News International (NWSA) lost about 5% of its stock value today, and with a special session of the UK Parliament on Wednesday all bets are off - if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.
Murdoch is probably doomed; unless he pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the Parliamentary committee meeting tomorrow morning, his stockholders seem almost certain to revolt. I'm kind of surprised that his board hasn't cut him loose yet. This Lulzsec joke is in poor taste, but right on the money as a piece of satire. Curiously reminiscent of a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon jesting about the funeral of NY Tribune publisher (and neckbeard extraordinaire) Horace Greeley.
By the way here is the cartoon I mentioned above. I mis-remembered; it wasn't Greeley's funeral exactly, but suggesting he was near death. Greeley had run as a quixotic Democratic candidate in the 1872 election against President Ulysses S. Grant and his continued occupation of the South during the reconstruction period following the civil war. Greeley did poorly in the election, and this cartoon in Harper's Weekly, a strongly Republican magazine at that time, mocked his crusading style and suggested his campaign had no life left in it.
This is considered an especially cruel editorial cartoon, because Greeley's wife died immediately after the election; Greeley then went mad, and died a few weeks later at the end of November. He had suffered terrible financial losses by being caught in an investment scam earlier that year, and had lost control of his newspaper to another New York publisher, Whitelaw Reid, who fired him. I happened to be reading about these events just before the News International scandal blew up. Technology has changed a lot, human nature not so much.
From what I've read, in the WSJ editorial today perhaps foremost, he sanctions those activities implicitly if not explicitly. Don't forget in the midst of all this the NY Post front page story alleging DSK accuser not only of being hooker but pimped by her union! If it is the end of Murdoch, good riddance.
> if Cameron is badly damaged enough, the Lib Dems could pull out of the government on principle leading to a snap election, although I would give that only a 20% chance of happening.
I'd say the chances of that are more like 0.2%. Most of the crap that went on was under Blair and Brown.
Cameron's problem is that he hired former NoTW editor Andy Coulson to be his press secretary, and Coulson was forced to resign last January because of these hacking reports.
Not only did he apparently approve of and even commission hacking while a newspaper editor, he hired a private investigator who had been jailed for trying to plant drugs on other people (to create a newspaper scandal) and who later turned out to be an axe murderer. I don't mean that as a figure of speech; the fellow murdered his business partner with an axe. Now coulson did not know this was going to happen when he hired him, but Cameron (or at least his chief of staff) apparently knew about it before hiring Coulson and decided that he would make a fine addition to the team anyway, desite his extremely dodgy social circle. Add in the fact that Cameron has had a meeting with Murdoch or one of his top lieutenants on average every 2 weeks since becoming PM, at either 10 Downing Street or at Chequers (the PM's official country house, like Camp David for the President), and he looks uncomfortably close to a bunch of rather villainous people.
Remember that Cameron is governing as part of a coalition with the Liberal Democratic party, who are allied with him by necessity rather than by choice. If they pull out and Cameron loses a vote of confidence in Parliament, the government falls.
The problem, as I see it, isn't the dodgyness, it's that the Lib Dems needs cover to back a vote of no-confidence. A vote of no confidence in a government you're part of is a big deal. If they vote no-confidence on the grounds that Cameron had meetings (even meetings) and no hard evidence, then the only thing Cameron needs to do to absolutely end the LDs is to demonstrate how Labour also had meetings (News Intl were behind Labour in all the Blair elections). Heck, Murdoch might just do him the favour and dump the minutes himself on the way out.
Also, LDs are in plenty of trouble with their base. They swallowed tuition rises but are willing to fire the PM over being too nice to Rebekah Brooks? Tuition affects pretty much everybody who will go to university or who wants their children to go to university. Loose ties to repulsive, illegal behaviour at at newspaper everybody already knows to be the scum of the earth affects comparatively no-one.
Finally, Coulson was working for Cameron when the coalition was set up. How does it play to be fine with that, and then suddenly be against some meetings on a vague principle?
All correct - that's why I think there's only a 20% likelihood of a showdown tomorrow. And the main reason I give it that percentage is the history of the Lib Dems dating back to the 80s; they've been willing to go through a schism before, and individual MPs might see a rebellion as the best chance of holding onto their seat, especially if they were already unhappy with the compromises forced on them in the coalition.
Employing someone who 10 years ago may have engaged in some, or known about dodgy journalistic tactics is hardly much to write home about.
Of course he had meetings with execs from NewsCorp. They own a bunch of newspapers! Blair and Brown did exactly the same.
It sounds like you'd like the government to fall. I don't think most people in the country would.
I think most people are thoroughly bored of this 'scandal' about a bit of corruption that happened 10 years ago. There's more important news out there. Like the collapse of the Euro.
>Of course he had meetings with execs from NewsCorp.
He had Christmas dinner with Rebecca Brooks, he had a secret meeting with Murdoch on a private yacht before the election. There are meetings and then there are meetings.
"I think most people are thoroughly bored of this 'scandal' about a bit of corruption that happened 10 years ago. There's more important news out there."
Nope. It's more to do with the fact that it's a scandal exposing just how corrupt and cosy the british power elites are. "A bit of corruption 10 years ago" is somewhat akin to Al Capone going down on tax evasion
Murdoch is probably doomed; unless he pulls a rabbit out of a hat at the Parliamentary committee meeting tomorrow morning, his stockholders seem almost certain to revolt. I'm kind of surprised that his board hasn't cut him loose yet. This Lulzsec joke is in poor taste, but right on the money as a piece of satire. Curiously reminiscent of a 19th century Thomas Nast cartoon jesting about the funeral of NY Tribune publisher (and neckbeard extraordinaire) Horace Greeley.
EDIT: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-18/news-corp-said-to-c... suggests NWSA is indeed planning to give Murdoch the boot. Oh, how the mighty are fallen.
EDIT II: A more illuminating story from the trades http://www.adweek.com/news/television/if-rupert-goes-chase-c...
Edit III: I can't help noticing that Mr Carey looks an awful lot like the Lulzsec mascot with those curly mustachios. Coincidence? I think not!
I'll show myself out