Last week Gordon and a tiny number of loyalists took umbrage in this statement from the Cabinet Office:

“We confirm there is a record of only one call between Mr. Brown and Rupert Murdoch in the year to March 2010, on 10th of November 2009″.

They claimed this was complete vindication and proof that Gordon did not lie about the “declaration of war” phone call. However if that statement is compared to what was said at the time by Brown’s official civil service Prime Minister’s Spokesman, that vindication looks very shaky. The Guardian reported the following briefing to the Lobby on 12 November 2009, the day news of the official Murdoch/Brown call on November 10 had leaked:

“‘He [Brown] has regular communications with Rupert Murdoch, as you would imagine, and he has the most enormous personal regard for Rupert Murdoch,’ the prime minister’s official spokesman said. ‘I am not going to give any further information about the conversation. I am commenting as much as I think I can about a personal conversation. There is nothing unusual in the prime minister talking to Rupert Murdoch.‘”

So there was contemporaneous confirmation from a civil service source that there were regular conversations between Murdoch and Brown prior to November 2009. In the light of the latest Cabinet Office statement saying that they have only have a record of one conversation, any such regular calls can only have been unrecorded and unmonitored. Add this to Peter Mandelson’s sworn statement that the “war” conversation took place and it is clear to all but Brown’s bunker buddies that last week’s statement in no way clears the Prime Mentalist…