Culture secretary told David Cameron the 'media sector would suffer for years' if News Corp's bid for BSkyB was blocked
The culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wrote privately to the prime minister urging him in strong terms to back Rupert Murdoch's takeover bid for BSkyB just a month before David Cameron appointed him to take charge of the bid himself in a "quasi-judicial" capacity.
The intervention by Hunt, who is facing calls for his resignation, was revealed for the first time in a document shown to the Leveson inquiry on Thursday. Hunt urged Cameron not to allow the business secretary, Vince Cable, to block the BSkyB bid despite strong advice to the culture secretary from his own officials that he should not involve himself in the process.
The culture secretary claimed to the prime minister that if the Murdoch bid was blocked "our media sector will suffer for years". He asked for a meeting with Cable and Cameron to discuss the handling of the deal.
The document appears to corroborate the picture that emerges from earlier email exchanges between Hunt's aide Adam Smith and the News Corp lobbyist Frà ©dà ©ric Michel. Those emails document an apparently collusive relationship with the Murdoch empire and have already put Hunt's cabinet position in peril.
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Leveson Inquiry - Frederic Michel confronted with memo sent by culture secretary Hunt to Prime Minister Cameron - recommending approval of the News Corp bid for 100% ownership of BSkyB. Hunt was supposed to be an objective analyst and judge of this issue. The memo shows extreme bias.
Frederic Michel. That's certainly what the email suggests but it's only from looking at that that I would guess that. I can't actually remember.
QC Robert Jay. What it says is: "James Murdoch is pretty furious at Vince's referral to Ofcom." That had occurred a few days beforehand, hadn't it?
Michel. Yes, I believe so.
Jay. "He doesn't think he will get a fair hearing from Ofcom. I am privately concerned about this because News Corp are very litigious and we could end up in the wrong place in terms of media policy. Essentially what James Murdoch wants to do is to repeat what his father did with the move to Wapping and create the world's first multi-platform media operator, available from paper to web to TV to iPhone to iPad. Isn't this what all media companies have to do ultimately? And if so, we must be very careful that any attempt to block it is done on genuine plurality grounds and not as a result of lobbying by competitors.
"The UK has the chance to lead the way ... but if we block it our media sector will suffer for years. In the end I am sure sensible controls can be put into any merger to ensure there is plurality, but I think it would be totally wrong to cave in to the Mark Thomson/ Channel 4/Guardian line that this represents a substantial change of control given that we all kno Sky is controlled by News Corp now anyway.
"What next? Ofcom will issue their report saying whether it needs to go to the Competition Commission by 31 December. It would be totally wrong for the government to get involved in a competition issue which has to be decided at arm's length. However I do think you, I, Vince and the DPM should meet to discuss the policy issues that are thrown up as a result."
Q What did you gather from this memorandum?
Page 74-57 Transcript of Afternoon Hearing 24 May 2012 (pdf, 154KB)
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