It is not known exactly who Jeremy Hunt met from News Corp during his five-day £4,000 trip to the U.S. during 2009. His Commons register entry says: “Purpose of visit: to look into local media ventures. Meetings with representatives of News Corp (including Wall Street Journal), Fox Five and WNET.” But within days of the visit in August that year, James Murdoch told David Cameron over drinks that The Sun would switch allegiance and support the Tories at the general election. This tends to support my growing feeling that Jeremy Hunt was, behind the scenes, a far more important go-between in the foundation-building of a Newscorp-Cameron relationship than has previously been realised. At the time, the Conservative Party said Mr Hunt was on a ‘fact-finding trip’ to discuss local television – and the BSkyB bid was not discussed ‘to the best of his recollection’. But out of over 40,000 broadcasters from which to choose, he saw four: three of which were owned by Rupert Murdoch. And at the time, his constituency website mentioned nothing at all about it – unusual, because if Jeremy so much as breaks wind, it makes the front page lead there.
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 00:20:41 +0000
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