TOP BRITISH LAWMAKERS DEPICT MURDOCH’S POWER

Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, who heads the Liberal Democrat party, has maintained that he was warned that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in the U.K. would attack him and his party if he did not back Murdoch’s bid to take over full control of BSkyB, the country’s biggest satellite TV service. Clegg’s remarks came in testimony before the Leveson inquiry into journalistic ethics in the U.K., which has particularly focused on the methods of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, and follows similar testimony by two former prime ministers, Gordon Brown and John Major, about how Murdoch attempted to influence government policy at the highest level. The uproar over News Corp’s methods now threaten the current coalition of the British Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties as Clegg ordered Liberal MPs to abstain from a vote in Parliament over whether Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt should face an official inquiry to determine whether Hunt broke the Ministerial Code in his testimony to Parliament over his role in the BSkyB deal and whether he should be accountable for the actions of his special adviser, Adam Smith, who resigned last month after it was revealed that he had exchanged hundreds of online messages with a News Corp lobbyist.