James Murdoch faces being quizzed by the police over claims that he tried to cover up phone hacking by authorising ‘hush money’ payments to victims.

Scotland Yard detectives want to talk to him over the alleged cover-up of the hacking scandal. No date has been set for him to be interviewed. 

But the chairman of News International will face rigorous questioning from MPs today over why he paid huge sums to celebrities whose voicemails were listened to by the News of the World, one of its papers.




The Commons Culture Committee will force him to defend himself against the charge he helped engineer a cover-up and silence victims of phone hacking – which could see him accused of perverting the course of justice.

Labour committee member Tom Watson, who has campaigned against hacking, said: ‘I think the focus will very swiftly move on to James Murdoch now and what he knew and what he was involved in.’


He will testify, together with his father Rupert Murdoch, to the Culture Committee from 2.30pm this afternoon.


Training: Rupert Murdoch has received media coaching ahead of today's interview in order to fend off questions and avoid damaging his company even further

The 80-year-old tycoon has been receiving media training in order to fend off questions and avoid damaging his company even further.

John Whittingdale, Tory chairman of the committee, has said it will be ‘firm’ but ‘not a lynch mob’. However Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff predicted he would lose his temper.

He said: ‘He will handle it very poorly. This is something that Rupert doesn’t know how to do, has never done, has resisted doing and frankly can’t do.

‘Rupert is – on top of everything else – an incredibly shy man and he is also a very inarticulate man. I don’t think he is going to know what to do with the fact that he will be confronted here.

‘It is very likely he will get angry. He will say things that people should not say in public.

‘I know they are drilling him and rehearsing him over and over and over and over again and they are saying to him: “Do not say anything, just answer the questions in as few words as possible.”  

‘Whether he absorbs that lesson or not, I can’t imagine that he will or that he has.’

Pressure for his son James to quit the company intensified last night when a poll found that 65 cent of voters think he should resign.

The ComRes poll for ITV News also found that 57 per cent believe that his father Rupert Murdoch should be disqualified by law from being a company director.