Kakistocracy!

"So much for the golden future I can't even start. I've had every promise broken, there's anger in my heart" - Breaking the Law, Judas Priest

A kakistocracy, as described by Wikipedia, is "a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens". It's a term that was coined in the seventeenth century by Paul Gosnold in "A sermon Preached at the Publique Fast the ninth day of Aug. 1644 at St. Maries" and though the term has been around for nearly four hundred years it has taken Boris Johnson's government of cronies, toadies, and grubby opportunists to really define what a kakistocracy would look like in real life.

How much hot air should we waste on the absolute shower of shit that are currently running/ruining the United Kingdom and polluting even the most trivial of conversations? Why should I waste time issuing these impotent yelps, these screams into the abyss, when every word of criticism, every fact proven, every lie revealed, every backhander exposed seems to strengthen their position? In a conversation with a close family member, one of many who voted for Johnson, she remarked that "they're all the same" - a belief Johnson and his fellow travellers are more than happy to spread in the hope we somehow imagine this is politics as normal - as if to say that, yeah Johnson's bent, corrupt, negligent, incompetent, vain, bullying, and cruel but so are all the others so really he's not so bad. Why would I even bother to try and argue the case that this is not politics as normal? That this is something much worse?

It's a question I've wrestled with myself. I guess I do it to try to save my sanity. It's hard to stay sane when you live in a country where there are a significant number of people who still, after all the evidence so far, think Boris Johnson and his cabinet of crooks and cronies are somehow a force for good. I'm writing this because the situation gets me down, it's had me, in the past, questioning staying in the country and, even, staying alive, and by writing this I hope to make some kind of sense of what seems to make no sense. I'm sharing it because I hope, and think, there are many others out there like me who feel the same.

I seriously doubt it will make any difference to what happens but if it changes one person's mind or brings one person some comfort then I feel I will have done some good. Could Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson, or Dominic Cummings put their hand on their heart and tell themselves they've ever done the same thing? They could tell us - sure, lying is their forte, but could they tell themselves. I really don't think so. I genuinely believe they are making the country a more unstable and more dangerous place and every week, every day, sometimes it feels like every hour, they underline that, italicise it, and write it out in block capitals. 

Earlier this year I wrote twenty-five Isolation blogs (count 'em) about lockdown, government responses to Covid, our response to Covid, our response to each other's responses to Covid, and the strange, strange times we were living through. That series began, and ended, with hope that humanity would win out and, indeed, lockdown brought me closer to many family members and friends than I had thought possible. But, now, with a second vaguely defined lockdown on the horizon, things are, remarkably, even less certain. Boris Johnson's gang have got their Mojo back and they're determined that whatever goes wrong this time they're not to blame. We are. You are. I am. 

Anybody but them. It's not that the new lockdown rules (pubs to close at 10pm, people not to meet in groups larger than six) are wrong. They're not ideal but they're at least something. It's that the application of them was delivered by Johnson with an admonishment that we'd been the naughty ones, going out to work, restaurants, and pubs during a pandemic, when, in fact, his own government had encouraged us to do just that. In some instances, for example using their mouthpiece The Telegraph, we'd almost been cajoled, bullied even, into doing so. Told it was our moral duty not to 'cower' at home and to get out there and get the economy up and running. Don't kill gran - but, more importantly than that, don't let Pret go into administration.

There was no mention of some of the leading rule breakers like Dominic Cummings and Johnson's own father, Stanley - a man the world will come to wish never lost his virginity. Just a vague threat to call in the army on anyone who's meeting up in large groups than for any other reason than to make money or to shoot grouse.

But how seriously can we take a government who threatens to have us arrested for breaking the law only a couple of weeks after the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis boasted in the Houses of Parliament that the Conservative Party intended to break international law in "a very limited and specific way"? Are we allowed to follow the example of our governors and break their laws in a very limited and specific way. What if I meet up with less than six people all week but just break the law on Saturdays? Is that ok? Peter Sutcliffe may have murdered thirteen women but to the best of my knowledge during his lorry driving days he was never booked once for speeding. Technically he was only breaking the law in a very limited and specific way.

A law's not a law if you're allowed to break it. I'm not going to break the laws regarding Covid safety measures and neither should you but the point is the people who should be most bound by law of all should be those who set it. If they can't even abide to their own laws regarding legal documents they negotiated, agreed to, and even campaigned and won an eighty seat majority on the back of then surely they should face the consequences. Allowing powerful people to break laws while holding the rest of us to them is the measure of an autocratic state which, so far, Britain is not.

Is reneging on a deal we've signed a good way of advertising ourselves as a trusted player to potential future partners? Is Michael Gove's vague and woolly announcement regarding some sort of lorry passport system for visiting Kent not an admission that the sunlit uplands of Brexit him and his associates sold the country are in fact a huge traffic jam with lorry drivers paid to sit in them while the country's businesses lose money hand over fist? Have we been sold a puppy?

It looks like we have. But it won't matter. Because it was never about delivering what was promised. It was never about telling the truth. It was never about sorting out problems. It was always about creating more problems. EU membership was of concern to virtually nobody in the country five years ago but it's been juiced into such a hot potato issue that now, more than four years after the referendum, it's still dividing families. 

The confusion and destruction reaped by Johnson and Cummings since the referendum isn't some accidental side product of Brexit or Johnson's premiership. It's not an unfortunate addendum to the policy. It is the policy in (almost) its entirety. When Nadhim Zahawi appears on Question Time and lies that the government are carrying out 240,000 antigen tests a day (the real figure is a third of that) it's not because he's negligent or because he's incompetent. It's because he doesn't care. Him and his party don't care about you, your family, or your life. They care only about your votes and your money.

 

Larger than life characters (a phrase which can always be replaced, pithily, with the word cunts) like Johnson, Gavin Williamson, and Jacob Rees-Mogg (who's been carping about us carping about the government of late in yet another attempt to distract us from the main story) dominate the narrative and poison the debate to such a degree that we find ourselves talking like them and about them. A family member described 2020 as being 'mugged off' by Covid, using the exact same bellicose language that has failed Johnson and his party so badly while those, like Angela Merkel and Jacinda Adern, who treated Covid as a health problem rather than a chance for macho posturing achieved far far better results.

