Matthew Rickardson

The most famous or infamous example of this some years later is when he publishes the fake diaries of Adolf Hitler.

He's advised these diaries are fake by a historian.

He famously says, fucking publish.

Fucking publish.

And he's, you know, he's questioned about that.

His answer is twofold, which, well, first is, well, remember, we're in the entertainment business.

And, you know, I'll take the additional hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation that we got from this.

The Sun, it became enormously popular, enormously influential, both through the size of its audience and through its ability to shape politics.

His rise in the UK coincides with the rise of Margaret Thatcher.

And they share a kind of notion they're both outsiders.

She's a grocer's daughter from a provincial town, not part of the old English establishment.

And the old English establishment also very hostile to Rupert.

But that becomes an advantage because with Thatcher, he finds a kind of a fellow traveller.

They share a kind of neoliberal sort of philosophy of free markets and antagonism to public ownership.

And I mean, Murdoch's papers were very much in support of that Thatcher agenda.

He already owns two of the most popular newspapers and he wants to buy more.

An opportunity comes up to buy the Times and the Sunday Times.

And under the law at the time, there's a requirement that this matter is referred off to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she ensures that that doesn't happen so that he is able to buy the Times and the Sunday Times.

The classic kind of paper of record in the UK because he wanted to have that entree into the elite.