LONDON: How long will you stay then, Mr Murdoch? How long do you wish to be master of your media universe? Questions growing ever more pressing over the last few years as the old boy hits 70 ... 71... 72. But now we, and Rupert’s shareholders, have our answer. How long will you stay?
There’s irony here, of course. Murdoch has a sardonic Aussie wit (of the kind best found in Foster’s Lager ads). He probably — well, possibly — doesn’t see himself as immortal (as they say in Carlsberg commercials). But if you are his two competing sons, Lachlan (31) and James (30), then the joke is more of a four XXXX-er. Their dad was 22 when he inherited, and began to rebuild, the wreck of his dad’s empire.
Dynasties go beyond a recycled Joan Collins pushing Linda Evans’s shoulder pads down the stairs on cable TV - or another duff book from Jeffrey Archer. Dynasties are what make much of the wider world go round.
India was built on the Nehru legend, and that legend still lives in Sonia Gandhi. Bangladesh is bedevilled by the ruling wives and daughters of assassinated presidents. No sooner have you bid an untender farewell to one Assad than another’s sitting in Damascus. The obscure stans of Central Asia — Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and the rest — are stuffed with sons and daughters poised to take over when president papa slopes off to the last great bank vault in the sky.
Even America, however theoretically democratic and undeferential, is built on dynastic ambition, on Rockefellers and Kennedys and Bushes. Could Arnie have made it in California without Maria Shriver standing by her man? Of course not: her Kennedy connections were the steroids that pumped up his ambition in the first place. And you only have to go near a Republican convention to understand that there is nothing like a Bush.
I sat next to a charmingly assertive member of that clan at dinner a few months ago. She asked me to choose the wine. She talked easily and affectionately about “Cousin George” and “Uncle George”. Uncle G was the president who invaded Iraq first: Cousin G was the president who finished the job. She had absolutely no doubt that the family tidal wave would sweep on and on.
Do we quite understand that here? We ought to, in a country founded for centuries on inherited wealth and privileges. But high-profile dynasties are really in curiously short supply. The Benns, father and son, Tony and Hillary, are just about the only current political offering of note. The Churchills and Macmillans have faded away. There are no power-broking Thatchers or Majors. There will be no IDS second coming.
We have Redgraves around, and an Amis who writes best-sellers. Of course you can add AS Byatt to Margaret Drabble for a finer sum of family parts. A Rothermere still rules the Daily Mail roost. But business has largely got out of that game, the Sainsburys scattered and quiescent, the Tukes and the Bevans who once ran Barclays dispersed. We’re not instinctively used to mixing blood with our water any longer.
That has its disadvantages. The least worst reason for going to war with Iraq wasn’t Saddam and the awful things he might have had stuffed up his jumper: in fact, the wheezing dictator had grown inert and unthreatening. No, the problem was what came next: Uday and Qusay, the next generation of psychopaths and torturers with a legacy to protect. They, if anyone, knew where the weapons of mass destruction might be buried. They were the pustules who needed lancing in public. But the boys from Clan Bush just blasted them apart in a brain-dead hail of bullets. They didn’t see what was important. They didn’t make the family connection.
Maybe the dynasty we have swamps our neeneed for any other. The Windsors — those specially imported Saxe-Coburg-Gothas — are all we can cope with. They can’t skip a generation or retreat into the undergrowth like normal dynasties. Genetics has to score runs every time they go to the wicket.
This current lot isn’t particularly lovable — or loved. Jennie Bond, after 14 years of royal traipsings for the BBC, deemed them distant and chilly when she quit last week. (Remember that royal visit to Seoul?
But distant or not, we’re stuck with them — just as, in all probability, we shall be stuck with Kings Charles and William. There is no easy escape. Their omnipresent stickability gives normal dynasty-building a bad name.
Which, on the irony round, brings us back to Rupert, the true Sun King. No Aussie-American living is fiercer in his denunciations of the Windsors; no media mogul has his republicanism further out of the closet. He can’t stand toffee- nosed backscratchers and freeloaders. Yet give him a family and a future of his own and he changes utterly. Son Lachlan rules one half of empire, son James prepares — with a push and a shove — to inherit BSkyB. Ancient Rome couldn’t have done it better.
And this supreme meritocrat, this sharp-elbowed apostle of market forces? He is no keener on abdicating than HM. Indeed, with third wife Wendy, he’s busy spawning the dynasty after next. He is with us “for ever”. And, as Theresa May will doubtless inform the next Tory conference, “for ever is a very long time”.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