While we argue, still, about how dangerous Covid is and the effectiveness of masks, test and trace apps (for which, astonishingly, Serco - fucking Serco - seem to have got involved) the government are left free to remove civil servants and experts from their positions or to demotivate them so much they walk out. New appointments aren't given due to expertise or knowledge in the field required but are made on the basis of fealty to the Johnson project or to those who have made large donations to the Tory party. 

In the case of Dido Harding - both. The ultimate (so far) definition of this corrupted quid pro quo system is Harding's appointment. The Guardian's excellent John Crace has taken to referring to Harding as Typhoid Dido and in a typically wonderfully witty piece he skewered her unsuitability for her current position as Head of the NHS Test and Trace programme. Was she, he wondered, appointed because "she had been chief executive of TalkTalk when it suffered a massive data breach" or could it have been that "she had been on the board of the Jockey Club that gave the go-ahead to the Cheltenham festival" that is believed to have acted as a major super spreading event back in March?

Crace wondered if her rise could, by any chance, be because "she had been in charge of NHS test and trace, a service in which many employees made just two calls a month" and even set up a mouse movers club to remind each other to move their mouse occasionally to give the illusion they were still at their desk and not watching Netflix. Or, Crace concluded, could she have been promoted because "she was a Tory peer, married to a Tory MP" and, thus, was unlikely to say anything that would impact badly on Johnson and his ongoing culture war project of division?

I think we all know the answer. At least with all these donors getting more bang for their buck we should be able to afford the estimated £100,000,000,000 that will be needed to run the promised and much vaunted Operation Moonshot (who the fuck comes up with these names?) that the government has claimed will carry out ten million tests per day by 2021. 

With the government having serially failed in all their targets so far since Covid began it seems unlikely that the promotion of another serial failure in Dido Harding will mean this will be achieved but that won't matter. By then they'll have dreamed up another wizard wheeze, found a new enemy, and opened up another window in the ongoing culture war that serves them so well. Worse still, we'll fucking let them do it.

Despite my grumpy tone I'm in a pretty good mood at the moment. I restarted work back in an office (for the first time in six years) a fortnight ago and so far, with a few minor misgivings, it's going better than I thought. I miss having time for daytime walks and chats and writing more blogs but it's keeping a roof over my head and putting food on the table and, a few months back, that was not guaranteed. With a future no deal Brexit, working for a company that imports many components from the Netherlands, I can't be certain of job security beyond the new year but even that puts me in a better position than many people up and down the country - if not Dido Harding.

More happy news comes with the fact that the TADS and Capital Ring walks are up and running again (although from now on, for the foreseeable future, the pubs and curries will be done by 10pm at the latest - which is fair enough). TADS have been to Wales and Salisbury and are off to North Weald Bassett in eight days and the Capital Ring has taken us from Streatham to Richmond and on to Greenford and will resume tomorrow morning with a walk that will take us from Greenford to Hendon via Harrow on the Hill. I'm really looking forward to it and even though it looks like there will be just three or four of us I've been thinking that if more than six people do turn up for a TADS or an LbF walk can I charge them a nominal fee, 10p say, so that it becomes work rather than leisure and is therefore legitimised? Or can I pay them, even less - 2p, so that they become my employees for the day? Or can we carry guns and turn it into a grouse shoot!

That's the crazy world of Tory we live in. Covid's a real and ongoing danger but I fear the Tory danger will both exacerbate and outlive the Covid danger and that's why in this occasional series of blogs I'll be writing more about that than Covid per se. The lie we're being told and sold, the one that says we somehow deserve this lot we have in power, that nobody else would have done or would be doing any better, is just that - a lie. A dangerous, mendacious one that will, if not fact checked, poison the debate for generations. We Brits, like everyone else in the world, deserve better from our leaders than division, untruths, and taking the blame for their mistakes. We deserve much much better than a kakistocracy.

Nilsen Schmilsen:Des

"I didn't do a stock check" - Dennis 'Des' Nilsen when asked how many dead bodies he had stored under his floorboards.

Many of us share a macabre fascination with serial killers. Often seemingly mundane people in ordinary jobs who, away from the eyes of others, commit crimes so transgressive and so horrific they're barely imaginable. It's almost a form of role play in which we get to live out some of our darker fantasies and fascinations through the likes of Fred West or Peter Sutcliffe but these characters, and others like The Moors Murderers and Harold Shipman, aren't fictional horror creations. They're real, they lived among us, and, almost certainly, many more still do.

Dennis Nilsen (known to his friends as Des) was a particularly bizarre case. A former Metropolitan Police Officer and ex-cook for the Queen's Royal Guard who, during his time living in Melrose Avenue in Cricklewood and Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill (both north London), lured at least twelve men back to his flat, plied them with booze, strangled them, and then sat them up on his sofa to watch television with him and slept next to them in his bed before chopping their bodies up and flushing the bones down the toilet.

Why he did it was, and still is, far less clear? A severe personality disorder is obvious but many of us have such things and don't even get close to being a serial killer. Nilsen appeared to enjoy reasonably cordial relations with his colleagues in the Jobcentre at Kentish Town and his rare temper tantrums didn't seem exceptional. He liked a drink but no more than many others and he struggled to make romantic connections but that, as I can report from first hand experience, hardly makes him a unique case in the big city.

ITV's recent three parter Des, with David Tennant utterly dominating the screen in the title role, sought not to show the murders themselves (as nobody except Nilsen knew exactly what happened and he is soon proved to be an unreliable narrator) but to try to comprehend why Nilsen carried them out and, perhaps even more so, how in 1980s London people could just go missing and nothing happen.

