FORMER British prime minister Gordon Brown has remained strategically silent about claims that Rupert Murdoch tried to influence Labour MPs and peers to cool investigations of phone hacking by the News of the World.

Mr Brown, who feared he was a victim of the phone interception and wrote to Scotland Yard last year asking for information about his numbers, has refused to comment on the claim, reported in London's Observer, but has not denied it.

According to a former Labour minister who asked to remain anonymous, the chairman of News Corporation used a third party to urge Mr Brown to help him defuse the political pressure over the scandal that he believed to be harming his media company.

The newspaper reported that the contact was made before May last year when Mr Brown left Downing Street after the general election.

''What I know is that Murdoch got in touch with a good friend, who then got in touch with Brown. The intention was to get him to cool things down. That is what I was told,'' the minister said.