As we discussed a few weeks ago, the March issue of Vanity Fair has a scandalous story about Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng’s divorce and why Rupert filed for divorce so suddenly last year. VF online teased the article adequately, and when I got my issue of VF, I poured through the story to see if there was more. There was. Rupert and Team Rupert, including his family and close staffers, are coming after Wendi. The VF article is pretty much a hit piece against Wendi, full of insinuations, rumors and second-hand stories about her allegedly multiple affairs. The alleged affair with Tony Blair is the one getting all the headlines, but there were more men named in the print edition, plus there were some alleged incidents of Wendi physically and emotionally abusing Rupert.
It’s an interesting hit piece and I’m sure it sent shock waves through the UK press in particular, much of which is either controlled by Murdoch or in awe of Murdoch. So The Guardian decided to get in on the action and got some of their sources close to Murdoch and Tony Blair to speak. You can read the full Guardian article here, and here are some highlights:
Tony Blair’s friends and allies seem to accept the globe-trotting former prime minister’s emphatic assurances that the press has got it wrong again. He did not have an affair with Rupert Murdoch’s now-ex-wife Wendi Deng; instead he was a sympathetic intermediary and confidante in a troubled marriage. Equally emphatic are Blair’s long-standing enemies, and new ones in the Murdoch camp, who peddle the story over dinner. “Why did Blair betray a friend? Because he could,” says one.
Apart from disputed details of solo meetings at Murdoch’s Californian ranch and elsewhere (witnessed by staff) the closest things to evidence to have emerged so far are a misrouted Deng email and her breathless notes to herself, unearthed after the debacle… In any case the facts of the case – or lack of them – are not what is important. What matters is that apparently the 82-year-old Murdoch believes the allegations are true. As do loyal News Corp colleagues and the four children from his first two marriages who never warmed to Deng or her “equal shares” demand for her own two Murdoch daughters. As the attack dogs of rival media tycoons circle, insiders have been feeding them good steak.
Vanity Fair’s attacks, personal and professional, would instantly ping round the world, damaging both Blair and Deng. Is there more to come? If so, what? And how much can they damage Blair’s embattled reputation? Insider accounts suggest Murdoch had already put up with quite a lot from his younger wife (“my greatest mistake”) after they went their parallel ways several years ago, albeit often under the same roof. She gave him a sartorial makeover, but for once he couldn’t keep up.
“Rupert would be going to the gym at 6am just as Wendi was coming in from a party,” says one. When rumours of a liaison with Google’s Eric Schmidt first surfaced, dismayed News Corp executives confided “Wendi’s been Googled”.
But the Blair story was different. Hell hath few furies like a mogul who feels cuckolded by a man he had come to see as a true friend. Some claim Blair was the excuse the tycoon had been waiting for before his classic counter-offensive, springing the divorce on his estranged wife in mid-2013. If so, it was certainly a powerful excuse.
…But the [Blair-Murdoch] relationship deepened [over time]. Murdoch had admired Margaret Thatcher, but she was older and a woman. With Blair it became matey. “They grew to like each other,” says one Blairite. “He liked Tony Blair a lot,” concedes a Murdoch journalist who did not share the boss’s enthusiasm and attacked Blair in print. So Murdoch approved “Traitor Blair” headlines in the Sun over Europe, but would also say “he’s a friend of mine”. In old age, and with most business battles won, the driven Murdoch was softening. Affection for Blair was dramatically demonstrated in 2010. Murdoch persuaded the globetrotter, now moderately rich in his own right, to become godfather to his daughter Grace, then eight, when she and her sister, Chloe, were baptised in the river Jordan with all guests dressed in white.
Blair was not in the Hello magazine photo spread, but Deng later revealed the detail to Vogue. “I think he felt that Murdoch really, really wanted him to do it; it was very personal,” says one faintly astonished Blair lieutenant. “Rupert pressed very hard. Tony felt embarrassed,” says another. “It was Wendi’s idea,” says a third.
Little wonder that Murdoch treated Blair’s alleged adultery as different from other aspects of his wife’s evolving party lifestyle. Though friends insist that Blair and his wife, Cherie, are a contented couple (despite long separations she works as a barrister, does charity work and has other interests) or that she would not tolerate affairs, rumours have inevitably become attached to him. Some are plain silly. “He likes women around him, he’s rather flirty,” explains a woman friend. When the Daily Mail staked out the Jerusalem home of an Israeli woman whom the Quartet’s special representative was supposed to be seeing, it drew a blank.
That weakness allowed him to slip easily into the Murdoch world where, in his version to friends, he allowed an unhappy Deng to cry on his shoulder – “He’s a nice guy. If a woman bursts into tears, he’ll be nice to her” – but foolishly accepted invitations when Murdoch was absent. He should have left, say friends, but didn’t and we’re no longer there to tell him not to be an idiot. He should have told Murdoch (who had been trying to help him raise money for good causes) when next they met, but didn’t. In the loyalist version, the Murdoch girls burst in just as he was about to do so.
The most that Blair loyalists will concede is that Deng may have had a “bit of a crush” or been “infatuated” while he foolishly allowed himself to be compromised. But there is no fixing the former intimacy between the two godfathers. Murdoch doesn’t take Blair’s calls and Blair has stopped trying. “There’s nothing Tony can do at the moment. Rupert won’t see him, he just won’t countenance it.”
Yeah. It feels like this article is a half-hearted attempt to give Blair’s side of the situation, and even The Guardian isn’t buying the story and they believe that something inappropriate went down between Wendi Deng and Tony Blair. Murdoch believes that Blair and Deng had an outright affair, and while Murdoch could have looked the other way when the affairs were with business types and her friend’s husbands, Tony Blair was RUPERT’S friend. Thus, all the anger.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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