The launch of the Sun on Sunday is a perfectly timed riposte to Leveson
Beleaguered staff at News International say they have rarely seen Rupert Murdoch so full of energy. Sleeves up, literally and figuratively, the almost 81-year-old newspaperman is back in his element, tearing around the offices at Wapping, doing what he always loves doing best — creating a new newspaper, and confounding his critics. The Sun on Sunday will be launched this weekend.
While other newspaper proprietors are in retreat all over the world, and while Murdoch himself faces the greatest ever threat to his empire as a result of the phone hacking scandal, he charges the barricades, confounding his enemies, launching Britain’s first new Sunday paper in a decade. Even his arch foes at the Guardian, the paper whose nabobs hate Murdoch as much as those at the BBC, are grudgingly impressed. A leading article on Tuesday acknowledged that he remains ‘the arch-magician of print — wrong-footing his critics, rallying his staff and stunning his rivals with his sheer speed and audacity’.
Staff say he has been designing layouts, commissioning articles for the first issue, working out regional advertising rates, and immersing himself in every detail. That’s been his life — starting new titles or transforming old — ever since he inherited two small Australian papers from his father in the 1950s. Perhaps the greatest creation in those early days was the Australian, the first national paper Australia ever had. Murdoch was involved in every detail of its creation, rushing papers to Canberra airport and cajoling pilots to take off through the constant fog. He was scoffed at and abused by his rivals then, just as he is today. He spent a fortune and persevered.
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