Rupert Murdoch and the revival of the Labour Party
Last year that the Leveson inquiry would suit Jeremy Hunt rather well. He had appointed Lord Justice Leveson, a judge with little previous experience of media law to sit alongside a remarkably undistinguished panel of assessors. They would inflict more blows on the battered cause of freedom of speech, I thought. But they would steer well clear of the corrupt relationship between Rupert Murdoch and successive governments, which had allowed his hacks to believe that the law of the land did not apply to them.
I underestimated Murdoch’s titanic self-pity. The old American definition of an honest politician is that ‘once he’s bought, he stays bought’. The same does not apply to the Dirty Digger. Hunt is the latest in a long line of ministers to find that you can’t buy Murdoch. You can only hire him. He’s going down, and is determined to take with him all those in the London and now Edinburgh governments who offered him favours in return for propaganda.
As the Leveson inquiry at last looks at what matters, a new criticism has arisen. I’ve heard it muttered in private
