British government’s ties to Murdochs scrutinized

LONDON—PRIME Minister David Cameron of Britain and a senior member of his Cabinet faced a growing scandal Wednesday over suggestions of intimate links between Rupert Murdoch’s business interests and the government presented by Murdoch and his son James this week as evidence in a judicial inquiry.

The Murdochs’ appearances at the Leveson inquiry—named after its chairman, Lord Justice Brian Leveson—were expected to focus on long-running accusations that their newspapers pursued scoops by illegally intercepting voice mail messages, hacking computers and paying public officials. Instead the hours of testimony and hundreds of pages of evidence have turned the focus more toward a network of warm, personal connections between Murdoch’s media empire and successive British governments.

Just a few miles from where Murdoch testified before Britain’s High Court on Wednesday, repeatedly denying any influence over the country’s politicians, Cameron and his culture minister, Jeremy Hunt, faced a hostile and noisy bank of rival lawmakers in Parliament as they sought to address the is- sue of a cache of e-mails that Murdoch’s company, News International, provided to the inquiry in response to a legal order.

The e-mails seemed to show close collaboration between one of the company’s lobbyists and Hunt’s office, which Cameron had designated to pass judgment on the company’s $12 billion bid to take over the BSKYB satellite television network.

An aide to Hunt named in the e-mails, Adam Smith, became the latest in a line of public officials damaged by links to Murdoch. Smith resigned early Wednesday, saying in a state- ment that his contacts with the lobbyist, Frederic Michel, went too far. Hunt, the subject of speculation that he, too, would resign, released a statement expressing confidence that his own appearance at the inquiry would prove his innocence.

But in Parliament, lawmakers from the opposition Labor Party were not satisfied.

“The reality is,” said one, Harriet Harman, “that he was not judging this bid; he was backing it, so he should resign.”

Another Labor lawmaker, Dennis Skinner, played on the perception that the Conservative party of Cameron and Hunt is upper class.

“The culture secretary’s adviser has now lost his job,” Skinner said. “Does that not prove the theory that when posh boys are in trouble, they sack the servants?”

Hunt, looking beleaguered at times amid jeers and catcalls by lawmakers, said that the contacts between his office and News Corp. “did not influence my decisions in any way at all.” There was no “back-channel” of communications, he said, and the process was conducted “with scrupulous fairness throughout.”