The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Leaders were ‘too close’ to Murdoch
TONY BLAIR and Gordon Brown may have grown “closer than was wise” to Rupert Murdoch, former Labour cabinet minister Lord Mandelson acknowledged yesterday.
In evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Lord Mandelson said the amount of personal contact between the two prime ministers and Mr Murdoch led to “adverse” comment.
He suggested the same was true of current Prime Minister, David Cameron, and other Conservative leaders.
“As far as the Labour Party is concerned, I do not believe, generally speaking, that the public interest was subordinated to the party’s interests in seeking good relations with News International,” he said in his written evidence.
“I reject the view that, under either Mr Blair or Mr Brown, some sort of Faustian pact was forged between the government and Rupert Murdoch involving commercial concessions to him in return for support from his newspapers.”
He claimed that “the contrary” was the case.
Former culture secretary Tessa Jowell said she sought an assurance from Mr Blair that he had made no deal with Mr Murdoch on media regulation when she was appointed to the job.
Ms Jowell said the then Prime Minister promised her in June 2001 there was “no prior agreement” with the media baron.
Her role involved responsibility for the reforms that became the Communications Act, which relaxed the rules on cross-media ownership in way critics felt could benefit Mr Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Ms Jowell said she had urged Mr Blair not to see the interested parties so that her decision-making would not be undermined by direct lobbying of Number 10.
“I wanted to make sure that the meetings I had, the proposals I developed, were not being undermined by representations being made directly to Number 10, and the Prime Minister understood the risks of that,” she said.
She said that she “invited lobbying” on the reforms by a wide range of media companies and other interested parties, and said she had more than 150 meetings.
Ms Jowell insisted there had been no “negotiation” with News International over possible media reforms and that she had not discussed with Mr Blair their impact on Labour’s relationship with the Murdoch empire.