The London of Margaret Thatcher's 1980s was, to some extent, still the London of the 1970s but just with even more homelessness. I visited often and coming in to Waterloo station from Basingstoke and crossing the river to the West End one of the first things you'd have to negotiate (after chips and beans in the Fishcotheque of course) was the huge sprawling Cardboard City where the BFI Imax now stands (interestingly, after another ten years of cruel Tory cuts, the homeless are starting to take over again - tents rather than cardboard boxes their modern digs).

It was a London, and a country, of blatant homophobia, toxic male violence, chauvinism, and punch ups outside pubs at closing times. It was a country of smoky pubs, smoky offices, Austin Allegros, Ford Fiestas, and mass unemployment and it was, London particularly - before GPS, before social media, before the Internet, a place where people could just disappear off the radar. Live out their days in an alcoholic haze in a cardboard box in a traffic island before dying decades before their time.

This was the milieu that Nilsen both despised and found himself 'operating' in and this is the milieu that director Lewis Arnold and his team have captured almost perfectly. From the hangdog faces of the police officers who don't look averse to secreting a bottle of Scotch in their desks and handing out a kicking in a cell with no CCTV to the retro Dyno-Rod van whose driver is called to unblock the drains at Cranley Gardens and finds some bones that seem to come from somewhere other than KFC, the period detail is exquisite - but the performances, importantly, match them.

Daniel Mays plays Chief Inspector Peter Jay as the good cop, the man determined to pin ALL of Nilsen's crimes on him and finds himself fighting the system as much as the suspect, Barry Ward does well in an unshowy role as Jay's sidekick DCI Steve McCusker, and Ron Cook imbues their boss DSI Geoff Chambers with just the right amount of world-weary ennui that comes with having to balance ideals off against PR while managing expectations.

An interesting, almost fourth wall breaking dimension, comes in the form of Jason Watkins' Brian Masters, Nilsen's biographer! I read Masters' book Killing For Company a few years after Nilsen had been incarcerated and I found it fascinating, a kind of British analogue to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, but I'd never given much thought to the motivations of Masters himself.

Des didn't make that mistake. Both articulate men, we see Masters and Nilsen verbally duke it out as they both seek to get what they want from their exchanges. Masters wants to tell the true story, to comprehend (but not understand) why Nilsen did what he did. Nilsen's motivations are less clear. Even, you suspect, to the man himself. We often see him carping about being treated like a criminal and when asked if he'd penetrated the bodies of any of his victims he rages about the injustices of a society that cares more about what happens to a corpse than to a living person. 

A rage that would have been righteous if it had not been Nilsen himself who had turned that living person into a corpse. Watkins was great as the camp, learned, but actually born off the Old Kent Road, Masters but the most praise must, of course, go to Tennant who, following his superb performance in Deadwater Fell back in January, is now moving into something of an imperial phase.

Actors seem to love the juicy roles, the gangsters, the killers, and the bad guys but Tennant managed to make Nilsen believable while steering him away from ever being likeable. Tense, agitated, fuelled by a sense of great injustice but, ultimately, a weak man unable to build trusting, loving relationships and unable to suppress, or even admit to, the demons that ruined his life and ended so many others.

The subject matter was necessarily grim (even scenes of crime scene investigators in masks reminded us of the fraught Covid times we live in) but the programme was grimly enjoyable, even if it failed to really answer why Nilsen did what he did or how society let him get away with it for so long. 

On the first of those questions that is an understandable failing. Nilsen's crimes were so beyond the pale and our minds are such complex hives of frustrations, desires, and suppressed memories that the work on understanding them will continue as long as humans exist. But on the second point we need to take a long look at ourselves. Society, now - as much as then, still leaves people on the street and it still marginalises and demonises those that don't adhere to its strict parameters. 

The unsettling conclusion I got from watching David Tennant as Dennis Nilsen murdering his way round Soho and Camden in the 1980s is not only that something like this could still happen today but, modern technology aside, it'd be probably be even easier. If those in government can proudly boast of breaking the law then what hope for the rest of us?

Evil Empire:The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty.

"There are no limits to my vanity" - Rupert Murdoch.

"The pollution of the British press is an important part of the pollution of British life" - Dennis Potter.

"A proper danger to Liberal democracies .... if Liberal democracy is your thing. I don't believe that Tony Blair or David Cameron really dare cough without first getting permission from Rupert Murdoch" - Hugh Grant.

BBC2's recent three part series The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty was a fascinating, worrying, and illuminating watch that outlined the damage that Rupert Murdoch's domination of the media in the UK, in the US, and Australia has done and continues to do to those countries. The film makers, perhaps in awe of HBO's recent blockbuster Succession, occasionally allowed themselves to get bogged down in petty family squabbles and Rupert Murdoch's anointing of a successor but it was a far more powerful show when it showed how Murdoch, and his empire, have, through corruption, coercion, bullying, intimidation, and outright criminality, bent the arc of recent Western history in their favour and how, now - in the forms of Donald Trump and Brexit, we're all paying the price for it.

As the owner of The Sun, The Times, The Sunday Times, and Fox News a claim is made that Rupert's (I'm using first names not because I have any respect for him but to distinguish him from the rest of his clan) story is rarely told but that's simply because too many are either scared of him and his legal team, are in awe of him, or require his say so to continue in their own work.

Certainly, the talking heads that appear throughout The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty are a mixed bag. The good, the bad, and the ugly - in some cases all in one person. There are interviews with Michael Heseltine, Steve Bannon, John Prescott, Hugh Grant, Max Mosley, Nigel Farage, Andrew Neil, Piers Morgan, Alan Rusbridger, Anthony Scaramucci, Alistair Campbell, Tom Watson, David Yelland, Peter Oborne, and Paul McMullan as well as people who worked for Rupert (Les Hinton) and directly against him (The Guardian's investigative journalist Nick Davies). Alan Sugar's tongue is wedged so far up Rupert Murdoch's arse it's a wonder there's not still shit smeared on it when he talks. It's quite an achievement to be the biggest Rupert toady in a programme that also features Farage (who claims, quite correctly, that Rupert made important decisions that paved the way for Brexit and freely admits that he checked with Rupert before agreeing to appear on the programme). Nigel Farage is a grubby opportunist and a complete fucking pussy happy to admit to foreign interference in our own democratic process.

