The day I spent riding around in the back of a News Limited car with junior-mogul-in-training James Murdoch, then aged 14, was one of those bizarre experiences that cropped up in the rough and tumble world that was reporting for the afternoon tabloids.

If you weren’t out on a “death knock” — that is, on the doorstep of the distraught relatives of some unfortunate who had been shot, knifed or bashed to death, mangled in a road accident or savaged by a shark — you were chasing down drugged-out pop stars, p-edophile priests, or expense-rorting politicians in the hope of gaining a confession of their shame, or at least a grainy black-and-white pic of them running from your photographer’s camera.

But after the shock-horror events that continue to rock the Murdoch family fortress in Britain, culminating in the humiliation of now 38-year-old James, his dad Rupert plus an assortment of other duckers and divers on their payroll, that day sharing the back seat of the Daily Mirror editorial car with Master James, then simply boss’s youngest son, seems long gone. And it is — all the way back to August 1987.

I was the Sydney bureau chief of the then seriously sick Melbourne Herald, soon to collapse and die before being folded into the Herald Sun, which all these years later, in best tabloid tradition, has not forgotten how to make a mountain of a headline out of a molehill of a story. The biggest tale at the time was the takeover of the Seven television network, then part of the Fairfax media empire. The buyer was Christopher Skase. Yes, we all now know about the dodgy life and times of the late and unlamented Skase, but back then in the greed is good ’80s he was a much-admired wheeler dealer on the rise, dashing from boardroom to corporate jet in those appalling light grey suits that young men with too much money and not enough taste seemed to favour.

And so it was that I, along with Jack Darmody, the Mirror’s gun reporter, a photographer whose name I can’t recall and driver were dispatched at 6am to find Skase who was due to announce the deal of the year some time somewhere in Sydney that day. Back then, Rupert still believed in old-school journalism — God knows what he believes in these days — and so it was decreed from on high that Master James, who apparently was visiting from the US while on summer school holidays, should have some front-row experience of how this crazy business worked.

A photograph from The Sydney Morning Herald in 1987

The Daily Mirror’s car pulled up in front of News Ltd, in Holt Street, Surry Hills, and we piled in to find him awaiting us. Although taken aback somewhat by this, we were soon down to business, that being a stop at the nearest “early opener” so Jack could stock up on a six pack to help keep up his liquids on what promised to be an exhausting day. Built like a brick outhouse and with a voice that mimicked gravel rattling down a rusty drainpipe, due in no small part to his 60 Camel plains a day habit, Jack was a legend. He’d made his name as a hard news man at Melbourne’s Age, a more upmarket concern than the Mirror it must be admitted, but he’d come to thrive on the knockabout atmosphere of the afternoon tabloids where the Mirror was locked in a struggle to the death with the Sun, which just happened to be owned by Fairfax, the sellers of Seven.

But while Jack, a former boxing champion who died in 2006, was a hard charger on a story he was also a charmer and, indeed, a gentleman — the women on The Mirror loved him and, having seen him in operation, he could win over the most reluctant of interviewees by simply treating them with due respect and consideration.

The word was that the Skase entourage was holed up in the Inter-Continental, then Sydney’s premier hotel, and so we staked out the main entrances. Sometime after 7am, Skase suddenly appeared from somewhere upstairs, heading towards the underground car park. Jack button-holed him from one direction as I did from another. Very much a man in a hurry, the floppy haired Skase didn’t want to speak but we managed to grab a couple of on-the-run quotes of no significance whatsoever and a rushed photograph before he jumped in a car to be driven off at high speed. By the time we got back to our vehicle, he had disappeared, but we had enough, well, something at least, to hold up the first editions of our respective papers.

Over the next three hours or so we drove around in a futile effort to find him. He’d gone to a jewellery company that he had an interest in … no he hadn’t. He’d gone to Channel 7 way out in the ‘burbs … no he hadn’t. He’d gone to Fairfax HQ … well, if he had we were buggered because there was no way they would let us in there.

During all this, young James came across as a nice, polite kid with one of those mid-Atlantic accents. Dressed preppy style, he asked about deadlines and how they worked and what kind of stories we preferred doing. From memory, he said he’d been up late the night before, having gone to a movie of some sort. I have a vivid memory of several action figures that he kept messing about with, shifting them from hand to hand. One looked like Darth Vader, the Star Wars bad guy, and he became most animated when he told us how much he loved the George Lucas movies. (It now turns out that he kept a full-sized Darth Vader replica at the entrance to his London office.)

As with most 14-year-olds, the impression was he’d much rather have been somewhere else, maybe sleeping in like any other kid on holidays or watching a sci-fi video. But here he was stuck in a car with this group of middle-aged men, driving around in circles while they drank, smoked, ate bad takeaway food, farted and cursed continuously because they couldn’t find some guy in a weird suit who he’d never heard of.

Then we got word on the car radio that Skase would formally announce the takeover at Fairfax HQ, in those days in inner-city Ultimo. It would be in time for our last editions and so we raced over and, James included, were ushered through security and up to what was a stuffy old boardroom. From memory, it was some time after 1pm and the announcement was delayed for whatever reason and so the assembled hacks, scores of us it turned out, waited … and waited. James took a seat off to the side and duly fell asleep, no doubt his late night and early start catching up with him. It turns out a Fairfax photographer took a picture of him eyes shut, chin on chest, which still gets a run now and then when The Sydney Morning Herald, all these years later, wants to give it to the Murdochs over something or other of which they have had plenty of opportunities in recent days.

Eventually, Skase turned up, looking all-important, with someone or other from Fairfax, Jack and I rapidly filed our stories on phones generously supplied by the opposition, James woke up, we went back to the office where we said goodbye — and I haven’t seen him since. The reality is that Master James didn’t miss much by dozing off. Even back in those quaint analogue days the news cycle was never-ending. That day’s sensation was the next day’s footnote — and that’s even more so in these digitally demented times. Anyway, I’m sure an under siege James Murdoch dearly hopes that’s what happens in his case, but this sensation looks like hanging around for a while.

*After serving his time on the tabloids, Mike Safe spent 19 years as a feature writer on The Weekend Australian Magazine. He left News Ltd in 2009.