In September 2009, as a major Labour Party gathering was under way, The Sun, News Corporation’s mass market, populist tabloid, stunned the British political establishment by switching its allegiances to the Conservative Party after more than a decade of Labour support. The audacity of the move was reinforced by the fanfare with which it was announced. The Sun featured a blaring front-page headline “Labour’s lost it,” floodlit its printing plant in Conservative blue and pumped blue smoke from a smokestack at its complex in Wapping, on London’s east side.

Rupert, who was still quite close to Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, had cautioned his son against supporting David Cameron ahead of an election more than six months away. The endorsement severed the longstanding friendship between the Browns and Rupert and his wife, Wendi, a development that one person with knowledge of the family dynamics said upset Rupert deeply. The reversal also made News International a willing political combatant, a status that seemed only to embolden its critics when the hacking crisis broke. Indeed, a major force in the revolt against News International has been Tom Watson, a member of Parliament and a loyal Brown ally.

It was in his role as head of the newspaper division that James approved a 2008 settlement with Gordon Taylor, head of an organization representing Britain’s professional soccer players, over allegations of voice mail hacking. That settlement is now at the center of a significant public dispute between James and two former News Corporation executives in London, who offer a conflicting account of events leading to the payment. The executives claim that they had informed James that the voice mail hacking went beyond the work of a lone “rogue” reporter and a private investigator that the company had acknowledged at the time. If that was the case, then law enforcement could argue that the settlement was intended as an attempt to buy the silence of victims, which legal experts say could provide the basis for British prosecutors to pursue criminal charges.

James has forcefully denied their assertion, saying the men did not tell him about a broader pattern of phone hacking. Some who know him have suggested that the most he is guilty of is listening to advisers who told him the settlement would be less costly than a court fight.

“James is one of those guys who, unlike his father, trusts his advisers,” said Alan Sugar, a British entrepreneur who sold his electronics manufacturing business to BSkyB.

Moving to New York

James, whose family is firmly established in London, has yet to comply with his father’s order to relocate to New York. He visits the headquarters on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan typically once a month. And when he is there he works from a visitor’s office on the side of the eighth floor occupied by Dow Jones managers, not the side where his father and other News Corporation executives have their offices.