Cable feared treatment by Murdoch press
BUSINESS secretary Vince Cable yesterday told the Leveson inquiry that he feared being “done over” in newspapers owned by News International if he did not give the go-ahead to its parent company’s £8bn bid for broadcaster BSkyB.
“I had heard directly and indirectly from colleagues that there had been veiled threats that if I made the wrong decision from their point of view, my party would be, I think somebody used the phrase, ‘done over’, in the News International press,” he told the inquiry into media ethics.
“I had myself tried to deal with the process entirely properly and impartially and I discovered that this was happening in the background. I took those things seriously, I was very concerned.”
Cable had been tasked with deciding whether to approve News Corporation’s takeover of BSkyB but was forced to step down from the process after reporters recorded him saying he had “declared war” on Murdoch over the bid.
Yesterday Cable said he was “angry with myself at what happened” but the perception of bias meant he “understood that there was no alternative in this case”.
He also attacked attempts to turn the bid into a political issue: “There was a systematic attempt to politicise the process to imply that somehow or other the whole process was governed by Liberal Democrat politics when it was not.”
“The Murdochs’ political influence exercised through their newspapers have become disproportionate,” he said in his witness statement.