NUJ says Rebekah Brooks' advice from Tony Blair shows the 'dodgy back-story' to News UK's phone-hacking inquiry
The revelation that Tony Blair advised former News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks over the phone-hacking scandal shows the “dodgy back-story” behind News UK’s public efforts to root out alleged illegal practices at the paper, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has said.
Email: The exchange between Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch
NUJ general secretary Michelle Stanistreet said the revelations put News UK’s Management and Standards Committee – set up in 2011 to root out problems at the paper related to phone-hacking and other alleged illegal activities – into context.
“Today’s revelations show the dodgy back-story that led to News UK’s establishment of the Management and Standards Committee – the independent entity recommended by Tony Blair as the way of manufacturing a clean bill of health for his erstwhile friend Rupert’s nearest and dearest,” she said.
An email exchange between Rebekah Brooks and her former boss James Murdoch was shown at the phone-hacking trial at the Old Bailey on Wednesday. In it, Brooks said she’d spoken to former prime minister Tony Blair on the phone for an hour and he’d advised forming an “independent unit” to investigate allegations of illegal activities by Brooks and others and produce a “Hutton style report” – a reference to an inquiry into the death of former UN weapons inspector David Kelly, which was described by some as a “whitewash”.
“The outcome of this process was that journalistic sources were outed and compromised in unprecedented fashion, leading to the arrests and imprisonment of many, and the detention and ongoing trials of many of News UK’s loyal journalists,” Stanistreet continued. “The damaging legacy of this is that whistleblowers no longer have the same faith that journalists in this country can protect their confidentiality and identity.”
She added: “Today’s evidence shows just how close the relationship is between Britain’s former prime minister and Rupert Murdoch’s most senior executives: that Tony Blair went out of his way to provide detailed advice to Rebekah Brooks on how she could choreograph a ‘Hutton-style’ inquiry – one cynically and deliberately designed to come up with an outcome to exonerate Brooks whilst fobbing off the general public with an admission of some ‘shortcomings’. It certainly says a lot about Mr Blair’s approach to the Hutton inquiry.”