham sandwich. It would, he writes, be another 15 years before the two men discussed anything more elevated than this.

The Bootle bits of Hinton’s book are undeniably charming, if a touch Hovis ad: he conjures up with some vividness the cobbles and the antimacassars, the outside lavatory at his grandmother’s house where torn squares of the Daily Mirror did for loo roll (was this, he speculates, how newsprint first entered his blood?). So, too, are the chapters devoted to the years when his family, before his parents finally emigrated to Australia, travelled the world, following his father, an army chef, from posting to posting: Egypt, Eritrea, Libya, Germany. But of course it’s Murdoch you’re waiting for. Hinton worked on the Sun when Murdoch first bought it; he had a ringside seat for its ruthless reinvention under its pugnacious editor, Larry Lamb, and for much else besides, up to and including the earliest stages of the phone-hacking scandal. Interesting as it is that he was named for the actor Leslie Howard, and that some of his relatives had a pathological dislike of Catholics, it is on his career and the powerful men for whom he worked that you really want to read him.

Hinton, centre, with Prince Charles and Rupert Murdoch in 2002. Photograph: Max Nash/AP

What’s Murdoch like? “I’m very fond of him.” So is he… nice? Hinton sighs. “This is the struggle,” he says, referring to my tone, I think, which is doubtless lightly satirical. But he soon rallies. Since Hinton left News Corporation (News International’s parent company), and with it the beloved world of newspapers, there is nothing he misses more than talking to other hacks – even hacks like me, with their mildly annoying questions. “He could be incredibly difficult and exasperating, unfair and capricious. But he was an authentic colossus. He would fire people – this happened countless times – and I was always generous [paying them off], and he would often say: ‘No, no. Be more generous.’ There were people when I got to News International who were long gone, but were still on these retainers, thousands of pounds. They were people [who had left the company’s employ] who’d worked for him for years and years.”

Is Murdoch content? Would he describe him as happy? “Well, contentment is not the same as happiness. He has had a lot of happiness in his life. But his best friend is the business. A lot of the people he spends time with work for him. He doesn’t have a lot of childhood friends. The business is more important than anything except for his immediate family.” Does he still see him? “I do, but not often. I usually go along to his Christmas party.”

What will happen to the Times and the other newspapers owned by News UK, when Murdoch, a newspaperman to his bones, dies? “Good God!” he says, laughing. “How dare you? But if you mean… if I can put it like this… what will happen after Rupert is no longer doing the job?” He laughs again. “The company is breaking apart [last year, Murdoch agreed to sell 21st Century Fox, the film and TV arm of the business, to Disney]. The Wall Street Journal, which you have to imagine is pretty reliable on this [it is owned by Murdoch], has said that James Murdoch [the younger son] won’t join Disney, but will start his own private equity company. But Lachlan [the older son] grew up in print and I think he has some of his father’s passion for it. In the end, of course, the company is owned by its shareholders. They will have to do the right thing for the future of the company, and its profits. But I don’t think there will be any company more loyal to print even when Lachlan’s in charge.”

Even at the height of the hacking scandal, in the days after Murdoch closed the News of the World, a decision Hinton regards as the result of a collective “nervous breakdown” and as having been wholly wrong, he always thought the newspapers would survive. “It never occurred to me that they wouldn’t. Why should it have been otherwise?” But this isn’t to say that when Murdoch told the parliamentary committee before which he appeared in July 2011 to answer questions about phone hacking that this was “the most humbling day of my life”, his words, as they might have appeared to some, were simply expedient, just another sly business move. In his book, he describes going to see Murdoch at his London flat shortly after the Guardian broke the news that the phone of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler had been hacked. “He was slumped forward in a chair,” he writes. “His head was drooped and still… His heavy glasses had slipped down his nose; his jaw was slack and his mouth slightly open. The familiar intensity in his eyes had given way to an empty gaze. ‘This is the worst day of my life,’ he said.”

