E-Mail Shows Murdoch Bid Maneuvering

The long-running judicial inquiry into the cloistered world of Britain’s media barons and powerful politicians produced a new and potentially damaging insight into the internal maneuvering within Prime Minister David Cameron’s government as it considered Rupert Murdoch’s $12 billion bid last year to take control of the country’s most powerful and lucrative commercial television network.

The Murdoch bid for British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, one of the most ambitious in his 60-year career, was ultimately abandoned as public and political outrage mounted over the pattern of phone hacking and other wrongdoing at the two tabloids that anchored the Murdoch media empire in Britain. But an e-mail introduced as evidence at the inquiry into the scandal showed more clearly than ever how strongly the currents favoring the BSkyB takeover were running within the Conservatives who dominate Mr. Cameron’s coalition government before the scandal erupted. The e-mail was sent to Cameron by Jeremy Hunt, the cabinet minister who was eventually given responsibility for deciding whether to approve the takeover bid, only weeks before Cameron handed power over the bid to him, under terms that required Mr. Hunt to take an impartial, “quasi-judicial” approach to the takeover. Hunt was given the task in January 2011 after Mr. Cameron took it away from another cabinet minister, Vince Cable, who had been secretly recorded by undercover newspaper reporters saying that he had “declared war” against Murdoch over the bid.