Even at 91, Rupert Murdoch could see that Lord Rothermere’s Mail titles were making an unforgivable blunder in championing Liz Truss to lead the Tory Party, and he acquainted his fellow proprietor with his view in what I am told was a “robustly worded” phone call.
“Rupert had a great many meetings with Rishi Sunak and it had been his assumption that he would succeed Boris Johnson relatively effortlessly,” one of his executives tells me. “He could not believe it when Jonathan’s titles threw a spanner in the works, and he called Jonathan during the leadership campaign.”
Murdoch was incredulous that his fellow non-dom could not see that in installing Truss in Downing Street, he’d more or less laid out the red carpet for Sir Keir Starmer – who is committed to outlawing non-dom tax status – to swiftly walk up it in her wake.
At least for now, neither man shows any sign of backing down. The Daily Mail on Saturday instructed the country to “stop plotting and unite behind the PM”, and the next day Murdoch’s Sunday Times retorted that Truss was “in office but not in power”, and quoted one Tory MP as saying: “The options are death if we stick with Liz or ridicule if we get someone else, and ridicule seems preferable.”
There’s apprehension at the Mail’s Kensington headquarters about a cold war with Murdoch at the very point they need all the industry support they can get: Doreen Lawrence, Sir Elton John, Prince Harry and others have lately begun legal proceedings against Rothermere’s papers, claiming they took part in “abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy”, an accusation the Mail group vehemently denies.
