Hunt called to answer to House of Commons ahead of Leveson
JEREMY Hunt yesterday received fresh calls to face the House of Commons and answer to email evidence that he supported News Corp’s takeover of BSkyB.
Shadow culture secretary Harriet Harman asked whether it was appropriate for Hunt to refuse to answer parliamentary questions “because instead he’s going to tell Lord Justice Leveson”.
Speaker John Bercow replied, “The accountability of a minister to this House is not diluted or suspended by a minister’s engagement with inquiries,” implying that Hunt should submit “substantive and timely answers” to the Commons.
But Leveson has separately said that evidence should not be disclosed before submission to his inquiry.
The discussion in Parliament took place as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s director of communications, appeared before the Leveson inquiry. Campbell, a former political editor of the Daily Mirror, said there had been no deal between Blair and Rupert Murdoch over The Sun’s support for Labour before the 1997 election.
“I was never witness to a discussion where [Murdoch] said, ‘Tony, if you do this and this, we’ll back you’. It just never happened,” he claimed.
Campbell added, “I wouldn’t overstate the significance of a couple of phone calls with Rupert Murdoch,” when asked about correspondence between Blair and the media mogul in the run up to the Iraq War. Blair’s spin doctor also said George Bush had once asked him what Rupert Murdoch was like, “because he’d never met him, which I found rather surprising.”