Will Murdoch’s appearance be an anti-climax?

The culture committee is likely to focus on phone hacking when it interviews the Murdochs at 14.30 today. But the symbolism of these hearings, for which people are queuing round the block here at Westminster, is about so much more than that. It is about back-benchers, representing the country, at last coming face to face with the media mogul who has done so much to influence—and some would say damage—British politics for 30 years.

Until now, the closest we have come to any scrutiny of Murdoch’s relationship with successive governments has been to ask the politicians themselves. And that has not proved fruitful. I can make the modest claim of having been the first journalist to pursue the scope of Murdoch’s influence on prime ministers from Tony Blair to David Cameron, asking questions that will, we hope, finally be answered by the judicial inquiry reluctantly set up by Cameron last week.

In 2005, after hearing from a No 10 official that Murdoch had threatened Blair with the withdrawal of support from the Sun and the Times, I put in a request under the Freedom of Information Act for details of “communications, correspondence and minutes” involving Blair, Blair’s advisers and Murdoch.

A year later, it emerged that Downing Street  had blocked the request.

In the previous months I had been told first that the investigation would be too costly, and then that I had to narrow down the time-frame in question. When I did so, to cover a one year period only, my inquiries were still blocked. A letter from a private secretary at Downing Street , Nikhil Rathil, said:

“I can confirm that the prime minister’s office holds information relevant to your request. We acknowledge that there are public interest factors in favour of disclosure of the information you have requested. However, on balance, we consider that the public interest factors in favour of non-disclosure outweigh those in favour of disclosure of the information you have requested. It is important for the effective conduct of public affairs that the prime minister is able to undertake free and frank discussions with a range of stakeholders. It is in the public interest that views are expressed as freely as possible.”

It appeared all was lost. But the following year, soon after Gordon Brown became prime minister, the government did release details of the meetings as requested. They revealed that Blair had three conversations with Murdoch in the nine days running up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But then further requests for similar details of contacts between Brown himself and Murdoch were blocked, leading to accusations of hypocrisy aimed at Brown by Nick Clegg.

Next came Cameron’s admission last week of 26 meetings with Murdoch executives in 13 months, and today’s news that in fact there was at least one further meeting between the prime minister and Brooks, during Cameron’s birthday celebrations at Chequers.

In other words, the past three prime ministers have been preoccupied with winning over Murdoch with a series of meetings which they have done their best to hide.

Yet it would be naive to expect today’s committee hearings to get to the bottom of this destructive practice, as it obsesses instead on hacking. These committee hearings hardly ever miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and my fear is that today will be an anti-climax. We shall see.