Revenge and ‘history rewritten’ as Brown has his day in The Sun

The former prime minister told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics that he was led to believe by Rupert Murdoch that the then News International chief executive would say sorry for a slew of damaging stories about his handling of Afghanistan.

But when he made the telephone call Mrs Brooks instead told him she had a taped conversation of him apologising to the furious bereaved mother of a soldier about a condolence letter he had sent her that was littered with mistakes.

Mr Brown also repeated previous denials that he had “declared war” on the Murdoch empire after it decided to switch support to the Conservatives ahead of the last general election.

He said the conversation where he was “alleged to have acted in an unbalanced way” as well as threatening Mr Murdoch “never took place”.

“I’m shocked and surprised that it should be suggested even when there is no evidence of such a conversation.”

The Inquiry was told all telephone conversations with newspaper proprietors would have gone through the Downing Street switchboard, not on mobile phones.

“I would not have known Rupert Murdoch’s phone number,” he added.

Mr Brown spoke to Mr Murdoch on November 10, 2009, over The Sun’s coverage of Afghanistan and also sent him a follow-up email later that day.

He told the Inquiry the newspaper had published a story criticising him for not bowing at the Cenotaph as well as an article about a letter he sent to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son Jamie, a Grenadier Guardsman, was killed by an explosion.

Mrs Janes had accused him of being “disrespectful” because the message began “Dear Mrs James” and appeared to contain other spelling errors and a visible correction to her son Jamie’s name.

Mr Brown has suffered with eyesight problems since a rugby accident in his youth

He said he had phoned the media mogul about the coverage but insisted there was “no reference” to the shift in The Sun’s political allegiance during the Labour party conference the previous month.

“He asked me would I phone Mrs Brooks, would I have a phone call with her where she would, he hinted, want to apologise for what had happened and I said I saw no point in phoning her,” he said.

But he eventually agreed to make the call “out of respect” for Mr Murdoch.

Mrs Brooks went on to tell him she had a tape of a conversation he had with Mrs Janes that the newspaper was planning to publish.

“I didn’t get the sense there was an apology coming from The Sun and I decided there was no point in continuing the conversation,” he added.

Mrs Brooks told the inquiry last month the tone of the conversation was “quite aggressive”.

She added: “The fact that it resulted in such an extraordinarily aggressive conversation shows that it doesn’t happen all the time. I remember it very clearly from the nature of it.”

Lord Justice Leveson told Mr Brown that he would have been “rather irritated” if he had called someone expecting an apology only to be told further negative stories were to come.

But Mr Brown insisted “when you are dealing with some of these issues you tend to be calmer”.

“I don’t think I was aggressive,” he added.

Mr Brown said the Press must be made to separate out fact from opinion and criticised the way he had been portrayed as not caring about British troops.

“I still feel to this day that huge damage was done to the war effort by the suggestion we just didn’t care about what was happening to the troops,” he said.

The Sun’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, hit back at Mr Brown’s claims about its coverage of the war, tweeting: “Fact for Gordon Brown - Sun has printed the word ‘Afghanistan’ 4,692 times since May 2010.”

He also tweeted: “Military loathed Brown because they felt he didn’t care about them. Sun reported that, but Gordon rewrites history to shoot the messenger.”

Mr Brown insisted he did not lose the support of The Sun because the newspaper had never backed him.

“The first thing The Sun did was try to ruin my first party conference by launching a huge campaign about how we were selling Britain down the river and demanding not only a European referendum but demanding I support it,” he told the inquiry.

The former PM insisted he tried to change the way Labour dealt with the media when he entered No 10 in 2007 by trying to move away from the “excessive dominance” of the Lobby system where a small group “get the benefit of early access to information”.

“We tried to move back to a system where announcements were made in Parliament,” he said.

But it was “wholly unsuccessful”, he told the inquiry.

“If you announced something to Parliament or announced it in a speech it would not be reported,” he added.

Later, Chancellor George Osborne denied attending a private meeting with the Murdochs in a Swiss ski resort months before the 2010 general election amid allegations that a deal had been done over the family’s plans to take full control of BSkyB.

The Chancellor told the inquiry he had met Rupert and James Murdoch, as well as Rebekah Brooks, in a chalet in Davos at the World Economic Forum but it had been the previous year.

It comes after newspaper reports suggesting a pact was made in January 2010 over News Corporation’s plans for BSkyB.

Asked if he had attended a “private meeting” at Davos in January 2010, he replied: “No, it’s not true.”

Mr Osborne said he and David Cameron spent the 2009 meeting “gently” trying to turn the conversation to domestic politics and the looming general election but Rupert Murdoch was more interested in international economics.

He said: “There was a meeting in 2009 in a chalet with Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks.

“As part of the Davos conference people rent hotels and chalets. It was not particularly unusual it was in a chalet.”

The lunch focused on the global financial crisis, he added.