James murdoch likes to take refuge

James Murdoch likes to take refuge in the word "process". Sometimes in his increasingly beleaguered public appearances he says it with a short "o", sometimes with a long one: his dry, slightly rootless transatlantic accent jumps around.

Until this tumultuous month, his continuing rise, like that of his family's media conglomerate News Corporation, seemed intimidatingly inevitable. Only 38, James Murdoch had for half a decade been regarded as the likely successor to his 80-year-old father Rupert as head of News Corp, having overtaken his siblings Elisabeth and Lachlan. Since 2007 James has been in charge of the company's European and Asian operations, from brash Indian satellite television to ancient British newspapers. Since 2003, he has also been chief executive and now chairman of its main moneyspinner BSkyB. And in March, News Corp announced a further promotion: a "newly created role" for him, with additional international responsibilities, at company headquarters in New York.


"James is like his father, News Corp people believe," wrote Rupert Murdoch's biographer Michael Wolff in 2008. "He's aggressive, implacable, focused, remote, fit, precise. His father is obviously proud, even perhaps slightly afraid of him."

Perhaps not any more. Already, this month's historic retreats and defeats and general, jaw-dropping disarray suffered by Rupert Murdoch's 58-year-old empire have claimed many casualties, from the entire staff of the News of the World to the legal manager of Murdoch's London newspapers, Tom Crone, to the reputation of News Corp on both sides of the Atlantic.

As I write, James still has his job. The News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, with whom he and his father have a delicate triangular relationship, remains more directly implicated in the phone-hacking scandal. On Wednesday, the Financial Times still described him as his father's "presumed successor". But he is highly vulnerable: as overseer of his family's British newspapers since 2007, he has been intimately involved in News Corp's disastrous response to the phone-hacking revelations.

"This must seem like an extraordinary nightmare for him," says Claire Enders of the respected media watchers Enders Analysis. "James Murdoch became chairman of News International in 2007, after the alleged [phone-hacking] offences took place. But people will say: 'James should have been more decisive. James should have asked himself more questions.'"

Nor has his touch improved as the scandal has gone on. "The whole thing has been an absolute crisis management disaster," says the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell. Max Clifford, another old hand at averting PR catastrophes, reflected an increasingly common view when he told this paper on Monday: "I get the feeling James Murdoch is out of his depth."

Last week, he gave an extended, damage-limitation interview to ITV. It lacked a certain composure: one of his shirt collars poked out untidily over his suit lapel, his tie knot was messy (he usually wears open-necked shirts for business), and he shifted from foot to foot when his answers were forced to touch on the most sensitive areas. With his lean frame and cropped hair, his round, almost rimless glasses and bureaucratic answers – "these are very serious matters that we take very very seriously . . . there are real human beings involved".

Enders says: "James Murdoch is a man of great ability, but he has a tendency to impetuous decision-making, like his father. [James] closing the News of the World was an impetuous act, and it has done absolutely nothing [to halt the crisis]. And over the years James Murdoch has done himself no favours in his dealings with people – media regulators, politicians." He has failed to anticipate, says a well-connected City figure who knows him well, that there are fraught moments in any business career when, "you may need people on your side.