These interviews are spliced with historical footage and lots of clips from ABC Australia's The Dynasties featuring interviews with various Murdochs to tell a story of how one man's quest for power grew so out of control that it changed the directions of some of the most powerful nations on Earth - and, ultimately and nefariously, made the world a more dangerous and less fair place.

In July 1995, on Hayman Island off the coast of Australia, a big pow-wow was called by Rupert. They're all there (Fox, News International, BSkyB) but they're not totally sure why except that if Rupert tells you to do something you do it. It seems to be about succession (a word that is needlessly overused in the documentary and distracts from the story of the inherent corruption of the Murdoch enterprise like an episode of Jeremy Kyle for the chattering classes) and dynasty and which one of Murdoch's children will be anointed heir to the empire.

The three main contenders are all there. Daughter Elisabeth and sons Lachlan and James with his piercings and tattoos. James has dropped out of Harvard and invested in 'rap music'. Rupert's got a beef of his own going on, with the then British PM John Major who's been threatening to regulate the Murdoch empire. So Major's not there - but the leader of the opposition, Tony Blair, is.  Hmmm.

We'll get back to that but, first, we go back to Rupert's childhood in Australia and the story of his father, Keith, who owned a small newspaper business but died in 1952 before he was able to pass it on to Rupert. The way the trustees split up the business leaving Rupert with just one paper caused frustration and, as if in revenge for this, Rupert began to build - and build - and build.

He bought a populist newspaper in Australia and then a serious one - and then a television station before moving to the UK and using the same plan to conquer the press here. First:The News of the World and The Sun but there were rules in place, initially, to stop him getting his mitts on The Times and The Sunday Times.

But, as we've learned recently, rules are for small people. Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch were politically aligned so she allowed him to buy The Times (and The Sunday Times) and also to take a large part of BSkyB. As a thankyou for doing so, he backed her in the 1983 and 1987 elections and Labour, under Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock, were destroyed.

Rupert Murdoch appears to have directly told John Major that if he didn't change his policy to allow a referendum on EU membership he would lose Murdoch's support. Major held his resolve and when Tony Blair was asked his feelings on a referendum he nimbly avoided the question. When Blair spoke at Hayman Island (a trip that even surprised his number two - John Prescott) he was smooth and glib but he was effective. A skill Blair has retrospectively been castigated for but one that, at the time, wooed both the British public and Rupert Murdoch. Who soon announced that he was 200% behind Tony Blair. and New Labour and told those that edited his papers to make sure that they follow that line.

Soon scandals about serving Tory MPs Jerry Hayes and Steven Norris appeared on the front pages of Murdoch's papers and an all out attack on the Conservative Party began to be waged by the Murdoch press and, sure enough, it's not long before D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better is playing and we're treated to footage of Blair, Neil Kinnock, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, and Robin Cook celebrating with wildly differing degrees of enthusiasm (some, especially Kinnock, had found Rupert Murdoch's support difficult to swallow) after Labour have taken power following the 1997 landslide election.

Celebrating with them were Eastenders actor and pretend hard man Ross Kemp and his then girlfriend Rebekah Wade who was soon to make a name for herself as the young editor of Murdoch's News of the World. Observers report that she was flirtatious and manipulative and that she was out to cultivate Rupert Murdoch.

Further connections are made between New Labour and Rupert Murdoch's empire when his daughter Elisabeth falls in love with PR adviser and party supporter Matthew Freud, the great grandson of Sigmund and, like Kinnock, not a fan of her father. The enmity was mutual, Rupert believed Freud to be a fifth column.

Rupert's romantic life, like Elisabeth's, was undergoing a major development of its own. After thirty-one years of seemingly devoted marriage to Anna, Rupert divorced her and married an interim nearly forty years his junior who worked in his Hong Kong office, Wendi Deng. The New York ceremony featured the then thirteen year old Charlotte Church singing Pie Jesu. It's a gig I'm almost certain Church would turn down now.

Wendi became an ever more dominant force in Rupert's life, she's described as "a bomb inside the family", and her and Rupert have two daughters - Grace and Chloe. The Murdochs and Tony Blair had become so close by this time that Blair became Grace's godfather. Rupert Murdoch then did Blair another favour by using his press to cheerlead for the Iraq war. Lies were printed in order to get the public on side for the disastrous invasion.

Robin Cook may have resigned from Blair's administration over Iraq but it seems likely that Blair will have considered the support of one hundred and sixty Murdoch editors, spread around the globe, to be of more importance even at a time when Rebekah Wade and her successor as editor at the News of the World, Andrew Coulson, had admitted that they had illegally paid the police for scoops, using bribery to obtain stories.

There was no punishment, then, for Wade or Coulson and not even a police inquiry. Some people, it seems, were, and are, above the law. In fact, in 2009 Rebekah Wade was promoted to CEO of News International which put her in such a lofty position that some saw her as a rival pretender to the Murdoch throne. Though James Murdoch had been installed as boss at BSkyB ahead of far better qualified people so he was, unsurprisingly, rising too.

When Wade married socialite and amateur jockey Charlie Brooks, a good friend and Cotswolds neighbour of the then Conservative party and opposition leader David Cameron (they were at Eton together), the wedding was more of a Murdoch networking event than a normal party for family and friends. Politicians lined up to attempt to curry favour with Rupert but it seems that, by this point, David Cameron's face was a better fit than Gordon Brown who'd taken over from Blair as PM by that point.

Rupert had been supporting Brown up until this point but things began to change. Coulson, who'd left the News of the World under something of a cloud under allegations of industrial sized crime and who'd also been having a decade long affair with Wade, was now Cameron's right hand man and was responsible for making the vital connections between Cameron and his soon to be Chancellor George Osborne and the Murdochs and Wade.

