@LouiseMensch "very confident today on #Hunt at Leveson. Clearly he didn't authorise Adam Smith and did have a proper quasi-judicial process. cf Perm Sec."

Bless.

Her spat with Monbiot this morning has been particularly entertaining. I'm surprised she hasn't played the "misogynist bully" card yet, she usually does when she's losing an argument

So Jeremy Hunt says that having a meeting with Murdoch wasn't right but having the same conversation over the phone was fine.
I have heard some double talk but that tops the lot.

Browsing through Peter Oborne's outstanding "Rise of the Political Class" I came across an interesting and relevant snippet:



But more important I think is the following quote:

What has become clearer than when Oborne write this, however, is that Thatcher met and maintained a good relationship with Murdoch – to the point of handwritten notes from at least one to the other.

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danie ... self-harm/

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danie ... self-harm/

Hunt has been 'beaten like a ginger step-child' blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomch ... ntin-hunt/

Hunt has been 'beaten like a ginger step-child' blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomch ... ntin-hunt/

No one doubts that News International and Thatcher were in a relationship. But whilst the two shared common interests and worked to achieve such Blair went two steps further and integrated the press (and, more importantly, the industrial, financial and technological corporations who provide the bulk of their advertising) with government whilst bypassing the civil service.

The Tories and Big Business worked together. New Labour and Big Business were effectively indistinguishable.

Indeed, Blair took things further – just as he did with Thatcher's neo-liberal policies.

But the point remains that that – and the links with Murdoch – were begun on Thatcher's watch. As I've mentioned elsewhere (and major hound has also commented on), Bernard Ingham was known, at the time, as a spin doctor.

And as has also been mentioned, given the need to win certain sections of the press over to your side if you're going to stand a chance in an election, then perhaps Blair had little option, given the position Murdoch was in (partly thanks to Thatcher) by the late 1990s.

Hang on a second. I'm not condoning the Tories' activities but the co-opting of modern media can be traced all the way back through the Callaghan administration to the Great Strike and Lord Reith. However, it's one thing to court the favour of media magnates, newspaper editors etc. It's quite another to give them [idirect control of government policy[/i. If you can't recognise this and accept New Labour outrageously re-wrote the rules for the process of government in this country your impartiality is suspect to say the least.

Surely these are opinions not facts. And Oborne is not exactly renowned for being a great Labour supporter. I don't condone what Blair did re Murdoch, but he was only doing what the Tories had a;ways done before, and not just with Murdoch, but with Beaverbrook and Rothermere giong back to the twenties and thirties. What really got under the Tory skins was that this time it was Labour cosying up to a press baron - rightly or wrongly.
Blair listed policies on which Labour went ahead that were contrary to Murdoch's views including a greater involvement in Europe.
I would say that Hunt's evidence points straight at David Cameron. Cameron knew Hunt's views about the Murdoch Sky deal. He knew that Hunt was biased in favour of Murdoch and yet he replaced Cable because of his anti Murdoch bias with a minister with the opposite view. If anyone should be resigning it's Cameron, not Hunt. He probably now regrets his actions at the time, but then I don't suppose he ever thought that they would see the light of day.

The whole Leveson enquiry is a farce. Its just an excuse for politicians to muzzle the media and settle old scores e.g. Lib Dems attacking Murdoch for never supporting them and Labour attacking him for abandoning him. All this enquiry will achieve is to demolish the freedom of the press and enhance the power of the self-serving corrupt political class.

If people were serious about this, they'd expedite the criminal enquiries and lock up dozens and dozens and then decide whether an enquiry were even necessary. It's just a show.

The first thing I would do is make a rule that they have to abide by that means ANY retraction is a FULL front page oppology.

I will bet a pound to a bucket of pig swill that the false stories would dry up overnight simply because they would not want to risk the utter embarrassment of their front page being a massive notification that they print rubbish.


Edit-Just to clarify the paper themselves don't write the oppology the PCC or whatever they will then be called write it for the paper so as to stop spin.

I know you're a troll, but the Leveson enquiry has actually exposed some of the journalists, editors and proprietors as utterly undesrerving of the so-called freedom of the press. If all it does is put people back in their boxes and return us to a proper, lawful, sensible press, it will have been significantly less than a farce. The fact that the enquiry has happened at all, and the revelations coming out from it, gives people less credence in the press in its current "format" so they'll have to change if they want to keep making money (which let's face it, is what it's all about anyway).

It makes me laugh how whenever someone expresses views different to the consensus (on here, rather than in the country at large) they are automatically "a troll"! Have you ever considered this might be his genuine view or are you so lacking in confidence that you go round in a bubble surrounded by people who affirm your own views?

Ok, not a troll. An idiot, if that is his considered view

Well the accepted definition of a troll is someone who posts inflammatory or ludicrous stuff to a group while ostensibly being a reasonable member of the group. I think he qualifies.

I think the assumption that he is trolling is the kindest assumption that could have been made.

Well the Leveson enquiry is certainly shedding quite a bit of light on the way things are done in government never mind the press.

The stuff that came out of Hunt's testimony jusgt confirms to me it is just a game for a bunch of ex-public school toffs.

This details a lot of the stuff that went on and summarises the farce concisely (as well as being an excellent political assassination of Hunt)

[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/31/leveson-hunt-scoundrel-or-fool[/url

We have minsters discussing policy by text message and using private unaudited email accounts to conduct government business.

I can't even use the web mail outlook client to access my works email on anything other than a company machine yet our government is being run by text message and gmail !!!

I saw that, and as an ex-Private Secretary I was astounded. His staff must be pulling their hair out. Everything my boss did had to be noted (phone calls, meetings etc). Really beggars belief that he was allowed off the leash so much.

Off the leash or a deliberate blind eye turned?

If they're civil servants with any sense of the job they'll not be turning a blind eye, as they'll get implicated too.

With the greatest of respect something has gone seriously wrong then if they didn't know how bad this was getting.