News addicts may recall Kay Burley’s hectoring questioning of Chris Bryant over phone hacking, culminating in the Rhondda MP describing the Sky News presenter as “a bit dim”.
“Do you have evidence that [phone hacking is] endemic … pretty strong claim if you don’t”
And while Burley’s detractors may delight in Bryant’s demands for an apology during an interview yesterday, it remains possible these exchanges could have significance beyond the mere amusement of the Westminster village.
Indeed, Ms Burley might have more reason to play down the scandal than Murdoch’s 39% share in Sky News owners BSkyB. Below is a picture of her at a New York literati lunch in 2009, arm-in-arm with her close friend, former Labour advisor Katherine Raymond, who is thanked in the acknowledgements to Burley’s novel First Ladies:
“My heartfelt and continuing thanks to … Kath Hinton who taught me the healing qualities of champagne and shopping, especially together.”
Kath may be familiar to readers of the Telegraph as writing under her married name, Kath Hinton. If that surname sounds familiar, it should. She is married to Murdoch lieutenant Les Hinton, who was charged with the first internal hacking inquiry — and is now in a whole lot of trouble:
But attention is now turning to Hinton, 67, who headed up News International during Brooks’s and Coulson’s editorships and now runs the New York-based Dow Jones & Co., another arm of Murdoch’s sprawling News Corp . Murdoch’s long-time lieutenant, some News Corp watchers say, could end up being a high-profile casualty in the scandal. ”The person that I think is most of a problem for Murdoch is Les Hinton,” Peter Burden, author of a 2008 book about the News of the World, told Reuters.
While Sky News’ coverage of the crisis has been otherwise excellent, could Burley’s aggression to Bryant be explained by her closeness to Mrs Les Hinton?
