| Blair to testify at hacking scandal inquiry on Monday |
LONDON Former British prime minister Tony Blair will testify next week at a press ethics inquiry set up following a phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, the inquiry said on Friday.
The inquiry was on Friday told that Prime Minister David Cameron appointed a minister to decide on Rupert Murdoch’s bid for control of pay-TV giant BSkyB, despite knowing that the official backed the deal, an inquiry heard on Thursday.
The revelation raises fresh questions about Cameron’s relationship with Murdoch’s News Corp., which was later forced to abandon the deal in July 2011 amid the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World tabloid.
Blair, Britain’s Labour premier between 1997 and 2007, is likely to be asked by the Leveson Inquiry about the nature of his government’s links to Murdoch’s US-based media empire News Corp. when he gives testimony on Monday.
The 59-year-old, who will give a full day of evidence, is godfather to one of Murdoch’s children, while Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Murdoch-owned Sun, backed him in three elections.
The inquiry into press ethics set up in the wake of the hacking scandal heard that Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt privately wrote to Cameron in November 2010 to warn that blocking the bid would harm Britain’s media sector. One month later, Cameron gave Hunt the job of deciding on the bid, after the previous minister in charge of it, Business Secretary Vince Cable, was removed from the brief for showing bias against Murdoch in a newspaper sting.
The prime minister’s office insisted in a statement released on Thursday that the memo was “entirely consistent with his (Hunt’s) public statements on the BSkyB bid prior to taking on the quasi-judicial role”. The memo came out during evidence from Hunt’s former special adviser Adam Smith, who quit on April 25 after it emerged that he had leaked confidential information to Frederic Michel, a News Corp. lobbyist.
In the letter, Hunt told Cameron that Murdoch’s son James was “pretty furious” that Cable had referred the £7.8-billion bid by US-based News Corp. to British media regulators.
Agence France-Presse
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