George Osborne is coming under pressure to explain the secrecy surrounding his meetings with top media bosses after it emerged that the details of his talks with Rupert Murdoch and others were kept out of Treasury records.

Osborne has met the News Corp mogul three times in the past two years. He also held talks with Telegraph executives, senior BBC bosses, and the Independent and London Evening Standard proprietor. All the meetings were held off the record, the Treasury has admitted.

“The chancellor must now come clean and explain what he has been keeping from the British public behind closed doors at the Treasury,” Maria Eagle, the shadow culture secretary, said.

Eagle, who was moved to her current position during Jeremy Corbyn’s reshuffle this month, said the chancellor had serious questions to answer.

She said: “In the year that the BBC charter is being reviewed and with the government drawing up plans to privatise Channel 4, the public will rightly want to know why Osborne has had so many off-the-record meetings with media leaders, and what exactly was discussed in them.”

Treasury records show that Osborne held two ministerial meetings with Murdoch in June 2015 and then another in September that year.

According to Cabinet Office guidance, ministerial meetings should be minuted if anything is discussed that either leads to a policy decision, requires any sort of follow-up action, or where any view is expressed that could be in any way useful to someone not present.



None of the meetings met any of those criteria, the Treasury said. Neither did talks with the BBC director general, Lord Hall, and his director of strategy, James Purnell, in May 2014, nor with the Telegraph Media Group chairman, Aidan Barclay, in July of that year, they said.

The same applied to a February 2015 meeting with Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Standard and Independent titles, others with Hall in June and July that year and talks with the Telegraph Media Group chief executive, Murdoch MacLennan, in September 2015, the Treasury said.

Officials did minute a meeting with the BBC director general in September 2015. The Treasury refused to release those records. To do so would not be in the public interest, it said.

The chancellor also met senior journalists from various organisations, including the Guardian editor, Katharine Viner, and the Sun editor, David Dinsmore.

The campaign group Transparency International UK called on the chancellor to open up about his links to media executives.

“At present, citizens have little opportunity to understand who is lobbying who, on what issues and at what cost. At the same time, 59% of the public also believe that the UK government works for a few big entities acting in their own interest,” its senior research officer, Steve Goodrich, said.

“Greater transparency on lobbying could help build confidence that the government is working in the interests of citizens, rather than lobbyists. This is why the government must improve the quality and timeliness of information it publishes about ministers’ meetings with external organisations, and introduce a statutory register of lobbyists that is fit for purpose.”

Osborne, like other ministers, accepted the hospitality of a series of media executives, including senior News Corp bosses. It is understood that minutes are not expected to be taken during these encounters.

