David Cameron denies trying to stop phone hacking probe

LONDON : Prime Minister David Cameron emphatically denied claims that his staff tried to stop an inquiry into phone hacking at the News of the World and defended his decision to hire one of the tabloid's editors as his communications chief. He had rejected an inquiry into allegations of phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's UK newspapers.

The unusual step by Gus O'Donnell, head of the Civil Service and the Cabinet Office, which advises the government, was a measure of the political heat generated by the scandal in Britain, whose current prime minister David Cameron has said politicians of all parties had been under Murdoch's spell.

The seven-page document revealed O'Donnell had advised Brown against holding an inquiry but not blocked any probe. In a raucous emergency session Wednesday in Parliament, Cameron did admit that both the ruling Conservatives and the opposition Labour parties had failed to pursue key developments in the hacking case and had actively courted media baron Rupert Murdoch.


Police are also probing whether news media breached privacy laws. David Cameron cut short his Africa trip and the House of Commons delayed its summer break to debate issues engulfing both Britain's political and media elite and Murdoch's global communications empire, News Corp.

Murdoch owned the troubled News of the World, where the phone hacking claims first emerged in 2005, when the royal household alerted police that the tabloid may have learned about Prince William's knee injury by illegally intercepting phone messages.

Cameron's former communications chief Andy Coulson -- a former editor at the tabloid is among 10 people who have been arrested in the scandal. One has been cleared. Lawmakers wanted to know why Cameron insisted on hiring Coulson despite warnings and how much the prime minister knew about the phone hacking investigation. There have been allegations that some people on Cameron's staff may have met with police to pressure them to drop the investigation.

"To risk any perception that No 10 (Downing Street) was seeking to influence a sensitive police investigation in any way would have been completely wrong," he said.

Cameron did, however, meet with News Corp. executives more than two dozen times from May 2010 to this month -- meetings that were criticized in Parliament by Labour leader Ed Miliband, who said Cameron had made a "catastrophic error of judgment" in hiring Coulson.

Coulson was an editor at the News of the World when royal reporter Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were arrested and jailed in 2007 for phone hacking. The original police inquiry into phone hacking was dropped, Coulson quit the paper and Cameron -- then opposition leader -- hired him.


This January, police reopened the hacking investigation. They are now investigating some 3,870 people whose names and telephone numbers were found in the News of the World files. It remains unclear how many were hacking victims. Coulson resigned his government post that same month.

News Corp. said Wednesday it had now eliminated legal payments to Mulcaire -- a day after Murdoch told lawmakers in a special parliamentary committee hearing that he would try to find a way to stop the payments. Mulcaire's lawyer, Sarah Webb, declined to comment on the development.

In other phone hacking news, a judge Wednesday awarded "Notting Hill" actor Hugh Grant one of the most prominent celebrity critics of the Murdoch empire - the right to see whether he was one of the tabloid hacking victims.

The scandal captivated television audiences from America to Murdoch's native Australia on Tuesday, as Murdoch endured a three-hour grilling by U.K. lawmakers. The media baron said he had known nothing of allegations that staff at News of the World hacked into cellphones and bribed police to get information on celebrities, politicians and crime victims.

He also said he had been humbled by the allegations and apologized for the "horrible invasions" of privacy. Cameron promised a “profound apology” if it turned out that the assurances Coulson had given him about not being involved in phone-hacking turned out to be false. Labour House leader Ed Miliband wasn’t satisfied by Cameron’s oratory. “The question is why?” He answered it: “Because the Prime Minister was compromised by his relationship with Mr Coulson. He was hamstrung by a conflict of interest.” Miliband said: “It's not about hindsight. It is not about whether Mr Coulson lied to him. It is about all the information that the Prime Minister ignored.”