Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch: the deconstruction of a friendship

Tony Blair's friends and allies seem to accept the globe-trotting former prime minister's emphatic assurances that the press has got it wrong again. He did not have an affair with Rupert Murdoch's now-ex-wife Wendi Deng; instead he was a sympathetic intermediary and confidante in a troubled marriage.

Equally emphatic are Blair's long-standing enemies, and new ones in the Murdoch camp, who peddle the story over dinner. "Why did Blair betray a friend? Because he could," says one.

The anger is real and for Blair the feud could be ominous when next he runs into controversy, for instance, over the long-awaited Chilcot report on Iraq.

Apart from disputed details of solo meetings at Murdoch's Californian ranch and elsewhere (witnessed by staff) the closest things to evidence to have emerged so far are a misrouted Deng email and her breathless notes to herself, unearthed after the debacle.

"Oh shit, oh shit, whatever why I'm so missing Tony … he has such a good, body and really, really good legs …" says one note. They strike a curiously adolescent tone for a clever and ambitious woman of 44 with an MBA from Yale.

In any case the facts of the case – or lack of them – are not what is important. What matters is that apparently the 82-year-old Murdoch believes the allegations are true. As do loyal News Corp colleagues and the four children from his first two marriages who never warmed to Deng or her "equal shares" demand for her own two Murdoch daughters. As the attack dogs of rival media tycoons circle, insiders have been feeding them good steak.

Placing Deng's notes in the bumper Oscars edition of the high-gloss Vanity Fair magazine last week was the most savage hatchet job so far. Wendi is the main target of magazine writer, Mark Seal's, hatchet.

"Why is your business strategy in China so bad?" were the first words she uttered to Murdoch at a Star TV staff conference in Hong Kong in 1997. A bold pitch which both jolted and charmed the boss. Within two years she had married him.

Yet Deng's own pushy business strategy in China would eventually prove "counter-productive", Seal's sources told him. Deng could be charming, but also foul-mouthed and bad-tempered.

As for the ungrateful Blair, Murdoch had "virtually put him in office" in 1997, the Vanity Fair article claimed, and "from 1997 to 2007 the two men virtually ran Great Britain". Such conceits can only have come from puffed-up Murdoch sources which have always overplayed their (admittedly) considerable importance.

Vanity Fair's attacks, personal and professional, would instantly ping round the world, damaging both Blair and Deng. Is there more to come? If so, what? And how much can they damage Blair's embattled reputation?

Insider accounts suggest Murdoch had already put up with quite a lot from his younger wife ("my greatest mistake") after they went their parallel ways several years ago, albeit often under the same roof. She gave him a sartorial makeover, but for once he couldn't keep up.

"Rupert would be going to the gym at 6am just as Wendi was coming in from a party," says one. When rumours of a liaison with Google's Eric Schmidt first surfaced, dismayed News Corp executives confided "Wendi's been Googled".

But the Blair story was different. Hell hath few furies like a mogul who feels cuckolded by a man he had come to see as a true friend. Some claim Blair was the excuse the tycoon had been waiting for before his classic counter-offensive, springing the divorce on his estranged wife in mid-2013. If so, it was certainly a powerful excuse.

In 1995, at the instigation of Peter Stothard, then editor of the Times, Blair was invited to address Murdoch's annual power-fest, that year's event being held on Hayman Island, off Queensland.

Keen to placate the Sun – Murdoch's baby and always under his direct, near-daily guidance, even now – which had savaged Neil Kinnock, Blair dismayed his party by accepting. He, his communications chief Alastair Campbell and his school chum turned Praetorian Guard, Anji Hunter, were feted ("we'd never flown first class") and Blair made a well-pitched speech – "enough for the News Corp lot, enough for the anti-Murdoch neuralgics" at home, Campbell confided to his diaries.Australia's Labour prime minister, Paul Keating, chaperoned them himself: never put up income tax, he warned "Bambi" Blair. And Murdoch is "a big bad bastard" who despises politicians ("they get in his way") unless you convince him you can be one too, he added.

The friendship that developed in the years that followed has been much-analysed. But on one point both sides of the Blair-Deng allegations row still agree. "They had very robust arguments on things like Europe and there were issues on which Tony never compromised with him. Murdoch was always more interested in foreign affairs than the domestic agenda," recalls one Blair aide who witnessed some sessions. "On Europe or press intrusion they would disagree. Sometimes Murdoch would persuade Tony on a point, sometimes Tony would persuade him," says another.

