More than half of British people think that Prime Minister David Cameron is too close to Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman of News Corporation, which has recently been embroiled in the phone hacking scandal, our poll has revealed. A strong majority also thinks that Cameron was wrong to employ Andy Coulson as his Director of Communications.
Half of people think that former Prime Minister Tony Blair was too close to Murdoch while in office, and slightly less think the same of Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown.
- 52% of British people think that Prime Minister David Cameron is too close to the Chairman of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch, who recently went before a committee on the recent phone hacking scandal which closed the News of the World newspaper
- 20% disagree
- 58% of people say Cameron is too close to former Chief Executive of News International Rebekah Brooks, while 14% say he isn’t
- 47% think Cameron is too close to newspaper editors in general, while 17% disagree
- 50% think that while former Prime Minister Tony Blair was in power, he was too close to Murdoch
- Just 10% feel Blair was not too close to Murdoch
- 48% say Blair was too close to newspaper editors in general, while 11% disagree
- 39% think Gordon Brown was too close to Murdoch when in power
- 20% disagree
- 36% think Brown was too close to editors in general, while 19% disagree
- Our poll also discovered that 70% of people think Cameron was wrong to employ Andy Coulson, the former editor of the News of the World, as his Director of Communications
The poll comes amid the on-going phone hacking scandal which has sparked increased scrutiny of the relationships between politicians and the press. Prime Minister David Cameron has come under fire for employing former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as Director of Communications between 2007 and 2011.
‘No inappropriate conversations’
Coulson is at the centre of the phone hacking scandal; he was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of corruption and phone hacking, before being released on police bail until October. Cameron has said that he hired Coulson ‘on the basis of assurances he gave me that he did not know about the phone-hacking and he was not involved in criminality’.
Last week Cameron insisted that that his Labour predecessors Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had enjoyed a closer relationship with the Murdoch Empire than he did. When asked whether he had broken the ministerial code by discussing Murdoch’s BSkyB takeover bid with News International exectutives such as Rebekah Brooks, Cameron insisted: ‘I never had any inappropriate conversations’.
