26 Jun 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Nick Clegg’s former Parliamentary Private Secretary has said News International threatened to “turn against” the coalition if its parent company News Corp’s £8bn bid for control of BSkyB were referred to Ofcom.
Quoting from a note of an October 2010 meeting with News Corp lobbyist Frederic Michel, Norman Lamb MP said that News Corp would have “turned nasty” if business secretary Vince Cable, then responsible for handling the bid, referred it to the broadcast regulator.
Lamb said he took Michel’s comments to mean “very clearly that positive coverage he said they had given might change.”
The note, read out by Lamb and posted on the Inquiry website this afternoon, read:
0900 meeting Fred Michel News International. An extraordinary encounter. FM is very charming. He tells me News Int. papers will land on VC’s [Vince Cable] desk in next 2 weeks. They are certain there are no grounds for referral. They realise the political pressures. He wants things to run smoothly. They have been supportive of Coalition. But if it goes the wrong way he is worried about the implications. It was brazen VC refers case to Ofcom – they turn nasty. Then he talked about AV – how Sun might help the debate – use of good graphics to get across case.
James M[urdoch] has met Nick [Clegg] – worth working on him to he could be receptive to case. Times will give it fair hearing.
So refer case and implication was clear. News Int turn against Coalition and AV.
In another note read to the Inquiry today, Lamb wrote that he had spoken to Nick Clegg about the meeting — among other things — noting that Clegg was “horrified” by it: “We will lose the only papers who have been positive,” it read.
Lamb said he has been thinking for some time whether to give this evidence to the Inquiry, saying he felt it necessary after Cable’s claim that “veiled threats” had been made to the Lib Dems connected with News Corp’s bid for full control of the satellite broadcaster.
The bid — which News Corp abandoned following the phone hacking scandal that emerged last summer — has become a key focus of the Inquiry as it examines close relations between the press and politicians. In December 2010 Cable’s responsibility for the bid was handed to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, following the revelation of the business secretary declaring “war” on News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch.
The high level of close contact between Hunt’s department and Michel over the course of the bid brought the government’s impartiality into question. Hunt’s adviser Adam Smith resigned in April after a series of emails between the department and News Corp revealed that the company was being given advance feedback of the government’s scrutiny of the bid.
Earlier today, the lawyer of the parents of a British schoolboy killed in a coach crash in Switzerland in March described the family’s distress at press intrusion, in particular the “unauthorised publication” of photographs of them by various newspapers.
Giles Crown told the Inquiry that a photograph of the grieving Bowles family had been taken outside the bereaved relatives’ hotel near Sierre, Switzerland, without their consent and printed in the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. Photographers were banned from the property and told not to come within 20 metres of the hotel, Crown said.
“It is clear that the people in the photograph have no knowledge that they are being photographed,” he added.
Crown said that the Sun had published a quote from Sebastian Bowles’ account of the trip that had been posted on a blog set up for the pupils to communicate with their parents.
He also alleged that the MailOnline had also published photos from Sebastian’s father’s Facebook page, adding that he was certain his privacy settings had been set to the maximum level.
Edward Bowles later deactivated his Facebook account after he found that the photos, which Crown said were of a “private, personal and family nature”, had been obtained by the press.
Bowles contacted the Press Complaints Commission with the family’s concern over media intrusion and sent a letter on the family’s behalf to the PCC and various media outlets requesting they not be contacted.
The Daily Mail replied in a letter on 20 March, noting that the pictures taken from Facebook were publicly accessible, but that they had now been removed from the MailOnline version of the story.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow.
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14 Jun 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
David Cameron has said statutory regulation must be a “last resort” in reforming the British press.
Spending the day giving evidence before the Leveson Inquiry today, the prime minister — who himself called for the Inquiry into press standards — said he was not ruling out statutory involvement in a new regulator, but said there was a need to “make everything that can be independent work before you reach for that lever”.
He said independent regulation of the press must involve all newspapers, be compulsory, be able to impose penalties and have investigatory powers.
A reformed Press Complaints Commission (PCC) had to be seen to be simple, understandable and offer redress for ordinary individuals, he said.
The key, Cameron said, was if an individual suffered press intrusion or was the subject of an inaccurate article, “that it really is worth their while going to this regulator, however established, and they know they’re going to get a front-page apology.
“Are we really protecting people who have been caught up and absolutely thrown to the wolves by the press?” he asked, citing repeatedly the “catacylsmic” revelations of last summer that abducted schoolgirl Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked, which led to the closure of tabloid the News of the World and Cameron’s call for a public inquiry into press malfeasance.
“If families like the Dowlers feel this has really changed the way they would have been treated, we would have done our job properly,” Cameron said.
While he maintained he understood the “real concern” over statutory regulation of a free press, he repeated that he felt the country’s current system of press self-regulation had “failed”.
Lord Justice Leveson’s report, which will offer recommendations on future press regulation, is due to be published this autumn.
Cameron emerged from his day in the witness box relatively unscathed, save the revelation of a text message from former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks during the Conservative party conference in October 2009, in which she told the then leader of the opposition that “professionally, we’re definitely in this together” and signed off “yes he Cam!”
