On Saturday, July 2, 2011, a high-society traffic jam descended on the cobblestoned town square of Burford, a village sixty-eight miles northwest of London, not far from the market town of Chipping Norton. Hundreds of chauffeured cars approached a gated stone wall, which opened to a long, circular driveway and the sprawling country house of Elisabeth Murdoch, a prominent television entrepreneur and the daughter of Rupert Murdoch, and her husband, Matthew Freud, who runs what may be the most powerful public-relations firm in Great Britain. In addition to their professional accomplishments, the couple have gained renown for their lavish “Chipping Norton set” parties, which are often attended by their friend Prime Minister David Cameron, government ministers, financiers, C.E.O.s, celebrities, and newspaper editors. “You’re never likely to be bored,” the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, an occasional guest, told me. The CNN host Piers Morgan, a former editor of Rupert Murdoch’s the News of the World, once told the Daily Mail, “I’ve never seen so many people who hate each other together in one room.”