Back at the News of the World, business had been continuing as usual and stories linking celebrities with sex scandals, often discovered by phone hacking, were causing the rag to fly off the news stands. When Max Mosley, the then F1 president, found himself on the front page he wasn't best pleased. The headline was "F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS" backed up with a slightly smaller "son of Hitler loving fascist in sex shame".

Mosley's father, Oswald, certainly did form the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and Max's politics are fairly cloudy but he maintains that the News of the World completely fabricated the Nazi element of the orgy so he set about suing them. He was one of the few who'd been maligned by the News of the World who could afford to do so and he was one of the few, even more surprisingly, that won.

The Guardian's Nick Davies was discovering that Max Mosley was the tip of the iceberg. He found out that the News of the World had hacked hundreds, possibly thousands, of phones. Of celebrities, politicians, royals, and ordinary citizens who, for one reason or another, had made the news.

The Metropolitan Police knew it was happening but when they did nothing it further emboldened the likes of Paul McMullan and other Murdoch foot soldiers who now admit that they used blackmail, fraud, and coercion to get stories and even broke into people's houses.

When Hugh Grant was arrested in Los Angeles for getting noshed off by prostitute Divine Brown in a public place he knew there was a shitstorm coming his way and he accepted that. He, like many others, was less accepting of the phone hacking that was carried out in the wake of it in an attempt to see if McMullan and his colleagues could find any more dirt on him.

When, in July 2009, the Guardian ran a story about the phone hacking on their front page it had, initially, a negligible impact but it did lead to an unlikely alliance between Alastair Campbell, Max Mosley, Tom Watson, and Hugh Grant among others. Which, with Rupert looking to consolidate his 39% ownership of BSkyB and needing the government on side, wasn't helpful.

Although Rupert had been drifting away from Gordon Brown towards David Cameron (who Rupert seemed to like as a person but not yet rate as a politician) it was Brown's refusal to play ball on the BSkyB owenership which saw the final shift towards Cameron and the Chipping Norton set which, of course, already included Rebekah Wade.

While Rupert was playing power games, future deputy Labour leader Tom Watson was asking his son, James, about phone hacking. Two years earlier Watson had discovered e-mails that linked James with the phone hacking and James had had twenty-four months to come up with an alibi or excuse. His pathetic response, that he'd seen the email and he'd replied to it but he didn't actually read it, may not have been credible and may have made James look incompetent and negligent but it saved his skin. It's a trick not lost on our current PM.

The Murdoch family were starting to feel the heat so, as ever, they went on the offensive. Private detectives were hired to follow Tom Watson in an attempt to get some dirt on him and The Guardian was threatened with destruction. Rupert Murdoch's change in allegiance from a reticent and reluctant Brown to a willing and eager David Cameron saw, as with Blair thirteen years earlier, the balance of power in the country shift and in 2010 Cameron, Rupert Murdoch's man, became Prime Minister.

Coulson was installed as Cameron's Director of Communications and soon the BSkyB deal went through just the way Rupert wanted it to. But there was still opposition to Murdoch, his phone hacking, and his abuses of both the press and the democratic process. The Guardian joined forces with The New York Times and both Steve Coogan and Sienna Miller sued the News of the World over phone hacking.

Others were less financially able to risk a court case so Max Mosley stepped in and offered to cover their costs. Underwriting the fightback to the tune of about £3,000,000. Rupert Murdoch, as with most bullies, wasn't used to people fighting back.

As more and more evidence came forward Rupert Murdoch and his empire kept paying people off but when the police told the parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler that the News of the World had hacked her phone after she had died it created a wave of public outrage. For the most part, the public didn't care about celebrities or politicians but anybody with a heart or a single ounce of empathy in their body could see that hacking a murdered school girl's phone was amoral, transgressive, and criminal.

Having thrown Andrew Coulson under the bus, Rupert Murdoch entered an existential crisis. Not about the behaviour of his staff towards the Dowler family and others, he wasn't bothered by that - he'd signed it off, but because his business was under threat. Rupert Murdoch, as ever, cared about nobody else other than Rupert Murdoch.

Gordon Brown called those involved 'criminals', advertisers started to withdraw from the News of the World, and the Murdoch family all flew into North London for a summit meeting where, it seems, the decision to kill off the News of the World was taken. Two hundred people were sacked to save the empire including Les Hinton who, after fifty two years as a loyal Murdoch general, is sacrificed to save the careers of James Murdoch and Rebekah Wade. It's hard to sympathise. When you get in bed with the devil you know the deal you're striking.

Andrew Coulson was arrested, Rebekah Wade resigned as CEO of News Int'l - and was arrested, and in a further attempt at face saving Rupert Murdoch met face to face with Milly Dowler's family. When they told him they were standing up to his bullying he had no reply for them.

Cameron had to balance off the feelings of the public with the support of the Murdoch press and announced that things had to change (at least temporarily). The House of Commons voted that Rupert Murdoch could not take over the rest of Sky.

When Rupert appeared in front a select committee (that also saw Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, John Major, and David Cameron all testify), he feigned frailty for sympathy and feigned forgetfulness when asked questions by Tom Watson for political expediency. When James Murdoch responded to Tom Watson's question regarding whether the Murdoch empire was basically a mafia in the negative Watson's comeback was fantastic:- "you must be the first Mafia boss in history who didn't know he was running a criminal enterprise".

Rupert's 'I was only giving orders' schtick saw him exonerated if chastened and Rebekah Wade, too, escaped a custodial sentence and was even found not guilty. Coulson, off to prison in a Serco van, seems to be carrying the can for the whole clan but Rupert and his mob were still not happy with this. They didn't seem to see it as a lucky escape and in fact they began to seek a revenge that would come in the twin gut punches of Brexit and Donald Trump.

The third and final episode begins with Lachlan, who didn't like Wendi Deng and fell out with Fox News' horrendous Roger Ailes, leaving the empire, the firm, and returning to Oz. There's more bad news for Rupert when his mother dies in 2012 aged 103 in Melbourne. An event that, quite bizarrely, results in a state funeral. Next, Rupert's marriage to Deng hits the rocks and there are even allegations that's she been involved in an affair with Tony Blair.

