Nicholas Leonard: Rupert Murdoch connection may be the undoing of Cameron
The British prime minister David Cameron is struggling to defend his integrity and his political judgement after a spate of damaging allegations about his most important spindoctor, the former tabloid editor Andy Coulson.
Former Labour government ministers, including John Prescott and Peter Mandelson, are among a host of MPs who are now convinced that their phones were illegally tapped during the time when Coulson was editor of the 'News of the World'.
Coulson has consistently denied he knew of any phone hacking but he was forced to resign when one of his reporters was sent to prison. Within a few months, he was back at the top of the media world as chief communications strategist for the Conservatives.
Cameron knew Coulson had the media-friendly skills his party needed but he also knew that the appointment would underpin his determined schmoozing of the most influential media owner in the country, Rupert Murdoch.
It was Murdoch who helped Tony Blair turn New Labour into a political machine capable of winning three general elections and it was Murdoch's switch to the Conservatives that provided the impetus for Cameron to emerge as the leader of a coalition government.
Without the support of the Murdoch titles, Gordon Brown might well have hung on to enough seats for Labour to have formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats instead.
All five of the would-be Labour leaders are now clamouring for Cameron to come clean on what he knows about Coulson and phone-tapping. They believe, rightly, that he is intensely vulnerable on the issue and, with the Commons resuming business today, they sense this could be the moment when the coalition starts to come under serious strain.
Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem deputy to Cameron, and his colleagues in the cabinet are extremely uneasy at what is happening. They fear Cameron has embroiled the coalition in a damaging relationship with Murdoch and Coulson which could force them to break ranks.
To understand why Murdoch is at the epicentre of this whole affair, you have only to look at the way he is linked to so many of the key players. Last summer, it was his son-in-law, the public relations promoter, Matthew Freud, who flew Cameron and his wife Samantha to a meeting in the Mediterranean.
Last week, foreign secretary William Hague was fighting to refute rumours about being gay by releasing details about the multiple miscarriages suffered by his wife, Ffion. The man who advised Hague on this strategy was Coulson -- they know each other well because Hague used to be paid €250,000 a year to write a column for his paper.
Yesterday, the government put up the education minister Michael Gove to defend Coulson from "recycled allegations". Gove used to be a columnist for a Murdoch paper, 'The Times'. One of the commentators on the same BBC programme, Mary Anne Sieghart, worked for 'The Times' for 19 years. She admitted it was "pretty odd" that Coulson claimed to have known nothing about the phone tapping.
Cameron is in a position to do Murdoch a big favour by decimating the BBC to open up more commercial opportunities for Sky television. The BBC feels under threat and, thanks to a memo inadvertently brandished by its director-general last week, it is now known that it is promising the government it will handle coverage of the forthcoming budget cuts "in context", in other words resisting the urge to headline massive reductions in key public services.
When Cameron was elected leader of the Conservatives five years ago, he sold himself as the "next Tony Blair". The real Blair admits in his memoirs that he was "manipulative".
In the end, of course, Blair found that there were limits to what he could manipulate, starting with Gordon Brown and ending with public opinion which, as evidenced in his hostile reception in Dublin, has failed to embrace his own view of himself as a secular 'messiah'.
- Nicholas Leonard
Irish Independent
