Mike Carlton is a journalist, broadcaster and commentator.
Writing his weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald he reflects on Rupert Murdoch, once one of Ozs' citizens before she shipped off the US to take up citizenship there.
"The disappointing thing about the Murdoch horror crisis is that there's no sex. Or not yet, anyway. The closest we've come to even the faintest whiff of traditional British raunch is a slumber party, for heaven's sake, thrown by Gordon Brown's wife at Chequers in 2008. Wendi Deng, Elisabeth Murdoch and the Wicked Witch of Wapping, the flame-haired Rebekah Brooks, were invited to ''bring their pyjamas'' and sleep over.
How feeble. Fans of scandal in the British establishment will think longingly of the fabulous Profumo Affair of the swinging '60s, when these things were done properly. John Profumo, a Tory secretary of state for war, was accused of bonking the delicious Christine Keeler, a party chick who'd been having a simultaneous affair with a naval attaché´ at the Soviet embassy.
The Cold War was at its height. Profumo lied to the House of Commons, denying all. But the scandal exploded, a lurid thriller of espionage and high-society sleaze. There were tales of naked romps in the swimming pool at Cliveden, the huge country pile of the third Viscount Astor, where dinner parties were served by a male waiter clad only in a mask and a pink ribbon on his penis - a figure variously and hilariously rumoured, but never proved, to have been either a royal duke or Duncan Sandys, a senior cabinet minister and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill.
And it got better. Astor - heir to a newspaper fortune - was himself accused of shagging a topless dancer, Mandy Rice-Davies. His furious denials prompted Mandy's memorable remark in court: ''he would, wouldn't he'', later widely misquoted as ''he would say that, wouldn't he''. Profumo quit in disgrace and the Tory government of Harold Macmillan fell soon afterwards.
Sadly, the Murdoch affair pales against all that excitement. Press barons are not what they used to be. Once, like Lord Byron, they were mad, bad and dangerous to know. Alfred Harmsworth, the first Viscount Northcliffe and the inventor of tabloid journalism, developed megalomania of Napoleonic proportions and towards the end of his life in 1922 had to be physically restrained from entering his own premises.
Robert Maxwell, an emigre known as ''the bouncing Czech'', who was both proprietor of the Daily Mirror and a Mossad spy, fell/was pushed/jumped off his yacht in 1991 after looting hundreds of millions from his company's pension funds. Haughty Canadian Conrad Black of London's Daily Telegraph, ludicrously ''ennobled'' as Baron Black of Crossharbour, also embezzled millions so that he and his disgusting wife might frolic like pre-revolutionary Bourbons.
To his great credit, Rupert Murdoch never grabbed the peerage he could so easily have had. But it was warming to see he has not entirely flung the mad, bad and dangerous tradition to the winds. As is the custom when the Great and the Good are brought to account, his ever so 'umble appearance before the House of Commons on Tuesday was studded with: I don't know, can't recall, was never told about that, do not have direct knowledge, this is the first I've heard, people we trusted, not responsible for this, blah blah. Likewise James, the flint-eyed younger son and, until now, heir apparent.
But then they would say that, wouldn't they. The pie-chucker came as welcome relief."
Writing his weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald he reflects on Rupert Murdoch, once one of Ozs' citizens before she shipped off the US to take up citizenship there.
"The disappointing thing about the Murdoch horror crisis is that there's no sex. Or not yet, anyway. The closest we've come to even the faintest whiff of traditional British raunch is a slumber party, for heaven's sake, thrown by Gordon Brown's wife at Chequers in 2008. Wendi Deng, Elisabeth Murdoch and the Wicked Witch of Wapping, the flame-haired Rebekah Brooks, were invited to ''bring their pyjamas'' and sleep over.
How feeble. Fans of scandal in the British establishment will think longingly of the fabulous Profumo Affair of the swinging '60s, when these things were done properly. John Profumo, a Tory secretary of state for war, was accused of bonking the delicious Christine Keeler, a party chick who'd been having a simultaneous affair with a naval attaché´ at the Soviet embassy.
The Cold War was at its height. Profumo lied to the House of Commons, denying all. But the scandal exploded, a lurid thriller of espionage and high-society sleaze. There were tales of naked romps in the swimming pool at Cliveden, the huge country pile of the third Viscount Astor, where dinner parties were served by a male waiter clad only in a mask and a pink ribbon on his penis - a figure variously and hilariously rumoured, but never proved, to have been either a royal duke or Duncan Sandys, a senior cabinet minister and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill.
And it got better. Astor - heir to a newspaper fortune - was himself accused of shagging a topless dancer, Mandy Rice-Davies. His furious denials prompted Mandy's memorable remark in court: ''he would, wouldn't he'', later widely misquoted as ''he would say that, wouldn't he''. Profumo quit in disgrace and the Tory government of Harold Macmillan fell soon afterwards.
Sadly, the Murdoch affair pales against all that excitement. Press barons are not what they used to be. Once, like Lord Byron, they were mad, bad and dangerous to know. Alfred Harmsworth, the first Viscount Northcliffe and the inventor of tabloid journalism, developed megalomania of Napoleonic proportions and towards the end of his life in 1922 had to be physically restrained from entering his own premises.
Robert Maxwell, an emigre known as ''the bouncing Czech'', who was both proprietor of the Daily Mirror and a Mossad spy, fell/was pushed/jumped off his yacht in 1991 after looting hundreds of millions from his company's pension funds. Haughty Canadian Conrad Black of London's Daily Telegraph, ludicrously ''ennobled'' as Baron Black of Crossharbour, also embezzled millions so that he and his disgusting wife might frolic like pre-revolutionary Bourbons.
To his great credit, Rupert Murdoch never grabbed the peerage he could so easily have had. But it was warming to see he has not entirely flung the mad, bad and dangerous tradition to the winds. As is the custom when the Great and the Good are brought to account, his ever so 'umble appearance before the House of Commons on Tuesday was studded with: I don't know, can't recall, was never told about that, do not have direct knowledge, this is the first I've heard, people we trusted, not responsible for this, blah blah. Likewise James, the flint-eyed younger son and, until now, heir apparent.
But then they would say that, wouldn't they. The pie-chucker came as welcome relief."
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