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Wendi Deng with Putin? Shes taking on Rupert Murdoch in a romantic arms race | Marina Hyde

OpinionWendi Deng This article is more than 7 years old

Wendi Deng with Putin? She’s taking on Rupert Murdoch in a romantic arms race

This article is more than 7 years oldThree weeks after the media mogul married Jerry Hall, his ex is spotted holidaying in the Caribbean on a Russian yacht. It’s better than Dynasty

Look, I’m sure Jerry Hall is perfectly nice. But does she have nuclear weapons? Suspicions that there are only 10 important people in the world hardened this week with reports that the third Mrs Rupert Murdoch has a new gentleman caller. Wendi Deng is apparently stepping out with a Russian named Vladimir, said to be quite a big noise in politics.

I feel a bit impudent teaching Mr Murdoch things about the cold war, considering he was already 76-and-three-quarters when it started, but man … that is what we call a missile gap.

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Barely three weeks ago, Rupert had just rushed up the aisle with Jerry Hall, and was tweeting for all the world like JFK having swept to victory. Yet all of a sudden he is plunged into crisis, howling at the sheer radioactive balls of it, as his old adversary sees his Polaris missile, and raises him a Tsar Bomba.

But first to what we know. Pictures taken in the Caribbean show Wendi Deng holidaying aboard the yacht of Roman Abramovich, and come with a side order of untried intelligence suggesting she and the Russian president are now an item.

Is it true? Well, it has yet to be confirmed in either Mr Murdoch’s or Mr Putin’s media outlets. But it certainly has what Private Eye always called “the ring of truth”, which as far as this column is concerned is perfectly sufficient to permit a few hundred words of facetious speculation on the matter. But please address the usual complaints to one or other of the Media Lens (©Michael White), who devote themselves to handling my correspondence.

What seems increasingly clear is that Murdoch and Deng are now involved in a romantic arms race even more sensationally epic than the training montage in Rocky IV (Wendi as Drago, obviously). And if you doubt the ability of Murdoch to bench-press a Merc containing two KGB agents, then I envy you your innocence.

Happiest times: Jerry Hall makes Rupert Murdoch the ‘luckiest man in the world’. Photograph: Arthur Edwards/The Sun/PA

Though technically taken west of the Cuban theatre, the photos of Wendi on the island of St Barts are the equivalent of those aerial snaps of Russian missile positions under construction in Cuba in 1962 – and if Adlai Stevenson, the former US ambassador to the UN, were still alive to wave them around at an emergency session of the security council, you can bet your bottom dollar he would be doing so. Still, if it falls to me …

First, let’s address the significance or otherwise of Wendi’s presence on Roman’s yacht. And it is the Chelsea owner’s yacht, not the £25m one he is said to have gifted Putin.

Someone who knew a few of them once told me that one of the ways the oligarchs’ deal works with Putin is as a sort of shit-eating turn system. We know all about the sweetheart deals, of course. But the payoff is that every now and then there is some malfunctioning petrochemicals firm or whatever that the state needs to get off its books.

So one of the garchs will be contacted and told that it’s on them to buy it for a vast sum that same afternoon. Which they do. They suck it up, safe in the knowledge that it won’t be their turn again for another 10 goes.

So part of me wonders if this isn’t behind Wendi’s vacation arrangements. Having storyboarded the call from the Kremlin, I think it would run something like this: “Hello, Roman! Say what? Oh I know, I know … Oh I know, I know… And even if you do make Europa you might then have to cancel the US tour …

“Anyway, listen: the boss has had a look whose go it is, and the upshot is you have to take Wendi Deng on your holibobs. Yup. Well, sometimes you eat the bar; sometimes the bar eats you. He says treat her like a first lady, and he’ll stealthcopter in for a sparkling mineral water and a shag in the Grenadines. Make sure you’ve moved your washbag into the guest cabin.”

As for Wendi, we have previously been given a substantial window into some of her likes and dislikes in a man. Not only was it revealed that she had invited Tony Blair out to Murdoch’s ranch in Carmel, California, while her husband was elsewhere, but it emerged she had been in the habit of writing herself notes, and – in a textbook error – not in Chinese.

As the famous one about Mr Blair read: “Oh shit oh shit … whatever why I’m so missing Tony. Because he is so charming and his clothes are so good. He has such good body and he has really really good legs Butt … And he is slim tall and good skin. Pierce blue eyes which I love. Love his eyes. Also I love his power on the stage … and what else and what else and what else …”

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How about a black belt in judo, and a 10th dan in being able to annex a country for your birthday? Having said all that, if Wendi does ever tire of Putin, I would caution against inviting anyone else back to the dacha while he’s taken up with business in town. Rupert was basically a massive sport about The Unpleasantness, but I get the feeling Vladimir would be … less so.

As for what it all means, I suppose we’ll have to wait for the foreign policy thinktanks and cryogenics quarterlies to report. I note that the notionally serious comment on the matter – a pose that this column obviously disdains – claims that Putin is looking to make alliances with China. This, you may recall, is just what they said about Murdoch when he married Wendi, and consequently elevates Ms Deng to a sort of 21st-century mercantile queen.

I must say I’d be fascinated to read an interview with her parents about her journey from a childhood in Jiangsu, where her birth name, Wenge, meant “cultural revolution”. But that seems vanishingly unlikely.

Then again, what does this tale remind us but that reality can be more hilariously high camp than fiction? Even in Dynasty the writers couldn’t have got away with marrying Alexis off to Brezhnev. It would have had to have been some minor fake European aristocrat, like the Moldavian prince they invented for the wedding massacre.

We can only hope, then, that real life wedding bells will soon ring out across Red Square, and add to the gaiety of so many nations.

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Abbie Anker

Update: 2024-05-21