guardian.co.uk,
Dan Sabbagh, Lisa O'Carroll and Severin Carrell, Monday 11 June 2012
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| Gordon Brown and wife Sarah leave after he had given evidence at the Leveson inquiry. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images |
Gordon Brown has mounted an impassioned and emotional attack on the Murdoch family and
News International at the Leveson inquiry, accusing Rupert Murdoch of lying on
oath, criticising James Murdoch for "breathtaking arrogance" and the
Sun for obtaining unauthorised information about his son's medical condition.
The former
PM also claimed the Conservatives adopted "every one" of the policies
put forward by the Murdoch company, including reining in the publicly funded
BBC and media regulator Ofcom.
Brown's
evidence capped another eventful day as the fallout from the phone-hacking
scandal continues, with George Osborne admitting before Leveson that "just
over a third" of his meetings with media executives were with News
International, and five phone-hacking case files being sent to the Crown
Prosecution Service to decide whether the same number of journalists should be
prosecuted.
A clearly
emotional Brown insisted he did not make "unbalanced" and threatening
remarks in a phone call to Rupert Murdoch in late September or early October
2009 – directly contradicting evidence given by the media mogul to the Leveson
inquiry in April.
Rupert
Murdoch had told the inquiry under oath on two successive occasions that the
phone call had taken place on or shortly after the Sun newspaper announced it
was switching its support to the Tories, which happened on 30 September of that
year. The News Corporation boss said that Brown had pledged to "declare
war" on his company.
Relying on
No 10 call records, Brown said that "News International have produced not
one shred of evidence that a call took place, not one date for the call or time
for the call".
But despite
Brown's statements, a News Corp spokesman said: "Rupert Murdoch stands
behind his testimony."
Brown did
say that he had a separate conversation with Rupert Murdoch on 10 November.
That conversation came shortly after the Sun attacked Brown for sending a
hard-to-read handwritten note of condolence to the mother of a soldier killed
in Afghanistan.
Brown said
there was a discussion in which he argued that the Sun's hostile coverage was
undermining the military's efforts in the country.
Brown also
revealed that Fife's NHS board had written to him to say it was "highly
likely" that a member of its staff told the Sun that his son Fraser had
been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in November 2006.
The
newspaper's front-page splash that month pictured Brown under the headline
"Four-and-a-half years after daughter's death, docs find cystic fibrosis
in baby Fraser".
He told the
inquiry that he had submitted a letter from Fife health board "which makes
it clear that they have apologised to us because they now believe it highly
likely that there was unauthorised information given by a medical or working
member of the NHS staff that allowed the Sun in the end through this middleman
to publish this story". Brown said his family only agreed to co-operate
with the Sun after it was made clear that an article about Fraser's health
would be published in any event by the newspaper.
John
Wilson, the chief executive of NHS Fife, said: "Any breach of
confidentiality in the NHS is unacceptable. We now accept that it is highly
likely that, some time in 2006, a member of staff in NHS Fife spoke, without
authorisation, about the medical condition of Mr Brown's son, Fraser." But
he added that he believed there had been "no inappropriate access to the
child's medical records".
Brown's
claims – a development of those first aired in parliament last July – set him
on another collision course with the Sun, which has insisted it did not access
Fraser's medical records and that the 2006 story came from another source – a
member of the public "whose family has also experienced cystic
fibrosis".
A News
International spokesperson said: "We welcome the fact that NHS Fife have
today said that they believe there was 'no inappropriate access' to the medical
records of Gordon Brown's son. The Sun stands by previous statements issued on
the matter."
However,
former Sun editor David Yelland, who edited the title between 1998 and 2003,
said on Twitter that he believed that Brown and his wife, Sarah, were
"bullied" by the tabloid and that: "I'm afraid that my old paper
behaved awfully in his last year or so. It was brutal stuff."The statement
from NHS Fife suggests it felt under intense pressure to establish how details
of Fraser Brown's medical condition were leaked to the Sun, but then carried
out an exhaustive investigation.
The affair
will have been extremely unsettling and embarrassing for the health board:
after decades at the heart of Labour politics in Scotland and within Fife,
Gordon Brown remains an immensely powerful and respected figure in the county.
Brown said
that at "no point" during in his tenure as prime minister had he ever
felt he "had the support of the Sun," but said that the company's
tone to him changed in 2008 and 2009: "I think what really changed,
however … is that News International decided that their commercial interests
came first."
Brown said
that the key point came with James Murdoch's August 2009 MacTaggart lecture at
the Edinburgh television festival, which he said "set out an agenda which
to me was quite breathtaking in its arrogance and its ambition; that was to
neutralise the BBC, it was to undermine Ofcom and a whole series of policy aims
… which no government that I was involved in could ever agree to".
But, he
said that the Conservative party, chose to support "every one of the
recommendations that were made by the Murdoch group".
That
assertion was challenged by George Osborne, appearing at the inquiry after
Brown. He said that only "a fantasist" would believe there was a
conspiracy between the Conservatives and News International to ensure the
approval of the BSkyB bid.
In a clear
dig at his former Labour rival, Osborne said this theory was "what the
previous person at this inquiry alleged this morning. It is complete nonsense
and the facts simply don't bear it out".
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