(Another) Scandal for Hunt

Yesterday was a bad day for David Cameron and the Culture, Media and Sports Secretary, Jeremy Hunt. In December 2011 Jeremy Hunt was handed the task of deciding whether or not News Corporation should be allowed to purchase the remaining shares of BSkyB, of which they already owned 39%.  Jeremy Hunt was only handed this quasi-judicial role after it had been taken from the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, who was deemed unsuitable to perform the job by the PM.  The problem was that Cable had been caught by journalists saying he had “declared war on the Murdochs” and would not let their company, News Corp, take over the remaining shares of BSkyB. As the decision was supposed to be taken in a quasi-judicial fashion Cameron decided it would be inappropriate to allow Cable to make this decision. So the job was handed to Hunt instead, what is uncomfortable for Cameron is that a month prior to his decision to give the job to Hunt, due to Cable’s strong views, Hunt had emailed Cameron saying that blocking the bill would cause “our media sector to suffer for years” and that “I think it would be totally wrong to cave into the Mark Thompson/Channel 4/Guardian line that this represents a substantial change of control given that we all know Sky is controlled by News Corp now anyway.”

The issue here is that, if Vince Cable was inappropriate due to already strong views on the subject, why was Hunt appropriate considering he also had strong views? This is not going to help the current government’s image as one that is too close to the Murdochs.