World Press Network

In his book Where Power Lies, former Downing Street aide Lance Price said Mr Brown was ‘obsessed’ with trying to win Mr Murdoch’s support and devised tax policies to appeal to him.

Mr Blair’s predecessor as Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, was convinced The Sun’s hostility cost him the 1992 election. He persuaded Mr Blair to take The Sun and its sister paper seriously.

Within months of Mr Blair’s election as leader, Mr Murdoch was telling his editors that he was ‘someone you could imagine people voting for’. But there was deep unease among Labour MPs that Mr Murdoch’s pro-American, pro-Israeli and pro-military intervention stance on the war on terrorism was reflected in Downing Street.

Mr Blair regularly spoke to Mr Murdoch at crucial points in his premiership, including on the eve of the Iraq war and the day after the publication of the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly.

Cherie Blair even revealed news of her fourth pregnancy – at the age of 45 – to Mrs Brooks, which led to the Sun running a front-page story.

Yates's confession prompts calls for him to step down

One of Scotland Yard's top officers was urged to resign yesterday after admitting he had appallingly mishandled a review of the initial bungled investigation into phone hacking.

Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who reviewed the 2007 investigation in the space of a few hours two years ago and found it to be satisfactory, issued a grovelling public apology about his choice to resist calls to reopen the original investigation. He described it as a "pretty crap" decision, which he now "deeply regretted".

Conceding that the phone-hacking scandal had left the Metropolitan Police's reputation "very damaged", Mr Yates seemed to admit he had failed to perform his duties properly. He appeared to indicate that he had not inspected the 11,000 pages of notes seized from the News of the World's (NOTW) private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, which the Yard admitted last week contains evidence that he targeted almost 4,000 people, before making his decision.

Mr Yates told a Sunday newspaper: "I didn't do a review. Had I known then what I know now – all bets are off. In hindsight there is a shed load of stuff in there I wish I'd known." He added: "I'm not going to go down and look at bin bags [containing the evidence]," but he did say that he had asked 10 officers to input the information in the notebooks into a computer system.

Chris Bryant MP, a persistent critic of Mr Yates's performance, said: "It is inconceivable that Yates could remain. He has told the Home Affairs Select Committee that there were very few victims, that they had all been contacted, that they had got in touch with all of the mobile-phone providers and none of these things is true. I don't see how anybody can have confidence in how he does his job."

The original investigation was led in 2006 by Andy Hayman, after it surfaced that the NOTW had hacked the phones of royal aides. Mr Hayman, who has since joined News International as a columnist for The Times, will appear before the Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday alongside his former deputy, Peter Clarke, to explain the failure of the first investigation.

Murdoch faces new obstacle to Sky takeover

Jeremy Hunt's reasons for asking for new advice from the media regulator, Ofcom, and from the competition watchdog, the Office of Fair Trading - in letters he plans to send them later today - are pretty embarrassing for Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation.

The culture secretary wants to know whether the disclosure that News Corp's News of the World business was out of control for many years is reason to doubt that undertakings given by News Corp to protect the independence and financial strength of Sky News are as credible and sustainable as he would like.

And Mr Hunt wants guidance on the implications for plurality or choice in the media industry of the possibility that News Corp might eventually be deemed by Ofcom as not fit and proper to own all of BSkyB.

For Mr Hunt to suggest that News Corp might not be a fit-and-proper owner of anything is a pretty big shift from the prevailing - and some would say fawning - attitudes towards Mr Murdoch we've witnessed from British governments in recent years.

Finally, Mr Hunt makes the less contentious point that the closure of the News of the World changes plurality in the media universe: that's a definitional point, in that there is, as of today, one less news voice.

Murdoch: the network defeats the hierarchy


Rupert Murdoch has dispensed power, terrorized politicians and shaped politics

The Murdoch empire fractured, a Conservative prime minister attracting bets on his resignation, the Metropolitan Police on the edge of yet another existential crisis and the political establishment in disarray.

A network of subversives would have counted that a spectacular result to achieve in a decade, let alone in a single week. But it was not subversives that achieved it - the wounds are self-inflicted.

As the News of the World scandal gathered momentum it became clear, by midnight on Thursday, that this was not just the latest of a series of institutional crises - the banks, MPs expenses - but the biggest. For this one goes to the heart of the way this country has been run, under both parties, for decades.