Hacking scandal: Tony Blair opens up on media battle

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair says he made a strategic decision not to take on the power of the media during his time in office.

Testifying at a press ethics inquiry last night (NZT), Blair said he feared the battle would be so immense that it would prevent his Labour government from getting anything else done.

The 59-year-old, PM between 1997 and 2007, was giving evidence at the Leveson inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press as it turned its radar on the links between politicians and the media.

Blair, who is godfather to one of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's children and received the backing of the influential Sun tabloid, said it was inevitable that top politicians and senior media executives would have a close interaction, but it was important to stop the relationship from becoming unhealthy.

He said the biggest problem in the press was the blurred lines between news and comment in some papers, whereby reporting stopped being straightforward journalism and became an "instrument of political power".

"You certainly do fear the power being directed at you. I took a strategic decision - this was not an issue that I was going to take on.

"The way priority comes into this is as follows: I was trying to do a lot of things I believed in for the country, for the Labour Party and so on."

Blair said that if he had decided to take on the media and change the law in relation to them, "my view is you would have had to have cleared the decks. This would have been an absolute major confrontation".

"The price you would pay for that would actually push out a lot of the things I cared more about."

Blair said the two most powerful newspapers were the Sun and the right-leaning Daily Mail.

If you fell out with the Daily Mail, you were subjected to an "all-out attack", he said, adding that his family and those close to him had been subjected to such treatment.

Meanwhile, detectives investigating illegal news-gathering techniques at Murdoch's newspaper group have been asked to investigate whether it tried to blackmail politicians.

The alleged plot centres on News International's apparent efforts to warn off MPs on a parliamentary committee from disproving its discredited defence that phone hacking was the work of a single "rogue reporter".

According to the former senior News of the World journalist Neville Thurlbeck, News International ordered the Sunday paper's reporters to scour the private lives of MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport committee in 2009.

At the time, Murdoch's company was mounting what it now admits was a mistakenly "aggressive" response to claims the interception of voicemail messages was rife at its headquarters in Wapping, east London.

On the advice of the parliamentary authorities, Labour MP Tom Watson has now asked the Metropolitan Police to investigate the allegation.

Thurlbeck said reporters were told by those in "deepcarpetland" to obtain evidence of affairs or gay relationships.

The aim, he claimed, was to "find as much embarrassing sleaze on as many members as possible in order to blackmail them into backing off from its highly forensic inquiry into phone hacking".

- AAP, INDEPENDENT