How Wendi Deng Murdoch influenced the course of the US election. An unhappy intersection with Panama Papers

In the fading fruit bowl of global media memes, Wendi Deng Murdoch is the perfect peach—the story so eternally delicious that if she didn’t exist we would have to make her up.

Sometimes we do.

She never disappoints. From the many conflicting accounts of how she and Rupert Murdoch discovered true love two decades ago, to the colourful details of her first marriage written by Wall Street Journal staff (who turned out to have strangely limited career prospects); on to the Murdoch family brawl over her children’s inheritance; slugging the pie-thrower who attacked Rupert at the UK parliamentary committee in 2011; all before her special friendship with former UK PM Tony Blair: Wendi has always been the best story in town.

And who can forget Clive Palmer’s fanciful (and entirely unsubstantiated) Twitter claims that she was a secret Chinese agent tasked to infiltrate Rupert?

But Wendi and the Panama Papers? The latest theory can be filed under the modest label, How Wendi Helped Bring Down Western Civilization (subtitled Or At Least The Hillary Clinton Bits Of It). Continue reading →