British Leader, Under Fire, Seeks Distance From Murdoch

Parliament.uk

This image taken from television shows Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain speaking at the House of Commons on Wednesday.

• Editorial: Britain’s Press Scandal (July 13, 2011)

At the weekly encounter in Parliament called Prime Minister’s questions, Mr. Cameron came under renewed pressure form the opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband to explain his relationship with his former director of communications, Andy Coulson, a former editor of The News of the World — a top selling Sunday at the epicenter of the scandal which the Murdoch family ordered closed last weekend.

A lawmaker also asked if there was evidence that journalists at News International, a British subsidiary of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation, had tried to hack into the voice mails of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, as they are accused of doing in Britain after the July 7 bombings.

Speaking in advance of broader debate, Mr. Cameron offered his most forthright comments yet on Mr. Murdoch’s $12 billion bid for the shares in British Sky Broadcasting which he does not already own, saying his companies should “stop the business of mergers and get on with cleaning the stables.”

The latest exchanges came a day after Mr. Murdoch’s once-commanding influence in British politics seemed to dwindle to a new low on Tuesday, when all three major parties in Parliament joined in support of a sharp rebuke to his ambitions and a parliamentary committee said it would call him, along with two other top executives, to testify publicly next week about the growing scandal enveloping his media empire.

But the argument was also marked with sharp exchanges between Mr. Cameron and Mr. Miliband. “He just doesn’t get it,” Mr. Miliband said, referring to the worries provoked by Mr. Cameron’s decision to hire Mr. Coulson, who was forced to resign from Mr. Cameron’s office in January as the phone-hacking scandal gathered pace. But Mr. Cameron replied: “The person who is now not getting it is the leader of the opposition.”

“What the public wants us to do is to deal with this firestorm,” Mr. Cameron said.

Since the scandal broke last week, Mr. Miliband had taken the lead in demanding strong action both against News International and its chief executive, Rebekah Brooks, and in calling for Mr. Murdoch to abandon the contentious $12 billion to complete his ownership of British Sky Broadcasting. On Wednesday, Mr. Cameron also distanced himself more abruptly than in the past from Ms. Brooks, reportedly a personal friend.

In an effort to save the broadcasting deal from the scandal’s fallout, Mr. Murdoch has already shut down the tabloid at the heart of the scandal, The News of the World. But the accusations have spread to other papers in his News International group, and have taken in an ever wider and more outrage-provoking list of victims.

The House of Commons is scheduled to vote on Wednesday on a motion declaring that “it is in the public interest for Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation to withdraw their bid for BSkyB,” a motion pushed by the opposition Labour Party that the governing Conservatives decided on Tuesday to support. The Conservatives’ coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, have been vocal in their condemnation of Mr. Murdoch and his executives. With the three parties holding more than 600 of the 650 seats in the house, the motion is expected to be approved overwhelmingly.

Though it would have little direct effect, the motion represents a powerful political headwind blowing against the deal and against Mr. Murdoch, a figure so powerful in Britain that until the current scandal, politicians and others in public life have rarely risked invoking his ire. And it threatened to undercut a last-ditch step that the News Corporation took on Monday, when it withdrew promises it had made to satisfy antitrust concerns about the deal, most notably that Sky News, the target company’s 24-hour news channel, would be spun off.

Before the scandal flared up, the Conservative government had shown readiness to waive a formal antitrust review of the deal, based on those promises. A regulatory review would now not just delay the deal for months, but may kill it.

A parliamentary committee said Tuesday that it would call Mr. Murdoch, his son James and Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, to testify next week about accusations of phone hacking and corruption at the News International papers. John Whittingdale, chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said it would seek to determine “how high up the chain” knowledge of the newsroom malpractices in the Murdoch newspapers went.

New and alarming charges came on Tuesday from the former prime minister Gordon Brown, who said that one of the most prestigious newspapers in the group, The Sunday Times, employed “known criminals” to gather personal information on his bank account, legal files and tax affairs.