Thatcher files: Secret Murdoch meeting detailed in archives. 17 March 2012Last updated at 03:56 ET By Holly Wallis BBC News Details of the meeting were "treated in confidence" Margaret Thatcher had a secret meeting with Rupert Murdoch at Chequers weeks before his 1981 purchase of the Times newspapers, newly released files show.
A note by her press secretary Bernard Ingham says the prime minister thanked Mr Murdoch for "keeping her posted". But the contentious issue of whether to refer the bid to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission was not raised. The official history of the Times had stated there was no direct contact between the pair at that stage. The papers are being released by the Margaret Thatcher Archive Trust. The note by Mr Ingham (who became Sir Bernard in 1990) refers to a lunch with Mr Murdoch at Chequers on 4 January 1981, "to be treated Commercial - In Confidence". Rupert Murdoch owns too many newspapers. Rupert Murdoch owns too many newspapers.
This was the uncompromising message from the Shadow Culture Secretary Harriet Harman at the Westminster Media Forum yesterday as reported in the Guardian. It’s not solely a British problem. Here in the European Parliament we have debated media pluralism, or plurality as we call it in the UK, on many occasions.One of the first debates after the 2009 European elections was about Silvio Berlusconi’s vast and often unedifying media empire.
Rupert Murdoch’s empire must be dismantled says Labour party leader. SNP links with Rupert Murdoch savaged by Labour leader Ed Miliband. Politics SNP in Aberdeen: Alex Salmond uses conference speech to persuade women to vote yes in referendum FIRST Minister vows to help females land top roles in business in bid to close gap in independence race.
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Tony Blair 'godfather to Rupert Murdoch's daughter' 5 September 2011Last updated at 11:06 Tony Blair angered many in his party when he decided to woo the Murdoch press Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair is godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch's young children, it has emerged.
Mr Blair was present last March when Mr Murdoch's two daughters by his third wife, Wendi Deng, were baptised. The revelation comes in an interview with Ms Deng in a forthcoming issue of fashion magazine Vogue. Tony Blair's office declined to comment on the report, which sheds new light on Mr Blair's ties with the media mogul. Rupert Murdoch: Labour forays into the lion's den. Drinks, dinners and audiences with Rupert Murdoch have long been a political rite of passage for those at the top – or those on the way up.
In July 1995, Tony Blair incurred the wrath of old Labour by accepting an invitation to address the News Corporation conference on Hayman island in Australia. Despite the fury of much of his party – not least Neil Kinnock, who felt he had been vilified by the Sun – Blair decided it was too good an opportunity to miss. "It seems obvious," he writes in his memoir, A Journey. "The country's most powerful newspaper proprietor, whose publications have hitherto been rancorous in their opposition to the Labour party, invites us into the lion's den.
You go, don't you? " Blair also notes that Paul Keating, then prime minister of Australia, felt Murdoch was "a bastard, but one you could deal with". Rupert Murdoch and Labour: goodbye to an uneasy friendship. The front page of Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper on the day of the 1992 general election.
John Major won a fourth Tory term, though the Sun soon dumped him too Labour's neurotic relationship with Rupert Murdoch's media conglomerate may best be illuminated by a pithy phrase of President Franklin Roosevelt who said of one sordid Central American dictator: "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. " Since the demise of the TUC-owned Daily Herald (it later resurfaced as the Murdoch Sun), successive Labour leaders have always known they can only say "he's our son of a bitch" about the loyal Daily Mirror stable. Clem Attlee (leader from 1935-55) did not let it trouble him much. Jim Callaghan (1976-80) was resigned, John Smith (1992-94) philosophical, about the fact that Fleet Street's core loyalty was that of its wealthy – often foreign – proprietors, to the Conservative party.
But most Labour leaders fret a great deal about the press. It did not do him much good.