Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry: ‘I never asked for favours or received them’

RUPERT Murdoch shed light on the relationships he forged with several British prime ministers, including Baroness Thatcher and Tony Blair, when he appeared at the Leveson inquiry yesterday.

On Mr Blair, the media mogul said that in the ten years in which the former Labour leader held power he “never asked” him for “anything, nor indeed did I receive any favours”.

He also revealed it was true that he had once likened his relationship with Mr Blair to two porcupines mating.

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He admitted having made a colourful joke, which was reported by Mr Blair as: “If our flirtation is ever consummated, Tony, then I suspect we will end up making love like porcupines – very, very carefully.”

Mr Murdoch also denied that Mr Blair had consulted him on how to discredit French leader Jacques Chirac in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Recalling his dealings with Lady Thatcher, whom the Sun supported in the election of 1979, Mr Murdoch said he met her for lunch at Chequers on 4 January, 1981, during which he discussed his plans to buy the Times and the Sunday Times.

But again he said he did not ask her for any favours and she did not offer him any.

Although he had been a great admirer of Lady Thatcher, Mr Murdoch said he was less impressed by her successor, John Major, whom he could not remember meeting.

Mr Murdoch rejected suggestions that he was a “Sun King” figure who used his charisma to exert his authority over his worldwide media empire.

He also denied claims that he used his newspapers to promote his business interests. He said: “I take a particularly strong pride in the fact that we have never pushed our commercial interests in our newspapers.”

He also claimed that he never gave instructions to editors.

“Sometimes when I was available on a Saturday I would call and say, ‘What’s the news today?’ It was idle curiosity perhaps.

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“Other times I would ring on a Tuesday from New York when the Sunday Times came in, and I would say ‘That was a damn fine newspaper you had this week’. I perhaps wouldn’t have read the editorial.”

He recalled talking to the former Sunday Times and Times editor Harold Evans on policy. Mr Murdoch claimed Mr Evans said: “Look, tell me what you want to say, and it needn’t leave this room, but I will do it.”

Mr Murdoch said his response was: “Harry, that’s not my job. All I would say, and this is the nearest I have ever come to an instruction, was to please be consistent. Don’t change sides day by day.”

The mogul admitted being closer to the Sun than the News of the World: “It was a daily paper, there was always something more urgent about it.”

Asked about the publication of Hitler’s supposed diaries – later found to be fakes – by the Sunday Times in 1983, he said: “It was a massive mistake I made and will have to live with for the rest of my life.”

Mr Murdoch admitted giving former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie a “bollocking” after the headline “It’s The Sun Wot Won It” appeared on the front page of the newspaper in April 1992, after the Conservatives’ general election victory.

He said: “I thought it was tasteless and wrong for us. It was wrong in fact – we don’t have that sort of power.”

Mr Murdoch said he never let commercial interests enter into any consideration of elections.