Liverpudlian’s Stellar Career via Oz

The Bootle Boy: An Untidy Life in News
by Les Hinton
Scribe, 2018, 445 pages, $49.99
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I was born in Liverpool, the same place as Les Hinton, and just a month later. Make no mistake, administrative niceties aside, Bootle is effectively Liverpool. It is centred on Merseyside docklands about six kilometres from Liverpool’s city centre. He is most definitely as Liverpudlian as I am. But still those from Bootle make a point of it as those from other suburban areas don’t. And you would expect them to make a fuss about all of their famous sons. Surprised then was I to discover that the Wikipedia entry on notable people born in Bootle does not include Hinton.

There are footballers, a comedian, a rock singer, a politician, and a few others, but no newspaper mogul. Perhaps that reflects Hinton’s ability to mix at the highest social levels while remaining publicly unnoticed. That might have been important to his longevity at News Corporation. Being out of the public limelight meant he didn’t cast a shadow over Rupert Murdoch. But those out of the limelight have a harder job attracting interest in their life stories. And I am not sure that Hinton’s tale is told rivetingly enough.

Murdoch is the principal attraction, of course, but he comes in and out of the story, largely as a background figure, pulling the strings on Hinton’s working life, sending him here and there to fill increasingly senior positions. You never really find out what Murdoch saw in him as opposed to those whom he sacked. A secondary attraction of the book, and what I was waiting for as I waded through, was Hinton’s take on the phone-hacking scandal that broke in 2011 in the UK and which led to his forced resignation from News. I will start with this ending.

“No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard / Or keeps the end from being hard” is a stanza from one of Robert Frost’s poems. It’s a salutary sentiment which reminds us that we live in the moment and not in the past. This is Hinton reflecting:

I had long ago made my personal bargain with the restraints and rewards of working for a personality like Rupert. I never felt immune; I had seen the casualties pile up over the years. But I never thought it would end like this for me, as a castaway in a hurricane.

Hinton could not have foreseen that his tenure heading News International beginning in 2007—almost the climax of his stellar career with News—would lead to his demise. It was on his “watch”, as he says, that numbers of News of the World reporters were discovered to have hacked into mobile phones. This became a public scandal when it was revealed that one of the phones hacked into belonged to Milly Dowler, a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl who was abducted and murdered in 2002. Not only was her phone hacked but the messages were re-sorted, which led her parents to believe that she might still be alive. It was reckless and disgusting behaviour on the part of the reporters.

Those who have lived in England know that the Sunday papers are a vital part of the tapestry of life. It might have something to do with the weather. I don’t know. Among Sunday newspapers, the News of the World was peerless. When Murdoch closed it down, as atonement, it was among the best-selling newspapers in the English-speaking world. We used to get it at home when I was a teenager. It appealed to the working class. It appealed to me. It was a racy publication with mandatory pictures of scantily clad young women.

The key here is that it was a racy publication. It should not have come as a surprise that its reporters might skate close to the edge. Hinton claimed that he didn’t know what was going on. Recording his thoughts flying back to New York from a meeting in London in 2011, he writes: “What exactly had been going on at the News of the World all those years ago?” And it’s clear he didn’t know. He was accused of lying to parliament in 2012 but was exonerated by the privileges committee in 2016. But it’s also clear that he doesn’t quite seem to accept accountability. In deciding not to travel to London for a while he writes, “It made me feel like a fugitive, even though I had done nothing wrong.”

One or even two reporters going rogue in a newspaper is one thing but phone-hacking (and also pay-off to police) was systematic. It might not be widely understood—and clearly isn’t by many highly-paid chief executives—but part of the job is to keep a close watch over the behaviour of employees to ensure ethical standards are being kept. And this is surely essential when the organisation employs large numbers of tabloid newspaper reporters. So it is not a question of whether Hinton should have known. It is a question of whether he ever seriously turned his mind to the ethical behaviour of those under his charge. There is no indication in his account of the affair that he ever did.

Hinton starts his story as a young child in Bootle. Much of what he says resonates with me. And it is useful these days to go back (not really so far) to the second half of the 1940s in Britain, when the scars of war were still vivid. It’s a reminder of the horrors and unpredictability of wars for those who indulgently think it can’t happen again. I was born about four kilometres from Bootle. We had a bombed-out site in the next street and one in an adjoining street. They were great for us kids setting bonfires on November 5. Hinton was surrounded by bomb sites. The Luftwaffe concentrated a lot of bombs on the Liverpool docks in Bootle. An aside, I noticed that his grandmother had a phone. That was a bit posh, I think. Neither my parents nor my grandmothers had phones. Mind you, Hinton’s dunny at the bottom of the yard, with newspaper for toilet paper, rings an uncomfortable bell.

I failed to pick Hinton’s politics throughout the book. His second wife (from Liverpool) worked for Gordon Brown so she is certainly of the Left. He gives the impression of being apolitical. I was amused by his mother’s view that Tories “were better to rule us than uncouth workers”. My own maternal grandmother voted Tory because, as she put it, “the Labour Party people had no money”.

Hinton left Bootle for the first time when he was just five, returning between his father’s overseas postings. His father was a chef and sergeant in the British Army. Hinton, his older sister and younger brother, had stints in Egypt, Eritrea, Tripoli, West Germany and finally Singapore. Much of the description of this part of his life, and his bewildering array of relatives, is somewhat prosaic. There for the record, I suppose. You could safely skip it and lose nothing of the main act. At the same time, I liked his story of listening on the radio in West Germany to the ventriloquist Peter Brough with his dummy Archie Andrews. I listened too, back in Liverpool. We must have both just assumed Brough wasn’t moving his lips. This is one of a number of amusing diversionary vignettes he tells.

