PM ‘set up Leveson to take heat off over his spin doctor’
DAVID Cameron announced the Leveson Inquiry to ‘take the flak away’ from his own disastrous decision to appoint Andy Coulson, says Britain’s ex-top police officer.
Sir Paul Stephenson, the former head of the Met, delivers the damning verdict in the latest extracts from Lord Ashcroft’s bombshell biography of the Prime Minister.
Sir Paul resigned from his post at the height of the phone hacking furore, suffering ill health. Earlier it had emerged he had taken hospitality from a health spa linked to ex-News of the World executive Neil Wallis.
He says Mr Cameron – who was under intense pressure over his decision to appoint the shamed NoTW editor Andy Coulson as his director of communications – then took the heat off himself by announcing the Leveson Inquiry into the entire British Press.
Sir Paul says: ‘I think they deliberately spread it wider to try to take the flak away from the decision to employ Coulson. I think there was a very strong agenda there to spread the heat around.’
The book says that later – after Lord Justice Leveson had proposed a system of State regulation of the Press – Mr Cameron promised to ‘go down fighting to protect a free press’.
But, within days, the Government capitulated and agreed a deal with the anti-Press lobby group Hacked Off.
This new regime of statutory regulation – rejected by the newspaper industry – would have ended 300 years of Press freedom.
On Day Four of our exclusive serialisation, Lord Ashcroft and co-author Isabel Oakeshott also reveal:
Tories set the controversial target of spending 0.7 per cent of national income on foreign aid to keep the aid agencies off their back,
PM’s guru Steve Hilton almost came to blows with Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell during a row over a foreign aid photo opportunity,
Mitchell thought it was ‘ridiculous’ to enshrine the aid pledge in law; he argued the party’s word alone should be enough,
Cameron went into a panic in the last days of the Scottish referendum, telling his pollster: ‘‘S***, we might lose,’
feared being haunted by a Yes to independence vote ‘till the day I die’,
also worried he had made a huge mistake by agreeing to the TV debates during the 2010 election, saying: ‘Christ, what have I done?’
According to Lord Ashcroft, Mr Cameron thought Labour leader Ed Miliband had him ‘on the run’ over Coulson – who a string of senior figures had warned not to take into Downing Street.
He was also being battered over his links to the Murdoch empire and Rebekah Brooks, a personal friend who, like the PM, was a member of the exclusive Chipping Norton set.
The authors suggest the PM may have got the idea for holding a wide-ranging inquiry into the entire media from Mrs Brooks, who was urging fellow newspaper executives to join a ‘ Truth and Reconciliation Commission’. She was said by one newspaper insider to be ‘desperate to have anything that would spread the NoTW virus into whole of the rest of the industry.’
The idea was dismissed out of hand by other newspaper editors and executives – most of whose publications had nothing to do with phone hacking. But the book, based on hundreds of interviews with senior figures, says: ‘One person at least appeared to take inspiration from it: David Cameron.
‘Under constant attack for employing former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his communications director, the Prime Minister – as he privately admitted later – felt that Labour had him “on the run”. He desperately needed to regain the initiative, and Brooks’ “truth and reconciliation commission” seemed the ideal device.
Thus, in July 2011, he announced a turbo- charged version of what some industry figures claim was essentially her scheme.’ A year later, his inquiry complete, Lord Justice Leveson called for a new press regulator, underpinned by statute and with the power to fine papers up to £1million. In a Downing Street meeting with newspaper editors, Mr Cameron made it clear he was definitely going to find a way to avoid a press law, the book says.
But he then handed responsibility to Oliver Letwin, a member of the Cameron inner circle who is said to have told a room full of editors: ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. I hate journalists, I hate all journalists.’
Mr Letwin later cooked up a plan, in agreement with Hacked Off, that was rejected by the newspaper industry, which set up the independent regulator IPSO instead. IPSO itself has the power to issue fines of up to £1million but does not involve the hand of the State.
On Scotland, the books says the gloom surrounding the referendum campaign was so deep that Mr Cameron suffered sleepless nights and his wife, Samantha, told friends her hair had begun to fall out.
Insiders say it was the first time during Mr Cameron’s entire political career that his ‘equilibrium deserted him’.