LONDON: British Prime Minister David Cameron came under fire yesterday both in parliament and from a senior judge after a court convicted his ex-media chief for being part of a phone-hacking conspiracy.
Opposition lawmakers demanded Cameron explain why he had ignored warnings in hiring Andy Coulson, while the judge who presided over the phone-hacking trial criticised him for commenting publicly on the case before the jury had delivered all its verdicts.
Coulson, who ran Cameron’s media operations from 2007-2011, faces a jail term after the jury at London’s Old Bailey court found him guilty on Tuesday of the phone-hacking charges.
The conviction for offences committed when Coulson was still a newspaper editor forced the prime minister to make an abject apology on Tuesday for hiring him in the first place, even though the jury was still considering verdicts on two other charges.
With just under a year to go before a national election the opposition Labour party is trying to use the case to argue that Cameron, the leader of the ruling Conservative party, lacks good judgment and doesn’t listen to advice from others.
It has criticised Cameron for hiring and retaining Coulson, even though he had already resigned from the News of the World tabloid when two of its employees were jailed in the scandal. Their activity involved the hacking of voicemails left on the phones of celebrities, politicians and crime victims, in the hunt for exclusive stories.
Labour contend that Cameron wanted Coulson in order to curry favour with media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and his British media outlets, which included the now defunct News of the World.
Reuters