He accompanied Norman Scott, the estranged lover of Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe, to a hotel in Devon in the late 1970s, where a gathering of Anglican clergy raised their glasses for the “royal toast” (a subeditor was needed to change royal into loyal). At the words “the Queen”, Hinton reports, “Scott staggered quickly to his feet, clattering glass at our table and capsizing a bottle of claret … ‘A toast for me?’ cried Britain’s most famous gay man to a room of gasping vicars. ‘Oh, how kind of you all. Thank you so much. I should now like to make a few remarks in response.’” There are one or two other amusing tales in the book. But I have to say that there is also some maudlin banality that the afore-mentioned subeditor might have struck out.

Of his first-born he writes: “When we met, I stroked his cheek with the outside of my left index finger.” Having been offered a job in New York by his then immediate boss he reports, “We stood at the men’s room door to the sound of flushing urinals.” Why tell us this kind of thing? He falls into the old trap too of lamenting that his work took him away from his family. “I thought that the job sometimes twisted priorities. It wasn’t the last time I felt that way.” Talk about a cliché. And he wants to second-guess his business decisions. “I cut costs, closed publications and businesses, pushed out editors and executives, always convincing myself it was for the greater good of the company and its remaining employees.” And, by the way, none of this “ruthless” behaviour is covered in the book, unless I missed it. Why isn’t it there? It might have added depth.

His family moved to Adelaide in 1959. His mother’s sister had emigrated earlier. He was fifteen, with no education to speak of. I read one reviewer who said that Hinton had failed the 11-Plus exam. His own account doesn’t quite back that up. He claims that he “must have done all right” but that his expressed ambition to be either an actor or a motor mechanic had resulted him being placed into a secondary modern school rather than a grammar. He has no idea why “motor mechanic” popped into his mouth. In any event, Hinton had a disconcerting eye condition (wandering eye), his parents had separated for a while, and he was moved from place to place. None of this is conducive to succeeding at school.

He swapped between acting and journalism as his chosen career, before deciding on the latter when he was just eleven; inspired, apparently, by his regular reading of the Daily Mirror. He first applied to the Advertiser in Adelaide and was offered a job in accounts, which to his mother’s chagrin he turned down. He tried the News, Adelaide’s evening paper. He became a copy boy and seventeen months later a cadet reporter. And this was the start of his career of fifty years, with one short interruption, at News Corporation.

His first editor, sacked a year later, was Rohan Rivett. Hinton writes that he knew from Rivett “that Australians were willing to give people a chance”. This same kind of sentiment he echoed years later in talking about America. “Twenty years before these people [a boardroom table full of lords and knights] would have intimidated me but America … had inoculated me against the old class divides of Britain.” It is true to say that Australia treated Hinton, as it treated me when I arrived six years after Hinton, on merit. You have to ask whether a fifteen-year-old boy, out of secondary modern school, would make such a good start in England as he did in Australia. It’s counterfactual but you have to doubt it.

Adelaide is a nice city, but Hinton wanted Fleet Street. He sailed off to London in 1965 and got a job with the news agency British United Press. Meanwhile Murdoch was busy buying up UK newspapers—the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, the News of the World and the Sun. The Sun was a languishing newspaper when Murdoch bought it. Nine years later it was Britain’s top-selling daily. This was just the start for Murdoch. “In the 1980s, he spent billions buying TV stations across America, as well as the 20th Century Fox film studio, Triangle publications, and more newspapers in America and Australia. Rupert didn’t like to wake up in a town where he didn’t own a newspaper.”

Hinton left British United Press after a short while and started working for the Sun. The right step at the right time. From the Sun, he went on an upward trajectory in the Murdoch empire. This included joining the all-Australian News bureau in New York; becoming news editor at the Star (a supermarket sensationalist periodical), city editor of the Boston Herald, editor-in-chief of the Star in Manhattan, vice-president of Murdoch Magazines; and head of Fox television before Roger Ailes took over to give Fox News conservative oomph. Subsequently he headed to London as head of News International to run the UK newspaper business before, after twelve years, returning to New York with a five-year contract as chief executive of the recently acquired Dow Jones; which, among other things, published the Wall Street Journal. Hinton’s time ran out before his contract.

Media people will like this book, I think—though they might have appreciated an index. I am ambivalent. It is readable without ever being gripping. I still don’t think I know Hinton. I don’t believe it added much to our knowledge of Murdoch’s character either. According to Hinton, an obituary for a past head of News International read: “The court of Rupert Murdoch is much like the court of Henry III. Men and women are promoted to positions of great power only to be felled on the royal whim, whether because they cease to be useful or because they threaten to gain more fame than the monarch himself.” But we know that Murdoch is ruthless in business affairs. He would not have been so successful otherwise in the media business. That Hinton lasted so long and rose so high, keeping his head while others lost theirs, is a testimony to his survival technique; and he is charmingly honest about it:

“You’ve got it wrong, Rupert. No way am I doing that job. I keep telling them, but no one will listen to me.” Well, they’re not the words I used. What I said was: “Oh, you’re welcome, Mr Murdoch, you’re very welcome.”