Murdoch’s ‘most humbling day’, giving evidence to the Commons culture select committee in 2001. Photograph: PA

“I think the whole thing was a shattering experience for him,” says Hinton. “He was exhausted. He also realised that the enemies had got through the gate and that was part of it.” That word, though: humbling. Are people such as Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks (the former editor of the Sun who was cleared in court of phone hacking and who is now back at News UK, in what is effectively Hinton’s old job) capable of humility? Do they learn? Do they change? Or do they simply sail on? Hinton, ordinarily so fluent, stumbles on his words. “I think you can… I’m sure… Rupert is… I don’t know whether it changed him. He didn’t know it [phone hacking] was happening. They [News UK] have gone to excruciating ends to check and change that [the culture]. If you wanted to take a camera to Lagos, and you needed to pay a bribe, and you told corporate ethics, they would turn you down now. It is that intense.” He smiles at me, his face a little pink: an open, straightforward, decent man, I think, but one whose loyalties are still, in spite of everything, ancient and remarkably tribal.

I meet Hinton in his rather anonymous Marylebone flat, one of three properties he and his second wife, Kath, a former adviser to Gordon Brown, own (a US citizen, he also has a flat in New York and a house in the Hudson valley). His lifestyle now is a far cry from where he started out, though he has never thought of his beginnings as particularly tough; his childhood, he thinks, was not the motivation for a career that, once he had left reporting and moved into management, was the result more of a series of unlikely events than of high ambition. “It wasn’t a path I particularly planned,” he says. “When Dad bought our first house [in Adelaide, after the family’s emigration], and he spent hours and hours in the garden, I did think, God, I never want to have to do my own garden. But I never thought I wanted to be rich, successful. My ambition was to be a journalist and to travel. I enjoyed telling stories.”

As a copy boy, one of his jobs was to fold edited pages into a metal cylinder, which he would then push into a thick pipe – the tube (whoosh) that delivered the copy to the men who would turn it into hot type. Hardworking and smart, he soon landed a cadetship, and four years after that, in 1965, he left for London with 50 quid in his pocket, plus his passage back home should things go badly wrong. But they didn’t, of course. He joined the Sun, then in its slightly whimsical pre-Murdoch incarnation, a paper that was pretty much annihilated every morning by the Daily Mirror, and returned to it after accompanying his first wife, Mary, home to Australia (they have five children), after Murdoch had bought it, when long, boozy lunches were suddenly a thing of the past, and its sales began to soar.

Did he see James Graham’s play Ink, which depicts the Sun in this era? “Yes and I thought it was brilliant. I texted Rupert and he ended up going to see it, too.” How does he remember those times? “Well, the great, looming figure was Larry [Lamb], this brusque Yorkshireman who was really hard and who used to stand at the backbench [where the senior journalists sit] and throw the paper across it if he thought there were too many mistakes in it. It was very harsh. We had no northern printing presses, so if you got a story in the morning, you had to have a very good reason not to file by lunchtime. You did have to ask bald men on the street if they had more sex because of some silly survey that had been done, which I didn’t really like.” It was brilliant training. But he was so terrified of his news editor, he learned Stanislavksi’s breathing exercises the better to cope. “I’ve still got the book: An Actor Prepares.”

Larry Lamb, right, talks to Robert Maxwell during a Labour party conference in Blackpool. Photograph: PA

He reported from Northern Ireland and from Cyprus during Turkey’s invasion and then – a long-held dream finally coming true – he managed to get a berth in New York where, among other things, he was the first reporter to arrive at the Chelsea hotel in 1978 after the body of Nancy Spungen, the girlfriend of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, was found in the bathroom of Room 100 (as he writes in his book, this did not please his rival Paul Dacre, the future editor of the Daily Mail, who swore at him in typically creative fashion).

His storytelling days, however, were now numbered. A series of editing jobs followed – eventually, he was appointed editor of a Murdoch-owned supermarket tabloid magazine, Star – until, somewhat to his surprise, Murdoch appointed him to run first his ill-fated magazine empire, and then Fox (he moved to LA, where his neighbour was OJ Simpson). Why was he chosen? In his book, he never quite makes this clear. He doesn’t particularly seem like a brown nose to me. So what was it? “Ha. Well, I’m not innocent of that,” he says. “I don’t know. Rupert has a history of giving journalists jobs on the business side. They’re quicker than MBA types and he has more empathy with them.” But if he wanted so badly to be a writer, why didn’t he simply say no? “I resisted editing the Star, but Rupert put his arm round me and thanked me and I just quaked. When I became executive vice-president of the magazines, I was happy about it, but I would have done anything to get out of staying at the Star.” Thanks to these promotions, his contact with Murdoch was now more frequent and more frequently alarming. For years, he kept a toy GI’s helmet in his office, which he would put on when he knew Murdoch was calling in a bad mood.