Following all the scandal of the noughties, Rupert Murdoch had managed to convince some that he is now some kind of anti-establishment figure. As ridiculous as that was, and still is, he's partly instrumental in setting up an idea that rich and corrupt players like himself are somehow society's best hope in the fight against a fictionalised elite. It's a trick that Boris Johnson and Donald Trump would not miss.

Sure enough, Rupert Murdoch, back in 2013, was not enjoying the profile or wielding the power he once had but to cast himself as an outsider was an outright lie and one he juiced to maximum effect. While many politicians were still avoiding Rupert at the time, the soon to be UKIP leader and dog whistle racist extraordinaire Nigel Farage went for dinner and wine with him in St James's. A part of London that could hardly be more elite or more establishment.

It was all very 'hail fellow well met' as Farage likes to play it and as Farage agreed to do Rupert's bidding for him, other things were beginning to turn in both of their favours too. Lachlan, perhaps following Rupert's divorce with Deng, returned to Fox News and its hugely undesirable founder Ailes. Fox News was never intended as a news channel. It was always designed to be propaganda masquerading as news and it has excelled in its remit.

The aim of Fox News is not to take the temperature of the nation but to heat it up so when Ivanka Trump contacted Ailes, James Murdoch, and Fox to let them know her father, Donald, was looking to get into politics it proved how powerful and influential Fox still were and also provided Fox with just the sort of guy who can push their agenda. Bigly.

If Fox News liked to heat up the nation, Trump could be, and proved to be, the man to set it on fire. Trump, like many moral vacuums, admires Rupert Murdoch but Rupert remained to be convinced of Donald Trump's suitability for office and found it hard to seriously imagine him as a presidential candidate let alone the actual president.

In fact, Rupert went further. He hated the Donald, he called his candidacy a 'catastrophe', and Fox News were less reverential towards Trump than they were to the other Republican candidates. Nevertheless they gave Trump a platform to spew his lies and hatred and we all know how that's playing out.

Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch had began to date Jerry Hall. As the world speculated as to how a former model and partner of Mick Jagger could possibly, both physically and morally, be able to sink that low Rupert and Jerry got married and their wedding guests included Bob Geldof, Michael Caine, Michael Gove, and Priti Patel. It genuinely looks like the worst party of all time and an event that no money could encourage any sane person to attend.

Rupert Murdoch had long been a Eurosceptic because, unlike in the US, the UK, and Australia, he held no power, he had no sway, no influence so, with the likes of Gove and Patel brought into Rupert's sphere and Farage courting him, David Cameron, foolishly, called an EU referendum which he believed he could win and put the matter of the EU to bed once and for all. Which, as any observer of referenda anywhere will tell you, is not what tends to happen.

For years Murdoch had printed self-serving covers of The Sun with demonstrably untrue stories about the EU and when the campaign to leave the EU juiced and amplified the xenophobia and racism that existed already in Britain another grubby opportunist, Alexander de Pfeffel Boris Johnson - a former hack who'd been sacked for making up stories, saw the crowd running, got in front of it, and shouted 'follow me'.

Johnson had no ideological interest in Brexit whatsoever because he has no ideological interest in anything other than his own self-advancement. In that he finds his analogue in the ridiculous orange baby-man Donald Trump, a brasher, more American version of Johnson. In 2016 Rupert Murdoch decided, for reasons not explained, to back the man he'd once hated - Donald Trump - and with Rupert behind both Brexit and Donald Trump they both won. As had happened with both Tony Blair and David Cameron.

The strongest backer of the nationalistic, jingoistic, xenophobic cult of Brexit was an American citizen born in Australia. A foreigner but, of course, not one of colour. Trump was able to celebrate a rise that had been enabled by Fox News radicalising middle America with propaganda. Just to underline how morally bankrupt an organisation Fox were and still are, their founder Roger Ailes is revealed to have run a twenty year long campaign of sexual and emotional abuse against his female staff.

It doesn't matter. Trump's in and the victory of Brexit means that, after placeholder PM Theresa May had held the fort - badly, Johnson has joined him. Most importantly of all for Rupert Murdoch, he was back as a global power player and though he soon sold off almost all of his empire (movie studios, Sky, Asian interests) to Disney for a stake in the house of Mouse (while hanging on to his UK newspapers) his position as a global kingmaker had returned. As if it ever really went away.

The series ends with Rupert Murdoch denying climate change juxtaposed with the Australian bush fires of 2020 and an image of Lachlan's enormous house in the hills above Los Angeles. It leaves us with the undeniable truth that lying, cheating, and hatred is the best way to make yourself rich and to get yourself into a position of power and that, in 2020, is down to Rupert Murdoch more than any other person on Earth.

Some commentators interviewed on The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty speak of the good and bad in Rupert but I struggle to see any good in the man. I see a power mad man filled with hate who runs a cultish evil empire that has destroyed lives all over the planet as surely as Covid-19 and I see a man whose decision to turn propaganda into news and to create division to enrich himself has polluted the debate to such a degree that we now have such dire individuals as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump as world leaders.

I paraphrase the words of Dennis Potter, "The pollution of the press is an important part of the pollution of life" and I think they'd make a suitable epitaph for Rupert Murdoch when he soon dies. They should be etched into his headstone and his story should be told as a warning from history. But, alas, we all know, that's not how it works. On the day he dies those shedding, or faking, a tear will include the likes of Alan Sugar and Nigel Farage. I'll not be joining them.

TADS#38:Salisbury (or Snare 'Em in Sarum).

"There was an old Sultan of Salisbury
Who wanted some wives for his halisbury
So he had them sent down
By a fast train from town
For he thought that his mortar would scalisbury" - Punch, 1928.

"There was a young curate of Salisbury
Whose manners were quite halisbury-scalisbury
He wandered around Hampshire
Without any pampshire
Til' the vicar compelled him to Walisbury" - Anon.

