Bonfire of the Murdochs: an ‘utterly gripping’ book

Bonfire of the Murdochs cover — US author and journalist Gabriel Sherman ‘really knows his stuff’

(Image credit: Simon & Schuster)

The American journalist Gabriel Sherman has been reporting on the Murdoch family for nearly two decades, and has “interviewed them all at one time or another”, said Lynn Barber in The Spectator. So “he really knows his stuff”. Now, he has produced this “utterly gripping book” about Rupert Murdoch’s relationship with his children, and the family’s acrimonious “war of succession” over his media empire. Things came to a head in 2024, when Rupert tried to amend an “irrevocable” family trust set up in 1999. It had established that Prudence (his daughter by his first wife) and Lachlan, Elisabeth and James (his children by his second wife) would inherit his estate equally, but Rupert now wanted Lachlan, the most right-wing of them, to assume full control of the business. The other siblings took legal action and blocked the move – though they later agreed to it, in exchange for $1.1bn each. Reportedly, Prudence, Elisabeth and James are now estranged from their father.

The “great benefit” of this book is its brevity, said Tina Brown in The Observer. Sherman distils “seven decades of dominance and predation by the world’s most rampant media mastodon” into just over 200 pages, to expose “patterns of ruthlessness” that were repeated over and again. I witnessed this ruthlessness myself in the 1980s, when Murdoch fired my late husband, Harry Evans, from his job as editor of The Times the morning after his father’s funeral. He has been equally “carnivorous” with his children – persuading them to work for him, knowingly overpromoting them, then blaming them “when they failed”. He did this most spectacularly with James, who was in charge of his father’s British newspapers at the time of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. Not content with merely sacking his son, Rupert, in a “hideous Hunger Games-like scene”, got Elisabeth to do the job for him – after which the “siblings didn’t speak for years”.

At one point, the family feud “seemed to contain the fate of Western democracy”, said Henry Mance in the Financial Times. While Lachlan supported Fox News’ hard right, pro-Trump agenda, James had “started calling out misinformation”. By handing sole control of his empire to Lachlan, Murdoch made sure that James could not lead a revolution there – but at what cost? Sherman likens him to King Midas: he “built a $17bn fortune but destroyed everything he loved in the process”. The patriarch might say some of his kids were ungrateful for their inherited riches. After reading this book, I felt they’d have “swapped the money for a functional family”.