For Campbell, an old friend of Kinnock's, such dealings with Murdoch were a necessary evil, though Murdoch was complicated. As a chippy Australian pluotcrat he had an outsider's instinctive dislike of the British establishment. He was anti-gay (Deng softened that) and anti-racist (he has several mixed-race grandchildren). The romantic streak which made him a near-Marxist at Oxford never quite died. "He admires the Queen, but in his heart he's a republican, he'd like to be left wing," insists the insider.

It was the same Murdoch who pushed Blair hard to back George Bush in invading Iraq and repeatedly annoyed him by foolishly saying Britain's relationship with the EU should be like Switzerland's.

Without ever saying so at that stage, Blair would leave interviewers with the impression that he knew he was dealing with a "big, bad bastard"; it was just business.

But the relationship deepened. Murdoch had admired Margaret Thatcher, but she was older and a woman. With Blair it became matey. "They grew to like each other," says one Blairite. "He liked Tony Blair a lot," concedes a Murdoch journalist who did not share the boss's enthusiasm and attacked Blair in print.

So Murdoch approved "Traitor Blair" headlines in the Sun over Europe, but would also say "he's a friend of mine". In old age, and with most business battles won, the driven Murdoch was softening. Affection for Blair was dramatically demonstrated in 2010. Murdoch persuaded the globetrotter, now moderately rich in his own right, to become godfather to his daughter Grace, then eight, when she and her sister, Chloe, were baptised in the river Jordan with all guests dressed in white.

Blair was not in the Hello magazine photo spread, but Deng later revealed the detail to Vogue. "I think he felt that Murdoch really, really wanted him to do it; it was very personal," says one faintly astonished Blair lieutenant. "Rupert pressed very hard. Tony felt embarrassed," says another. "It was Wendi's idea," says a third.

Little wonder that Murdoch treated Blair's alleged adultery as different from other aspects of his wife's evolving party lifestyle. Though friends insist that Blair and his wife, Cherie, are a contented couple (despite long separations she works as a barrister, does charity work and has other interests) or that she would not tolerate affairs, rumours have inevitably become attached to him. Some are plain silly. "He likes women around him, he's rather flirty," explains a woman friend. When the Daily Mail staked out the Jerusalem home of an Israeli woman whom the Quartet's special representative was supposed to be seeing, it drew a blank.

Where the Blairs have proved vulnerable to critics is in their weakness for the lifestyle and comforts of the rich. ("Always over-impressed by money," says a friend from their early married days in Hackney). Blair stresses the need to fund and staff his philanthropic foundations, but his fondness for yachts, executive jets and Barbados holidays ("How much would I need to have a place like this?" he supposedly asked when staying at Cliff Richards' home), is more apparent.

That weakness allowed him to slip easily into the Murdoch world where, in his version to friends, he allowed an unhappy Deng to cry on his shoulder – "He's a nice guy. If a woman bursts into tears, he'll be nice to her" – but foolishly accepted invitations when Murdoch was absent.

He should have left, say friends, but didn't and we're no longer there to tell him not to be an idiot. He should have told Murdoch (who had been trying to help him raise money for good causes) when next they met, but didn't. In the loyalist version, the Murdoch girls burst in just as he was about to do so.

The most that Blair loyalists will concede is that Deng may have had a "bit of a crush" or been "infatuated" while he foolishly allowed himself to be compromised. Some fear that Murdoch's revenge will take a more tangible form when the Chilcot report finally overcomes hurdles to publication in late 2014 or 2015. Murdoch papers which backed the invasion of Iraq may turn on him, as others have done.

Others make light of that threat and point out that, whatever Murdoch's frequent guidance to his beloved Sun, he leaves broadsheet editors he trusts to do what they want. In a lecture in the City of London this week, Campbell told bankers that even they could overcome reputational damage. So can Blair.

But there is no fixing the former intimacy between the two godfathers. Murdoch doesn't take Blair's calls and Blair has stopped trying. "There's nothing Tony can do at the moment. Rupert won't see him, he just won't countenance it."

The Guardian, Michael White