2012 Countdown wrote:Phone hacking
Tea with Tony and dinner with Cherie – how the Murdochs wined and dined the Blairs
As David Cameron and Gordon Brown turn on their former News International ally over the phone-hacking scandal, Tony Blair's reluctance to join the condemnation is raising questions
Jamie Doward
The Observer, Sunday 24 July 2011
The speed of Wendi Deng Murdoch's right hook, to stop a protester during her husband Rupert Murdoch's testimony to MPs, caused a stir around the world. Two particularly admiring onlookers of the must-see TV moment are likely to have been the Murdochs' increasingly close friends, Tony and Cherie Blair.
Blair's reluctance to speak out against Murdoch over the phone-hacking affair will undoubtedly bolster accusations that he has been compromised by his close ties with the media tycoon and his wife...
John Simkin, at The Education Forum, had this 4 years ago.
In the run-up to the 1972 election, Murdoch's paper The Australian was a keen Whitlam supporter, donating some $75,000 in free advertising. By 1975, with Peer de Silva, John Denley Walker and Milton Wonus CIA station chiefs, Murdoch had turned savagely against the Labor government, to the extent there were demonstrations outside The Australian's Sydney offices. Murdoch's role was part of a longer-term CIA operation to destroy Labor's powerful leftwing and install Bob Hawke and his CIA-affiliated cronies in the NSW Right faction, who hosted Bernie Houghton and the merry band called Nugan Hand. Shackley and Walker particularly despised Whitlam who had tolerated the left and believed in Australia's sovereignty!
Murdoch did the same in Britain switching his support from the Conservative Party to the Labour Party in 1997. As we now know, the Labour Party followed a right-wing agenda after they came to power. A senior Blair aide, Lance Price, reported in his memoirs that Blair always consulted with Murdoch before announcing any major policy decision. Blair is rumoured to have been recruited by MI5 in the 1970s to spy on CND activists in the Labour Party. He also took CIA funded trips to the United States in the 1980s. Gordon Brown also went on those trips so don't expect any change since he became prime minister.
Rupert Murdoch and Ted Shackley - The Education Forum
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