Those two limericks, intended to instruct and amuse people regarding the pronunciation of the word Salisbury, don't make a lot of sense but are at least amusing. Another thing that doesn't make much sense, and isn't remotely amusing, is that, in England, in 2020, half the land is still owned by just 1% of the population. One of those land owners, William Pleydell-Bouverie, the 9th Earl of Radnor, owns Longford Castle in Wiltshire and his inherited wealth and greedy insistence on keeping it private resulted in the third TADS trek of the year taking both a different physical direction, along the A338 instead of by the side of the Avon, and a more political dimension than normal as Shep, for one, felt a compulsion to sign up for Class War and I was confronted by a passive-aggressive toady who does Pleydell-Bouverie's bidding for him.

Luckily, this proved to be a minor blemish on an otherwise relaxing, enjoyable, and lovely day and the gentle rolling countryside of rural Wiltshire, the spire of Salisbury's notorious cathedral, the lovely pub beer gardens of Odstock and Nunton, and most of all the delightful, as ever, company will linger far longer in the memory than a minor altercation with an anti-Spartacist who's spent so long doffing his cap to his wealthy owners he's no longer able to read a moral compass.

The day started early for me. A 6AM alarm was necessary to get a few bits and bobs done but I was still out of my flat by 8 and not long after on the train to Honor Oak Park to East Croydon and then on to Clapham Junction where Platform 9 was emptier than normal (for obvious reasons) and specifically emptier than normal for me because Pam wasn't there.

The first ever TADS march (back in the pre-blogging days) was in Salisbury (out to Stonehenge, taxi back) in 2015 and one of the highlights of the day had been the Indian restaurant Anokaa. Me, Shep, Adam, and Teresa have raved about it for the past five and half years and part of the reason for this walk was so that Pam would be able to finally experience it for herself. So, of course, typically, she was unable to attend. Maybe we can try again in another five years!

So I took the train alone from Clapham Junction until Shep and Adam joined me in Basingstoke. Muffled chat beneath our masks took us into Salisbury proper and we soon cut into the city centre for coffee (Shep/Adam) and tea in Jenny's. A slightly overpriced and perhaps overly bustling, in the circumstances, greasy spoon that nevertheless served me up a rather delicious cheese omelette and chips.

On the way back to the station to meet Colin and Patricia (who'd driven down from Oxford and taken the Park and Ride into Salisbury) we stopped to briefly take in the park where Sergei and Yulia Skripal collapsed after being poisoned by Putin's Novichok back in March 2018. A friend later asked if there was a plaque to mark the spot. Not yet!

Patricia would become the 27th person (following Michelle and Ben's debuts last weekend) to complete a full TADS walk and a very welcome addition she was too. Colin's been with us before a few times and always brings something to the party. He's normally got a funny story or two, he helps Adam help me with technology, and, this time, he took all the best photographs that Pam and Belinda normally provide. Thanks for that.

The five of us left Salisbury train station and headed into the pretty Queen Elizabeth Gardens. Crossing a small stream in the middle we followed a path to the SE corner of the garden where the river Nadder flows into the Avon. The Nadder's a 34 mile long tributary that flows from Ludwell and never leaves Wiltshire. 

The Avon, one of many rivers of that name - it's not the same one you'll find in Bath, is sixty miles long and flows from the Vale of Pewsey to the English Channel near Christchurch in Dorset and is believed to contain more species of fish than any other English river. A few of which we could see. Best of all, and this is a very well known fact but I'm still sharing it, the name Avon means 'river'. The river river!

We followed the Avon briefly and then crossed it on Crane Bridge, turning into the High Street, through the dramatic gate below (Colin's photo accidentally, rather than intentionally, jaunty or arty), and into the rather pleasant Chorister's Square where stands Mompesson House, an 18c mansion constructed in the Queen Anne style of English Baroque for Salisbury MP Sir Thomas Mompesson. Another MP on our mind was Edward Heath who is buried in the cathedral grounds and whose house Adam thinks we walked past.

There was some kind of outdoor sculpture exhibition in the cathedral grounds so we took in Subodh Gupta's When Soak Becomes Spill, Elisabeth Frink's permanent Walking Madonna, Shirazeh Houshiary's String Quartet, and Lynn Chadwick's Sitting Couple On A Bench. It's a nice idea and if we weren't looking to get walking (and, in some cases, getting desperate for a pee) it'd have been enjoyable to spend more time with these and other more distant installations.

Sadly, my camera started adding unwanted text to my photos at this point so my photos, already shamed by Colin's superior ones, start to look a bit crap. I remedied it (much) later in the day but so focused on the walk was I that I didn't even notice this at the time. Blame Huawei!

Salisbury Cathedral has, famously - not least to the Russians, the tallest church spire in all of the UK (123 metres, 404ft), a title it's held since 1548 when the spire of Lincoln Cathedral collapsed. Ulm Minster, 161m, holds the European, and World, record.

The main body of Salisbury Cathedral was built between 1220 and 1258 and it houses one of four original copies of the Magna Carta (which we'd needed to have booked tickets to see - and, like London's art galleries that are now reopening, that is not easy. Things are selling out quick) and one of the world's oldest clocks. The cloister is the largest in Britain and its been painted by Constable and inspired a book, The Spire, by William Golding.

We passed by the cathedral, crossed the Avon again, and walked along Harnham Road and Old Blandford Road. On the latter of which we made our steepest ascent of the day up some steps that gradually veered away from the road. It was here I was responsible for our first minor wrong turn of the day. That one was quickly corrected but the next one proved more problematic. The path we were due to take was completely overgrown and impassable so we had to walk out to, and then along, the very busy and unpavemented, A354. 

I always do my best to keep people from these roads and this time I had, unfortunately, failed in my duty. It was a huge relief to find a hole in the hedge that soon lead us back to my intended path and it wasn't long before we were heading south through gently rolling fields of crops. A fairly long, reasonably uneventful, but, to me, rather pleasant (if you ignore the fly tipping) stretch which eventually took us over the river Ebble (a new one to me) and into the small village of Odstock.

