The prime minister met with Rupert Murdoch five times over a 12-month period, it was revealed in The Observer this weekend.
Official records show the former News Corp boss personally met government representatives 12 times between October 2022 and September 2023, including five meetings with Rishi Sunak.
News Corp owns the Times and the Sun newspapers in the UK.
Meetings with the media mogul include a dinner in December 2022 and a meeting the following day with Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp, Rebekah Brooks, the CEO of News UK, the Times editor Tony Gallagher, former Sunday Times editor Emma Tucker and Sun editor Victoria Newton to “discuss the PM’s priorities”.
The two men then met again in May 2023 for a “politician discussion” and again in June for the Times CEO summit and subsequent party, and in September last year for a “social meeting”.
Previous Hacked Off analysis found that Rupert Murdoch had met ministers five times in 2018 and 2019 and had met Boris Johnson three times during that period.
Campaigner Hugh Grant has called for an end to “secretive” meetings between media barons and the government, with no minutes from the discussions recorded.
“Britain deserves politicians who will govern with integrity and in the interests of the British people, not take their lines from Murdoch and other unelected newspaper owners in secretive meetings,” he said.
“This government’s subservience to the press is pathetic and a betrayal of the public. We need to clean up our politics, starting with the undignified and undemocratic mutual back-scratching between politicians and the press which has gone on for the last nine years.”
Press meetings with Murdoch-owned publications accounted for 40 per cent of the total meetings with media representatives, while the Telegraph accounted for 19 per cent.
Meetings between the government and the Guardian accounted for 3 per cent of the total.
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