Media mogul writes to the Guardian to deny asking No 10 to do his bidding as Sky takeover attempt awaits government approval

Rupert Murdoch has written to the Guardian to deny he ever claimed that Downing Street did his bidding, as an attempt by his US film and television group to acquire Sky is due to be formally notified to ministers.

The media mogul, who is chairman of 21st Century Fox, wrote: “I have made it a principle all my life never to ask for anything from any prime minister.”



In a rare move to write directly to a newspaper, Murdoch disputed a quote attributed to him in the Guardian and elsewhere in which he reportedly said: “When I go into Downing Street, they do what I say; when I go to Brussels, they take no notice.”



Rupert Murdoch: ‘I have never asked for anything from any prime minister’ | Letter Read more

In his response, Murdoch added: “There is much fake news published about me, but let me make clear that I have never uttered those words.”



The quote was originally reported in the Evening Standard by Anthony Hilton, who wrote in February: “I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union. ‘That’s easy,’ he replied. ‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’”



When asked by the Guardian, Hilton said: “I stand by my story.” He said Murdoch made the remarks in a conversation in the early 1980s, when Hilton was city editor of the Times. Hilton, now a columnist for the Evening Standard, has referred to the anecdote several times over the years without either a denial or a complaint from his former boss, until now.

The denial from Murdoch comes at a highly sensitive moment for his business interests, with Fox’s proposed £11.2bn takeover of the 61% of Sky he does not already own expected to be notified to the UK government for approval.

The culture secretary, Karen Bradley, has 10 working days from being notified to tell Ofcom whether a public interest investigation into the proposed takeover should be launched.

The former Labour leader Ed Miliband and former business secretary Vince Cable have called for the takeover to be blocked and referred to the regulator.

A previous attempt by a Murdoch company to acquire the remaining part of Sky was withdrawn in the summer of 2011 at the height of the phone-hacking scandal, which was exposed by the Guardian and led to the closure of the News of the World.

However, Fox, the company bidding on this occasion, does not own the newspapers; they are published by a separate business, News Corporation. The newspapers were hived off in the wake of the hacking scandal.

During the Leveson inquiry, Murdoch made a similar statement about his political influence, saying “I’ve never asked a prime minister for anything in my life” during a day of testimony in April 2012.

However, that was contradicted by John Major, the former Conservative prime minister, who told the inquiry shortly after Murdoch gave evidence that while the media mogul “never asked for anything directly from me … he was not averse to pressing for policy changes”.



In particular, Major described one meeting in the run-up to the 1997 general election in which Murdoch “made it clear that he disliked my European policies, which he wished me to change. If not, his papers could not and would not support the Conservative government. So far as I recall he made no mention of editorial independence but referred to all his papers as ‘we’.”

Major added: “Both Mr Murdoch and I kept our word. I made no change in policy and Mr Murdoch’s titles did indeed oppose the Conservative party. It came as no surprise to me when soon after our meeting the Sun newspaper announced its support for Labour.”



The ultimatum, Major said, was delivered at a private meeting three months before that election, which resulted in the Tories losing heavily to Labour.

Harold Evans, the former editor of the Times, has also said that a private meeting between Murdoch and the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher over lunch at Chequers, the official country residence, led to a “coup that transformed the relationship between British politics and journalism”.

Evans suggested that a deal was brokered at that meeting in which Murdoch offered his papers’ support to Thatcher in return for approval for his purchase of the Times and Sunday Times in 1981.

Hilton, while working at the Times, saw a lot of the paper’s proprietor, with dinner in Murdoch’s Green Park flat and conversations in his office in Gray’s Inn Road. The conversations were between owner and employee, not part of a formal interview, so there is unlikely to have been any verbatim note or witnesses.

Hilton used the comment in his February column as part of a wider discussion about the nature of the relationship between corporate power and government. That column concludes with an observation about Murdoch’s comments: “That was some years ago but things have not changed that much.”