Rupert Murdoch's sentimental side, by Alexander Chancellor

Rupert Murdoch (photo), the world’s most powerful media tycoon and a former Reuters director, has a sentimental side to his character that could now be struggling to get out, says Alexander Chancellor, former correspondent and family friend.

Murdoch, 80 on 11 March, would be excused for feeling that his work is done and that it’s time to relax a little, Chancellor wrote in The Spectator magazine.

Chancellor, whose father Sir Christopher Chancellor was general manager of Reuters until 1959, told of how his sisters “patronised this awkward young colonial” when, as an undergraduate at Oxford, he visited the Chancellor family and one of them made fun of Murdoch’s Australian accent.

“Rupert took this mockery in good part and paid us more visits on his motorbike. Since then, I have seen him only rarely, but he has never failed to ask warmly after my family. In 1990 he took three hours out of a working day to attend a memorial service for my father, followed by a luncheon in the Reuters building in Fleet Street. Murdoch suddenly looks his age, perhaps because he has stopped dyeing his hair orange. Now firmly established as the world’s most powerful media tycoon, he’d be excused for feeling that his work is done and that it’s time to relax a little. He may have been a ruthless businessman, he may have promoted the lowest forms of journalism and hired editors with too few scruples, but he also has a sentimental side to his character that could now be struggling to get out.” ■