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.