In 1995, though, he was appointed to a job he really longed to do: running News International in Wapping, London. There, he inherited an office so large a packed lunch was required to cross it, and a group of singular and singularly powerful editors. “They were the nobility of Wapping,” he says. “Though I didn’t have to deal with Andrew Neil [former editor of the Sunday Times] or Kelvin MacKenzie [former editor of the Sun], which was one of the great reliefs.” It was in this period that Murdoch was being wooed by Blair (the Sun would come out for Labour before the 1997 election). “These [senior Sun staff] were genuine believers in the Conservative movement,” he says. “Higgy [Stuart Higgins, the editor] would call me at three in the morning and plead with me not to let it [support for Labour] happen.”

Hinton loved the 12 years he spent at Wapping. His last job, which he took up in 2007, would be as chief executive of Dow Jones, after it, too, was bought by Murdoch. But in its beginning was its end, for it was while he was in charge that the News of the World’s royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and his co-conspirator, Glenn Mulcaire, were illegally intercepting phone messages from Clarence House, crimes for which, in 2007, they received prison sentences. In 2011, when the new revelations of phone hacking broke, Hinton offered his resignation and it was accepted. After this, there followed an extremely difficult period. In May 2012, the Commons culture select committee accused Hinton of misleading it during its inquiries into the phone-hacking scandal. It wasn’t until September 2016 that parliament’s committee of privileges published its own report, saying that there was no evidence that he had done so.

Former News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman at Horseferry magistrates court on phone-tapping charges in 2006. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

In his book, he gives a highly detailed account of this time, in which he states, not without some anger, that people at News Corp briefed against him. He was offered up as a kind of sacrifice, he thinks now. But what he doesn’t give is any sense of his deeper feelings. How frightened was he? And how stupid did he feel, having seemingly believed that Goodman was a sole bad apple? On the second point, he says he never thought to question the paper’s many scoops: “No, no, no, no, no, I didn’t. The News of the World won newspaper of the year at the London Press Club three years in a row. Should I have said: is this too good to be true? Probably.” Does he feel an idiot about that now? He laughs. “I don’t feel smart about it, no.” On the first question, he’s frank enough to admit that he was very frightened indeed. This was a time of sleeping pills and medication for high blood pressure. But he also thinks that he was stupid to appear before the Commons culture select committee in the first place.

He then talks about the dawn raids, all those journalists who were arrested, charged and, in the end, not convicted. Brooks’s trial, in his eyes, was nothing more than a show. “It was like the air catching fire,” he says. “The police accused of being too close to News International, the police then overreacting to everything, the baying of the politicians.” Amazingly – shockingly, perhaps – he thinks Goodman should not have been sent to prison for his crimes, a “guy who’s got no other blemish on his record”. Does he feel the same about Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World and adviser to David Cameron who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for phone hacking? “I thought prison was… a bit rough. He is a very talented man. This bit of wrongdoing didn’t make him a bad newspaperman or for that matter an evil person.”

Didn’t make him a bad newspaperman. As a newspaperwoman who began her own career at News International (I used to avoid meeting Hinton’s eye in the lift on the way to the canteen), this statement strikes me as hollow and wilfully blind and it stays with me long after I leave him. Good newspaper people need, in Nick Tomalin’s peerless phrase, a certain amount of ratlike cunning. But there are reporters everywhere who deliver important stories without resorting to breaking the law. They are the good newspapermen and women. When Hinton talks of the importance of the freedom of the press, describing, for instance, the way the famous condemnation of the hanging of Ruth Ellis by Cassandra in the Daily Mirror worked on him as a boy of 11, I’m with him all the way. But this stuff makes me feel more equivocally about him, which is a shame, because he is smart, nice and fun – and just like him, I do love to gossip about inky old times.

Bootle Boy by Les Hinton is published by Scribe (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846 Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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