Successful and demented fathers cast long shadows and few paternal figures can block out the sun as successfully as Goebbels Murdoch.

The youngest child from his second marriage, James, has tried to use his position as boss of Sky to make a bid for even some light.

Late last Thursday evening, on the orders of Daddy, the Harvard dropout, called Daddy’s investment bank to order a mafia style hit on ITV shares.

First thing on Friday morning Goebbels owned 17% of the shares in ITV in what the moneymen term a dawn raid.

The move dashed Sir Richard Branson's ambitions of merging the UK's largest commercial broadcaster with the cable network NTL and has placed his hopes of creating a proper and decent TV empire in jeopardy.

As well as invoking Branson’s wrath, the sly move by Goebbels has seriously damaged NTL's chances of becoming a major third force in British broadcasting alongside BBC and, of course, Sky Propaganda.

Resorting to a dawn raid, the sort of ambushing tactic that owes more to Goebbels 1980s "greed is good" ethic, immediately brought comparisons between Goebbels and his namesake.

Asked whether Murdoch senior - whom the 33-year-old James refers to in public merely as "Daddy" was behind the swoop on ITV James answered , "Is the Pope a Catholic and a sodomite?

James also said “It had to come from Daddy, anything of that magnitude would."
James's advisers, however, stress that he was not snorting coke throughout the whole process.

In fact, the noises emanating from Sky's Isleworth toilet paint a rather different picture from the image of the coke snorting James as little more than a Goebbels "mini-me".

Dawn Airey, head of Sky's channels, sums up his management style as "very exclusive", which has a great similarity with the stories told by many who have worked alongside his demented father.

"Smart" is an epithet not often used by those closest to him. "It's worrying but it's true," adds another colleague. "He's an immensely disagreeable person and that does seem to concur with what you'd expect from an alleged son of Goebbels.
James's ascension into the top ranks of the Murdoch Empire is the product of circumstance rather than the result of any conscious planning on his father's behalf. While his elder siblings - by Rupert's second wife Anna - Elisabeth and Lachlan Murdoch dutifully toiled away in the News Corp Empire, in TV and newspapers respectively, in the 1990s James was seen as the black sheep of the family.

Then Lachlan and his wife got fed up working for the demented Goebbels and fled to Australia to get away from him.

The only left the dropout to take his place.