Lord Rothermere and Rupert Murdoch appear to have fallen out over Boris Johnson.
Rothermere still thinks he’s a player – witness the Mail on Sunday’s tragic “Boris’s six-point plan to defeat Putin” – whereas Murdoch’s Sunday Times didn’t feel the need to even mention him in relation to the crisis in Ukraine. Johnson got name-checked only in relation to his part in foisting the dodgy Evgeny Lebedev on the Lords and the concerns of his own MPs that he’s not doing enough to seize the assets of all the Russian oligarchs resident on these shores.
“One proprietor is significantly older than the other, but both, to all intents and purposes, have regents,” one veteran newspaper executive tells me. “Murdoch’s is Danny – now Lord – Finkelstein, the Times grandee, and Rothermere’s is Paul Dacre. Paul seems to understand that the second act of his career is now only going to last as long as Johnson’s.”
