The Bootle Boy
By Les Hinton, Scribe, £20 Review by Noreen Barr
Holed away in a lonely inn in the Connecticut woods, Les Hinton turned white and tense as he spoke on the phone to his ex-boss, Rupert Murdoch.
Hinton’s wife held up a piece of paper on which she’d written: “Remember, you don’t work for him anymore.”
It was 2011 and Hinton had just resigned from News International at the height of the phone-hacking scandal.
For more than 50 years, he had been Murdoch’s employee — starting out as a lowly copy boy aged 15, before rising through
the journalistic ranks to become the media tycoon’s right-hand man.
Between 1995 and 2007, he was publisher of the Sun, Times and the ill-fated News Of The World. Now, it seems, Hinton has again followed the advice in his wife’s note — for he has written his life story and, in the process, given an unprecedented insight into the media mogul’s ways.
The ever-changing relationship between Hinton and Murdoch makes for fascinating reading.
So, too, does Hinton’s lasting ire over the phone-hacking investigations, the way he was treated, and the closure of News Of The World — the paper, he says, “didn’t deserve to die”.
Beyond that, Hinton conjures up the lost worlds of his boyhood and early newspaper days and is consistently self-deprecating and likeable as he charts his unplanned career and adventures.
This book is a must-read for anyone with even a fleeting interest in the media.