Murdoch is misleading media probe, says Brown

Reuters/London

Former prime minister Gordon Brown leaves the High Court with his wife Sarah after giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry in London yesterday

Former prime minister Gordon Brown yesterday accused media tycoon Rupert Murdoch of misleading a government-sponsored inquiry into press ethics with incorrect testimony alleging Brown had threatened war against Murdoch’s company.“This conversation never took place. I am shocked and surprised that it should be suggested,” Brown told the Leveson inquiry. “This call did not happen. The threat was not made. I find it shocking,” Brown said.“This did not happen. There is no evidence that it happened other than Murdoch’s, but it didn’t happen.” Murdoch had told the inquiry under oath that Brown phoned him in September 2009 after the Sun newspaper started supporting the Conservative Party.Brown vowed to wage war on Murdoch’s company in revenge, he testified. “We were talking more quietly than you or I are now - he said, ‘Well, your company has declared war on my government and we have no alternative but to make war on your company,’” Murdoch told the inquiry in April.When pressed on how a serving prime minister could make such a threat, Murdoch told the inquiry: “I don’t think he was in a very balanced state of mind”.Brown, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2010, said that Murdoch was wrong about both the date and the contents of the phone call.A spokeswoman for News Corporation declined immediate comment.Statements submitted to a media watchdog by five of Brown’s advisers, show none of the five heard Brown threaten Murdoch on the call.Aides to Brown, including his special adviser, director of strategy and deputy chief of staff, said in statements submitted to the Press Complaints Commission last year that Brown made no such threat on the call, which took place in November not September as Murdoch had said.“I listened to the phone call between Brown and Murdoch in November 2009,” Stewart Wood, special adviser to the prime minister’s office, said in a statement dated October 2011.“At no point in the conversation was threatening language of any sort used by either Brown or Murdoch,” Wood said.In one of the other corroborating statement, lawmaker Michael Dugher, wrote: “At no time did Brown threaten the position of News International. Both Brown and Murdoch were entirely courteous and calm.”A former leader accusing Murdoch of misleading the inquiry under oath will further tarnish the reputation of the world’s most powerful media tycoon in a country which is home to some of his biggest newspaper and broadcasting interests.A parliamentary committee which investigated allegations of illegal phone-hacking by Murdoch publications has already deemed the Australian-born tycoon unfit to manage a major global company. The cross-party parliamentary committee said in May that Murdoch was ultimately responsible for the illegal phone hacking that has corroded his global media empire and convulsed Britain’s political elite. Brown also denied behaving aggressively towards Rebekah Brooks when he telephoned her expecting an apology for negative coverage, only to be told more was to come.The former prime minister said he was led to believe by Murdoch that the then News International chief executive would say sorry for a slew of damaging stories about his handling of Afghanistan.But when he made the telephone call Brooks instead told him she had a taped conversation of him apologising to the furious bereaved mother of a soldier about a condolence letter he had sent her that was littered with mistakes.Brown spoke to Murdoch on November 10, 2009, over The Sun’s coverage of Afghanistan and also sent him a follow-up e-mail later that day. He told the inquiry the newspaper had published a story criticising him for not bowing at the Cenotaph as well as an article about a letter he sent to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son Jamie, a Grenadier Guardsman, was killed by an explosion.Janes had accused him of being “disrespectful” because the message began “Dear Mrs James” and appeared to contain other spelling errors and a visible correction to her son Jamie’s name.  Brown has suffered with eyesight problems since a rugby accident in his youth.