MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Parliament to question PM Cameron on links with the Murdoch empire

Cameron had to cut short his visit to Africa

British PM David Cameron cut short a trip to Africa and will fly home on Tuesday to defend himself from a scandal that has battered Rupert Murdoch's media empire, forced British police chiefs to resign and raised doubts about the prime minister's judgment.

As the head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit followed Britain's top policeman in quitting on Monday to fight corruption allegations, Cameron curtailed an already much abbreviated tour of Africa in order to attend an emergency debate on Wednesday in parliament, which delayed its recess.

Though he faces no challenge yet to his leadership, some of his Conservative supporters began to consider the possibility, albeit remote, that Cameron might face pressure to go himself.

Cameron will be in Nigeria during a showdown in a parliamentary committee room on Tuesday when Murdoch himself, along with his son James and former top executive Rebekah Brooks, will face questions from lawmakers on what they knew of payments by tabloid journalists to officers in the Metropolitan Police and of the hacking of voicemails of possibly thousands of people.

The Murdochs' management of their businesses was also being questioned by other investors. News Corp shares were 4.5% down in New York. That was 17% lower than when news broke on July 4 that British police were investigating whether journalists in 2002 had hacked voicemail for a missing teenager who was later found murdered.

That has reignited a five-year-old scandal which once had seemed limited to spying on the rich, famous and powerful. Ten journalists have been arrested and released on bail.

In yet another twist to the story, police were quoted as saying that former News of the World journalist who blew the whistle on illegal phone-hacking had been found dead.

The arrest on Sunday of the 43-year-old Brooks, a personal friend of Cameron and former editor of the News of the World, and the resignation of Metropolitan Police commissioner Paul Stephenson, left Cameron looking exposed in defending his own conduct in an affair that has triggered public outrage at cosy relations among the elites of the press, politics and police.

Starting his visit to South Africa on Monday, Cameron was again forced to defend his appointment of Andy Coulson as his spokesman, just months after Coulson resigned as editor of the News of the World following the jailing in 2007 of one of his reporters for hacking the phones of aides to Prince William.

Labour opposition leader Ed Miliband, whose party has long competed with the Conservatives for Murdoch's favour, stopped short of suggesting Cameron should quit -- he said he wanted details, among other things, of discussions he may have had with US-based News Corp about its bid for broadcaster BSkyB finally dropped amid political hostility last week.

“He's got to come clean,” said Miliband.

Stephenson had put Cameron on the spot in unusually barbed remarks in his resignation speech. The police chief noted that while he was quitting over the appointment of Coulson's former deputy Neil Wallis as a consultant to London's police force, Cameron did not follow suit over his hiring of Coulson himself.

Moreover, Stephenson said, Wallis was a less tainted figure than Coulson: “Unlike Mr. Coulson, Mr. Wallis had not resigned from News of the World or, to the best of my knowledge, been in any way associated with the original phone-hacking investigation,” the outgoing commissioner said.

The officer responsible for a decision in 2009 that there was insufficient evidence to reopen inquires was savaged by a parliamentary committee last week. When told on Monday he was to be suspended, counter-terrorism Chief John Yates chose to resign. He vowed to clear his name of corruption allegations.