Last week the Murdoch phone hacking empire hired the palatial rooms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for their summer party. There Rebekah Brooks and Murdoch junior sumptuously entertained their bought politicians from all the major parties, who turned up in droves, tongues dragging on the bespoke axminster, from Cameron down.
There is something horrible about News International taking over the Foreign Office. Its state rooms are available for hire – but not for public hire. A couple of years ago when Charles Crawford and I were considering holding a public debate on foreign policy and the practice of diplomacy, I asked whether it would be possible to rent a state room in the FCO. I was told I was not an appropriate person to rent a room there. While evidently the lying criminal scumbag Rebekah Brooks is an appropriate person. Fascinating set of values our government has.
Exactly what kind of blackmail material does Murdoch hold on the top echelons of the UK political establishment? They seem to be going out of their way to avoid mentioning the takeover of BSkyB that will seemingly be cheerily waved through by Jeremy Cunt er I mean Hunt
Exactly as Kebz says above. News Int must have hacked plenty of top politicians phones, as well as top police officers, (they hacked everyone else FFS) hence the lack of willingness to challenge Murdoch’s poisonous pen.
Our armed forces are spread across the world “bringing democracy” to random oil-rich countries, and all the while the total lack of democracy in the UK becomes clearer and clearer.
Can you say who these politicians were?
Now where is my ‘vote Cameron get Murdoch’ banner?
Phonecords International, we bring it all together. Are we looking at the core activities, the nutty secret of the ‘how to do’ Murdoch empire, control over private communications? Is this why he likes to own his own satelites? to gather info on the most powerfull people?
Just a thought, looking at the scope of his snooping it would not surprise me.
I find it quite extraordinary bearing in mind the extent of the hacking that the intelligence services didn’t counter it. Or perhaps it was a shared enterprise.
Ruth, the intelligence services are in the business of (among many other things) controlling elected politicians, or at least of ensuring that those who get to key positions are potentially controllable, usually through ensuring that they are ‘on side’ (meaning serving the interests of power rather than those of the people) and/or the threat of incipient blackmail. Some MPs, journalists and others are (as the euphemism goes) “very close to” intelligence. I think increasingly these intelligence security complex has people – paid or unpaid – in all walks of life. Intelligence and corporatism are becoming ever more united, so that intelligence and security serves primarily a corporate, rather than a (I use the inverted commas very deliberately in this context) ‘democratic’ state, master. Thus, the machinery of the state can be modulated directly and indirectly by corporate power. There are all kinds of extremely complex interlocking dynamics in this field, about which one senses, we (‘Ordinary Joes and Janes’) have little knowledge. But you already know this, since, not unlike Roderick Russell, Denis Lehane, Gary Llewellyn and others, you’ve had personal experience of some aspects of it in the UK – as you have told us before on this site.
But why would the intelligence services take part in a shared exercise when they could do it more efficiently themselves.
Good point, Ruth. What do you think, then? Is this Murdoch (and the others) setting up as a privatised intelligence entity, a corporate ‘Blackwater/Xe/Sandline’ (allegedly) to the MIs ‘Army’, as it were?
I don’t know. It’d be important for the papers to keep up their circulation in order to maximise propaganda and hacking gives them the edge.
It’d be quite logical for Murdoch’s companies to be part of the shadow economy of the governments within the governments in the UK and US.
Or could these revelations be part of the intelligence services attempting to temper the growing power of a potential rival in the field and/or at the Met (another rival of the MIs, eg. in Northern Ireland vis a vis Special Branch and MI5 turf-wars) – rather as the initial investigation and revelations wrt Watergate may in part have been J. Edgar Hoover’s (ultimately, posthumous) revenge on Richard Nixon, whom he hated? Bob Woodward has always been more than just an investigative journalist, it seems to me; he had been in US Army and Naval Intelligence, after all. So may be, yet again, things are not as simple as they seem.
@ Mark Golding
“Now where is my ‘vote Cameron get Murdoch’ banner?”
As opposed to ‘vote Labour, get Murdoch’?
Only the Lib Dems are remotely clean on this one.
News to me that you asked the FCO for use of a room for a debate with … me! I’ll ask them again to see if they’ll be more obliging under non-Labour management.
So who’s suprised that the Fuck’em & Castrate’em Office (Kenyan branch) is hiring out rooms to the cancerous Murdoch empire.It spread the lies for war after war.Both have only one agenda power and personal enrichment.