David Yelland: Rupert Murdoch is a closet liberal – It’s a talk his own son is familiar with. “We talk all the time and we’re very close. Our relationship is a bit like Bart and Homer without the beer,” he jokes.
David Yelland was, by his own admission, drunk for most of the five years he edited The Sun and only went into recovery when it became obvious to him that he would have to raise his son on his own. His ex-wife Tania, Max’s mother, died in 2006 of breast cancer.
This week Yelland publishes his debut novel, The Truth About Leo, a painfully honest crossover book for children and adults about a 10-year-old boy whose mother has died and whose father is a chronic alcoholic.
It’s not exactly the story of Yelland’s life, but it’s not far off. Shortly before Tania’s death, Yelland admitted himself to a rehab clinic to cure what he calls 24 years of alcoholism. “Max simply doesn’t recognise the father in the book as me — thank God,” he says. “But he knows that the father in the book is the man I would have become if I hadn’t stopped drinking.”
Shortly before Yelland gave up drinking in 2005, he felt his body shutting down. “The later stages of alcoholism are terrifying. The alcohol stops working and you don’t get drunk any more. You get a creeping numbness in the limbs so that when you wake up you can’t feel your hands or your feet. Then it starts coming towards the knees. When it gets to your heart, it kills you.”
We meet at his publisher’s office on the Strand. Yelland is self-deprecating and ever-so-slightly dishevelled in a navy suit and trendy glasses. He’s down-to-earth, likeable — and almost too candid. Since leaving The Sun in 2003 to do a business degree at Harvard, he has reinvented himself as a consultant, lives in west London and is now a partner at PR firm Brunswick.
He admits he is not sure how aware he was that he had a problem when he was editing The Sun. He would drink beer and wine in his office from early afternoon onwards. “But all addicts know. I increasingly got into situations I didn’t want to be in. People around me were starting to say I had a problem, although I kept it hidden from most of them.”
A series of erratic decisions coloured his time at the paper. “In my case it wasn’t that I got pissed and got more extreme. It was that I got pissed and went more liberal. I would agonise about things. Often I would go with the flow first edition and do what was expected. Then I’d go out and have a few drinks and change the leader [column].”
He ran stories he deeply regrets: exposés on Lenny Henry and Ian Botham, the topless pictures of Sophie Rhys-Jones.
“There were reasons the drinking went unnoticed for so long. I was very protected at The Sun. I had a chauffeur-driven car, an unlimited expense account, free alcohol at the office and everywhere else I went. I was a lucky drunk in the sense that I would black out and fall asleep. I very rarely woke up in beds that weren’t my own.”
On one occasion he was almost rumbled when he was thrown out of Soho House. “The next day there were two diary writers who wanted to run the story. But I was able to keep it out of the papers by ringing their editors.”
Meanwhile his marriage was already all but over. He and Tania married in New York in January 1996 while he was deputy editor of the New York Post. (He had previously been City editor at The Sun, then the paper’s New York correspondent.)
“I do have deep regrets which I have had to deal with in recovery. At the end of The Sun, we realised that we didn’t have a marriage. We hadn’t seen each other very much at all for five years.”
He isn’t sure she knew he had stopped drinking before she died. She had tried to stop him before. “I drank heavily throughout our marriage. It was an issue and she did raise it and she was right to. She knew and she felt she couldn’t help me. She had cancer. I had alcoholism. We couldn’t help each other. We did try, but it was too much for us to cope with.”
They divorced after he left The Sun in 2003. After he returned from Harvard, the alcoholism got worse. This was an appallingly lonely time in his life. “Your system packs in and you can’t get the high any more. You either have to use drugs — which I never did — or you have to drink in the morning. So I would wake up at 4am and drink a huge glass of chardonnay.”
By this point, he was drinking up to four bottles of wine a day. “I always drank very expensive drinks because it made me think I wasn’t an alcoholic.” He laughs at himself. “Then you do lose control and you are very much on your own. There are only two ways from that moment on — recovery or death.”
One night, at four in the morning, having drunk his last bottle of red wine, he admitted himself to the Promis recovery centre in Kent.
“My BlackBerry was taken off me which had half the Cabinet on it. Part of me was thinking, Don’t you know who I am?’ But, of course, I didn’t know who I was, to be honest with you.
There were all these voices screaming in my head, You don’t belong here.’ But I knew that if I didn’t surrender, my life was going to implode.”
Yelland now believes he was born an alcoholic. “Alcoholism is not about how much you drink, it’s about the effect it has on you and from the moment I took my first drink I now realise I was an alcoholic because it seemed to solve everything.”
He was a troubled child. “I had issues with adoption — like every adopted child. You grow up not quite knowing how you are. And I had lost my hair when I was 10 through alopecia.” (He wore a wig until he was 31.)
Adopted in early childhood, his biological father was John Sheridan, a peace campaigner. When he was in his thirties Yelland traced his father and met him before he died. His biological mother was a children’s writer (he doesn’t want to name her), who influenced his choice of career: they never met. His real parents, he considers, are the ones who brought him up: Michael and Patricia Yelland, a bank manager and housewife, now retired and living in Yorkshire.
Yelland is now very much steeped in the language and philosophy of recovery. So much so that he even has a good word for his once arch-enemy Piers Morgan. “Piers’s secret is his work rate and his energy,” he says without rancour. “He has done very well and he deserves his success. Even my son is a fan.”
What a difference rehab makes. In an interview after he left The Sun, Sir David Frost said: “My God, Piers Morgan’s going to miss you.” Yelland replied: “Well, I won’t miss him.” (When Yelland left for Harvard, Morgan said: I wish him every success with his schoolwork.)
Yelland has even sent his old boss Rupert Murdoch a copy of the book. “We’re not close but we’re still in touch. He completely changed my life and dealt with me at every stage of my career with absolute grace. He’s not the man that people think he is. He is actually a closet liberal, but he hides it really well. Although obviously he’s not a liberal on some issues, like immigration, for example.”
Did Murdoch interfere in his editorship? “All Murdoch editors, what they do is this: they go on a journey where they end up agreeing with everything Rupert says. But you don’t admit to yourself that you’re being influenced. Most Murdoch editors wake up in the morning, switch on the radio, hear that something has happened and think, What would Rupert think about this?’ It’s like a mantra inside your head. It’s like a prism. You look at the world through Rupert’s eyes.”
He refuses to be drawn on whether he would ever return to newspapers. There is a huge sense of regret hanging over his time at The Sun.
“I was paid to be angry. It was the worst job for an alcoholic. The difference between me and the people I was condemning was nothing. Once you realise that, it’s very difficult to carry on editing.”
He knew this in his heart, he says, but he was ambitious. “I couldn’t have edited The Sun sober. In recovery you have got to be completely truthful and the fact is that being editor of The Sun is the worst job in the world for that.
“I don’t mean that everything in the paper is made up — it’s not, it’s a professional paper. But I was having to judge people, even people like murderers or paedophiles, for example — and these people are not as different from the rest of us as we’d like to think. We demonise people in our society to make ourselves feel better. And what you learn in recovery is that there is bugger all difference.”