Odstock (pop.554) has a 12c Grade II listed church, St Andrew, and Oliver Cromwell is believed to have stayed at the village's parsonage. It's highly likely he visited the church but less so that he popped in to The Yew Tree Inn. As you might imagine, for us it was the other way round.

On a sunny day the pub itself was empty and though most of the garden was taken up by a group of lycra clad cyclists we had a nice big table and a friendly, if hugely overworked, waitress soon brought out pints of Ringwood Razorback, lager, and a lime'n'soda for Adam who'd vowed to not touch any booze all day and stuck to his word. Even if his eventual tally of five pints of lime and soda resulted in him, in his own words, "pissing like an elephant" the next day.

After a sup and a natter we left the pub. There was no need for a two pint mistake as the next village and next pub was not far. A mile or maybe less through a few fields took us into Nunton, past some pleasant looking bungalows, and into the garden of The Radnor Arms. Which, much like The Yew Tree Inn and many of the houses in the area, sported an impressive thatched roof.

Better still it sported a huge beer garden (replete with a couple of marquees in case the weather changed) and a very friendly barmaid who inquired as to the details of the walk. I took a Romsey Gold and we sat for a pleasant forty minutes or so enjoying what would be our final pit stop before we returned to Salisbury. It would not be the last enjoyable part of the day but the rest of the walk would, thanks to the landed gentry, prove to be a bit of a damp squib.

Once we'd admired The Radnor Arms' take away milk shed (and wondered why they don't do a beer one) we took a quiet diagonal road out to the A338 where my research, and some - if not all it seems - maps, told me we could leave to the right and pass down to Bodenham and Longford Castle. There was no turning so we turned back to take what would have been a slightly lengthier diversion.

We followed a road into Bodenham and realised, photogenic thatched cottages aside, that this was leading us further in the wrong direction and when I finally located the correct road we saw that it was a private one. Pondering if it was just cars that were not allowed to pass through, the toady I referred to earlier came out to speak to us.

As I moved towards him to speak he did a hugely performative and backwards jump back, shouting "distance" with an aggressive West Country burr and assured us that Longford Castle, which laid just off the road, was a private residence that we'd not been able to walk past. Apparently you can't just walk past people's houses - which is funny because people walk past mine, my friends, and my families houses all the time.

It seems you can't walk past posh cunts houses if they don't want you to. This forelock tugging is one of the worst things about being British and lickspittles like our man from Longford Castle selling their soul for a grace and favour gatehouse on the edge of their properties is what props up this vastly unfair system. I was glad when he fucked off but it still meant we ha to negotiate how we were to finish the walk and I was eager to keep my friends happy after what Colin termed our 'Bodenham blip'.

Longford Castle, incidentally, was built as an example of an Elizabethan 'prodigy house'. Huge mansions built in the hope of housing Elizabeth I as she roamed her realm. So a massive arse licker guarding it was, at least, in keeping with the building's original purpose.

While we quietly raged at both injustice and inconvenience we walked along the A338 for a couple of miles into the outskirts of Salisbury - a city whose famous sons and daughters include the aforementioned William Golding, Jonathan Meades, Richard Digance, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO to you), Joseph Fiennes, and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich as well as the Skripals and Ted Heath.

Luckily my friends are magnanimous and easy going and instead of complaining they simply made light of our forced diversion and though the injustice still rankled, the inconvenience was quickly and quietly forgotten. We missed the village of Britford and yet another old church and, on the egde of Salisbury, we passed through Churchill Gardens, under a subway festooned with images of music legends, discarded cans, and streams of piss and passed through a housing estate back into Salisbury's city centre and The New Inn pub.

I'd Googled the pubs of Salisbury while planning the walk and The New Inn had always looked a good bet as it had a large and pretty beer garden. A large table was available and views of that famous spire made it an even more agreeable spot. The drinks took a long time coming and the friendly barmaid tripped over and spilled some of them but, having switched to lager, they still went down well so we had another.

Which a friendly barman managed to trip over and spill again. Perhaps it's some sort of gimmick the pub operates. We supped up in the evening sunshine and bade a fond adios to Patricia and Colin who, quite understandably in the current conditions (everyone's on a different page and the goverment guidance is intentionally negligent) aren't back to doing restaurants yet, before making haste to Anokaa to see if it was still as good as it used to be.

The answer? Yes, it is. I'd remembered correctly but what I had forgotten is that it's not cheap. Ah well, we rarely push the boat out and my strawberry, asparagus, and toasted home made cottage cheese in rich tomato gravy with cream of coconut and fenugreek served with saffron pulao rice was delightful, an almost melt in the mouth experience that I've never had anywhere else.

The poppadoms were no better, no worse, than any other poppadoms and the Cobra beer was cold which was all it needed to be. Shep, Adam, and I sat on the same table we'd sat on (with Teresa) back in 2015, a kind of leather banquet rounded seat that looked like a fancy Waltzer car, and though I very much enjoyed the food and the experience we remarked that next time in Salisbury we'd probably go for something a bit more cheap and cheerful (though if I was in the city with a foodie who'd never been I'd definitely show off Anokaa to them).

Cheap and cheerful was the order of the day as Shep and I bought a bottle of train booze for the ride back to Basingstoke. It was my first experience of tugging'n'glugging and, to be honest, it was a trifle inconvenient. With no game of Heads Up and minimal 'mucking about' the train journey was less eventful than many in the past but that's as need be. At least we're getting out again for now. It was a varied day, a funny day, and a fun one. I didn't expect our little Wiltshire wander to be as epic as last week's Wye Valley experience but then it didn't need to be. Give us countryside, give us pubs, give us Indian food, and give us each other and we'll almost always have a good time. Which I bet is more than you can say for William Fucking Pleydell-Bouverie, the 9th Earl of Fucking Radnor and his performative baldrick.

Next time we're out in North Weald Basset for a walk called Stations of the Crass that looks to pass near by the home of anarcho-punk legends Crass and the question we'll be asking is "do they owe us a living?". Course, they fucking do.