A prominent government minister has been accused of unseemly haste in co-opting the Leveson report into press standards to protect their own interests before the ink on the weighty tome has even dried.
David Cameron’s communications chief, Craig Oliver, is reported to have warned The Telegraph that Culture Secretary Maria Miller, is ‘looking at Leveson’ – a not so subtle hint that the full weight of the report will be used in a bid to dodge questions about her suspicious expense claims.
Those claims took a fresh twist today when it emerged that Miller had rented a home from a significant Conservative donor in an off the record deal that wasn’t declared to Whitehall officials.
Oliver denies that the statement should be construed as a threat or a warning but just yesterday one of Miller’s advisers made a similar statement, revealing that she intended to ‘flag up’ her bosses role in implementing Leveson.
Opposition politicians have pounced on the news, with Labour MP Simon Danczuk saying it calls into question the ‘professionalism’ of government advisers. He said: “If Craig Oliver threatened The Telegraph without David Cameron’s authority, that looks like an open-and-shut breach of the special advisers’ code. And the same applies to Maria Miller and her special adviser Joanna Hindley. If these allegations are true then one of them has broken the rules.”
Calls have already been made for Miller to stand down from her role of implementing the report with Guardian columnist Roy Greenslade stating: “I think Miller’s aides – and Miller – have questions to answer. The mention of Leveson, and the call to The Telegraph’s ‘head of public affairs’, were sinister moves that, on the face of it, amounted to pressure to prevent publication."