Across the pond

David Davis’s attempt to provoke a national debate about the erosion of Britain’s civil liberties using the way Prime Minister Gordon Brown steered his controversial 42-day-detension bill through the House of Commons, turned to farce today. Downing Street has been telling journalists that Labour will follow the Liberal Democrats, who have already announced that they will not fight the by-election, which Davis has provoked by his resignation.

But Rupert Murdoch, the Australian, turned American citizen, has decided that the interests of British democracy are best served if Davis does get the fight he is looking forward. He is encouraging his own champion to stand and put the case for the 42-day-detension bill.

He is sending into battle one of his most trusted men, Kelvin MacKenzie, who was editor of The Sun, when in the days when it established a new high in British daily newspaper circulations and a new low in British popular journalism standards. MacKenzie later went on to adapt his popular journalism to television, introducing the much-ridiculed news bunny.

It is a quite astonishing development which demonstrates the old saw, ‘you couldn’t make it up. Since MacKenzie has declared his intentions on the BBC Radio Four Today programme there is no doubt that the story is not journalistic invention. Sun journalists have been known to invent quotes, when they could not find real people to voice the opinions they were seeking.

But MacKenzie in this instance was the news.

I still doubt, however, whether Rupert Murdoch will follow this one through. For Britain’s most powerful media tycoon to fund a parliamentary candidate in this way is gift to all those who question whether the free press in Britain is served by so much media control in the hands of one family.

And think how this will play in the US, which is gearing up for the Presidential election. This week Fox News, Murdoch’s US television channel, was forced to suspend one of their lead presenters because of offensive racist jokes about Barack Obama. Murdoch now also owns the Wall Street Journalism, which is traditionally Republican. But the New York Post, the leading popular newspaper in New York City, now owned by Murdoch, is traditionally Democrat.

Recently, as reported here, Murdoch lavished praise on Obama, though stopping short of endorsing him. His daughter, Elisabeth, hosted a fund-raising dinner in London last month for Obama.

But now that the Presidential battle is a straight fight between Obama and McCain, Murdoch must be seriously worried about his left-wing sympathies. McCain’s personal views are much closer to Murdoch’s. But, temperamentally, Murdoch, although he is now an old man, tends to prefer the young thrusters.

My view remains that if Murdoch thinks Obama is going to win, he will offer his support, as he did so often with Blair, in the hope that he can influence him in the direction of his own business interests and political preferences.

And I think, that he may well have second thoughts about funding his former editor as a candidate in a British election. That is not going to do his credibility in the US any good at all.

Indeed it might cause Americans to start crusading against media barons with ‘power without responsibisty’