Cameron also spoke cautiously about his appointment of former News of the Wold editor Andy Coulson as his communications chief in 2007, noting that it was “controversial” due to Coulson’s resignation from the tabloid following the jailing of one of its reporters on phone hacking offences.
Yet Cameron stressed he and current chancellor George Osborne felt Coulson was a “very effective” candidate.
“The calculation was, who is going to be good enough, tough enough to deal with a very difficult job,” Cameron said.
He described the issue of Coulson’s lower-level vetting by Number 10 as a “red herring”, and defended handing responsibility of the £8bn bid for control of BSkyB to culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, telling the Inquiry that it had been endorsed by Cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell and backed with legal advice.
Looking to the future, Cameron recommended greater distance and respect between members of the press and politicians, noting that the relationship was not “a particularly trusting one at the moment”.
“When I got into Downing Street I did try to create a bit more distance. I think I need to go back and do that again,” Cameron said.
The Inquiry continues next week.
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13 Jun 2012 | Leveson Inquiry
Scotland’s first minister Alex Salmond has alleged that the Observer newspaper accessed his bank account in 1999.
Giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Salmond said he was told this by a former journalist on the Guardian’s sister paper.
“The person concerned had detail which could only have been known by somebody who had full access to my bank account at that stage,” Salmond said.
Salmond said that, in conversation with the journalist, the reporter said his colleagues had wondered whether a toy shop Salmond had been to was more than a conventional store. The Scottish first minister clarified he had bought toys for his nieces at the shop in question.
In a statement released this afternoon, Guardian News & Media said Salmond had first raised the issue with the Observer’s editor last year, and the publisher has since been “unable to find any evidence to substantiate his allegation.”
“As our response to him at the time made clear, we take this allegation very seriously and if he is able to provide us with any more information we will investigate further,” the publisher said.
Elsewhere in his evidence, Salmond defended press freedom, arguing that he felt people had a right to offensive “within the law”.
He told Lord Justice Leveson that if his Inquiry were to come up with a proposition for press regulation that “accords with public support, is eminently sensible and points the way to a better future then the Scottish parliament would be foolish not to pay attention to it.”
But he added that the Scottish parliament might “wish not to apply” any over-prescriptive solutions.
When discussing whether or not he was in support of News Corp’s bid for the full takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB, Salmond emphasised the broadcaster was a “huge employer in Scotland” and that he was in favour of what benefited the Scottish economy.
Salmond stressed that his responsibility was ensuring investment and jobs in Scotland, rather than overseeing media plurality or broadcasting.
The Inquiry continues tomorrow with evidence from prime minister David Cameron.
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12 Jun 2012 | Uncategorized
Sir John Major has said Rupert Murdoch threatened him that he would no longer support him unless the former prime minister changed his European policy.
During a firm and composed morning of evidence at the Leveson Inquiry in which he criticised the media baron, Major recalled the February 1997 meeting with Murdoch as “not something I would easily forget”.
“He made it clear that he disliked my European policies which he wished me to change,” Major said. “If not, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government.”
“There was no question of changing policies,” Major added.
Murdoch told the Inquiry in April he had “never asked for anything directly from a politician”.
“Certainly he never asked for anything directly from me but he was not averse to pressing for policy changes,” Major said of the proprietor.
“I haven’t talked about this conversation at any stage over the past 15 years but now I am under oath,” he added.
Major also denied Kelvin MacKenzie’s anecdote that the former Sun editor had threatened to pour a “large bucket of shit” over Major during a phone call in 1992 about how the paper would cover the Black Wednesday crisis. Major said the story had acquired a “mythical” status.
“I dare say it wasn’t an especially productive call,” he added.
Major said it came as “no surprise” to him when the Murdoch-owned Sun switched its allegiance to support the Labour party ahead of the 1997 general election. Given its criticism of his government from 1992 to 1997, it would have been “difficult”, Major said, for the paper to support the Conservative party.
The former Tory prime minister made a veiled warning against currying favour with Murdoch. While he said he recognised the media baron’s “enormous skill as businessman” in building up broadcaster Sky and boosting newspapers such as the Times and Sunday Times, he said the “sheer scale” of his supposed influence was a “an unattractive facet in British national life.”
He added that he believed parts of Murdoch’s media empire had “lowered the general quality” of the British media. “I think that is a loss,” Major said.
Major stressed more than once the need to raise the standards of the worst excesses of the British press to the standards operated by the good. “The bad is just a cancer in the journalistic body, not the journalistic body as a whole,” he said, attacking culprits of dealing in caricatures and taking “a particular point and stretch[ing] it beyond what is reasonable”.
He added that editors and proprietors should bear the responsibility for wrongdoing, arguing that the Inquiry was taking place because “those who could have ensured proper behaviour have not done so.” He said reporters operated “within a culture” and found it “difficult to believe” that editors and proprietors do not know how stories are obtained.
Major conceded he was at times “much too sensitive” about what was written about him in the press, but said he was not appearing at the Inquiry to complain. “I’ve long since moved on from that,” he said.
He added that he did not inherit the “natural affinity with the press” that his predecessor Baroness Thatcher had earned, noting that her right-wing views appealed to national newspaper editors and proprietors, and that she admired “buccaneering businessmen” who were prepared to take risks.
The Inquiry continues this afternoon with evidence from Labour leader Ed Miliband and deputy leader Harriet Harman.
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