At Holmwood, a 14,200 sq ft Georgian pile on a southern knoll of the Chilterns, Murdoch and his fourth wife, the model Jerry Hall, will host executives, friends, family and politicians who dare accept his hospitality a decade after the phone hacking scandal. TalkTV, which it is said Murdoch has backed against the advice of some of his senior executives, is viewed as his latest rebuke to those who sought to bring him down.
Its roots extend at least to the £30bn takeover of Sky by the US cable operator Comcast in 2018. For the second time Murdoch had been pursuing full ownership of the satellite broadcaster, and for the second time had been thwarted by the British political and regulatory system.
The first bid collapsed under the weight of the phone hacking scandal. The second got bogged down in regulatory wrangling, against a backdrop of political instability triggered by the Brexit vote and claims from opponents such as Ed Miliband that he would seek to turn Sky News into a British version of Fox News, his bombastic US channel. Defeat was less humbling the second time around,…
