With the Leveson Inquiry into phone-hacking and press standards due to get underway tomorrow – fresh questions have been raised about former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s closeness to News Corp and Rupert Murdoch.
Vogue magazine has published a profile of Murdoch’s wife Wendy Deng in which she reveals that Blair is godfather to one of Murdoch’s young children and was present at the baptism on the banks of the river Jordan last year.
The Telegraph notes that Deng said in her interview with Vogue that Murdoch views Blair as one of his closest friends.
This a very different picture to one that emerged in Blair’s political memoirs published last year, which said very little about Murdoch – and made no reference to the many meetings the pair are known to have had at Number Ten during Blair’s decade in office.
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In it Blair wrote: “I thought Rupert an enigma, and the more I knew of him, the more I thought it so.
‘In the end – and I’m aware of the shrieks of disbelief as I write this – I came to have a grudging respect and even liking for him.”
The first preliminary Leveson Inquiry hearings get under way at 10.30am tomorrow and will discuss which organisations and individuals can have “core participant” status.
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