Murdoch told Major ‘change your policies on Europe’

The former prime minister said the News Corporation chief executive made it clear at a dinner in February 1997 that his newspapers – the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times – would not come out for him at the forthcoming general election without this change.

Sir John’s evidence puts him at odds with Mr Murdoch’s statement to the inquiry that “I have never asked a prime minister for anything”. Before the 1997 election, which Sir John lost, the Sun and News of the World backed Labour.

If we couldn’t change our European policies, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government. Sir John Major

Sir John said he was advised before the election that he “ought to try to make some effort to get closer to the Murdoch press and I agreed that I would write Mr Murdoch to dinner”.

He added: “In the dinner it became apparent in discussion that Mr Murdoch said that he really didn’t like our European policies… and he wished me to change our European policies.

‘No question’

“If we couldn’t change our European policies, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government. There was no question of me changing our policies.”

Sir John mentioned the late Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party, which campaigned for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU – a policy he believed Mr Murdoch wanted the Conservatives to adopt.

He said: “My feeling was that what he was edging towards was a referendum on leaving the European Union. I made it pretty clear we were not going to change our European policies.

“It is not very often someone sits in front of a prime minister and says, ‘I would like you to change your policy and if you do not change your policy our organisation cannot support you’.”

‘Reluctant’

Labour leader Ed Miliband told the inquiry, which was set up following allegations that journalists at the News of the World hacked phones, that politicians including himself had been initially reluctant to criticise News International, which owned the now-defunct newspaper.

“Organisations like News International had huge power and I think politicians were reticent to speak about some of these practices that were exposed. I include myself in that,” he said.

He said Labour had been too close to News International before he became leader, although he had never enjoyed “particularly good relations” with the company.

“We were too close in the sense that meant that when there were abuses by the press we didn’t speak out,” he said. “It was a sense of fear I suppose in some senses about speaking out on those issues that were affecting ordinary members of the public. We didn’t speak out on those issues where there was increasing evidence about News International’s behaviour.”

Mr Miliband said he met Rupert Murdoch in June 2011, but failed to raise the issue of phone hacking with him. He said that when he changed his position and called for former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks to resign in July, “I knew it would be seen by News International as an act of war”.

Sir John Major also talked about former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie and denied that Mr MacKenzie had directed vulgar abuse at him during a telephone conversation after Black Wednesday.

The former prime minister was asked to comment on a telephone conversation that is alleged to have taken place after the pound was forced out of the European exchange rate mechanism in September 1992.

Mr MacKenzie told the Leveson inquiry into media standards in January that Sir John had called him and asked him “how the story is going to play in the paper tomorrow”.

He claimed he had told him: “I’ve got a bucket of s*** on my desk and I’m going to pour it all over you.”

If the conversation had proceeded as I read it proceeded, then I do not think I would have forgotten it. Sir John Major

But Sir John disputed this version of events, saying the story had taken on an “air of mythology” and that he had read accounts of the conversation with “a degree of wonder and surprise”.

He added: “If the conversation had proceeded as I read it proceeded, then I do not think I would have forgotten it. Neither do I think Mr MacKenzie would have been invited to Downing Street 12 months later, as he was on one occasion.

“So perhaps my memory is very faulty indeed, but I certainly don’t recollect the same conversation that has been circulated from time to time. As to the conversation itself, I frankly cannot recall it in any detail. I would have recalled the bit that has entered mythology, I’m sure I would not have forgotten that. But I don’t actually recall it. “