Why Elisabeth Murdoch’s husband Matthew Freud put a private plane at David Cameron’s disposal in 2008

Why James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks can no longer front the BSkyB referral negotiations

What Sean Hoare told the Met about Andy Coulson

Elisabeth Murdoch….vital asset for Newscorp

Although Rupert and Elisabeth Murdoch had been discussing Newscorp’s takeover of the latter’s Shine programme maker for months, once Andy Coulson resigned from his Downing Street job, the deal proceeded at a much faster pace. Why?

If you were an objective shareholder in Newscorp, you might well be thinking that the patriarch’s purchase of his daughter’s indie production shop was the wrong deal at the wrong time. And as a Shine employee, you’d be struggling to see the logic in it.

For starters, now Shine is no longer independent, under UK broadcasting rules it’ll be limited by the total amount of work it can reasonably expect to get from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Had she taken the money and stayed off the main Newscorp board, the problem might not have arisen; but yesterday her Dad was keen to point out that she would “join the Board with full voting rights”.

Then there’s the issue of Newscorp’s cash position at the moment, which isn’t brilliant. (If it was, Roop wouldn’t need to get his hands on the rest of the BSkyB cashflow in the first place). Newscorp was coy yesterday about whether Elisabeth really was £200M cash-richer, although I’m led to believe that she’s been paid almost entirely in shares. However, Shine still had some whopping debts of around £60M, and Newscorp confirmed that it will pay them off. That’s enough to make any shareholder’s eyes water.

Finally, there’s the sibling rivalry thing. Elisabeth and James don’t get on – a reality reflected in the fact that she has no reporting line to her brother, and will answer instead to the Group Deputy Chairman. With his son engaged in delicate Christmas lunch negotiations with David Cameron about holly, surveillance activity cover-ups, ivy and the BSkyB deal referral, you’d have thought the last thing Rupert Murdoch needed was tension in that area.

But the reality is that Elisabeth is a major asset to Newscorp given its current dire straits.

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Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, you will recall, has given Newscorp ‘more time’ to prepare its case against the Monopolies & Mergers Commission taking a dim view of Newscorp’s BSkyB takeover. That case is looking bad from every angle – whether it be Murdoch’s close relationship to the Tory Party, or the seamy phone-hacking habits of his journalists.

But Ms Murdoch makes the picture altogether better, because she does (as it happens) have enviable quality credentials as a programme maker. Under her leadership at Shine, good stuff like Masterchef, Spooks, and even an acclaimed Shakespeare documentary were churned out. And as there seems no evidence in the rumour that Andy Coulson was her technical advisor on Spooks, when it comes to quality and a squeaky-clean uninvolvement with nuisance telephone calls, Elisabeth is a valuable bit of window dressing to allow Hunt to a real asset to the future of a broadcasting combine bidding to usurp the BBC.

When it comes to the BSkyB bid’s success or failure, it seems that Newscorp has been told in no uncertain terms that James Murdoch would be well advised to take a step back into the shadows. And this is something of an exclusive for The Slog.

I was tipped off Sunday to the effect that not only did former NoW journalist Sean Hoare repeat to the Met last week that Coulson frequently asked to hear the tapes of hacked phone messages, there is now a general acceptance in Downing Street that James Murdoch’s personal closeness to Coulson might conceivably  put him in the frame as a hacking insider before too long.

So, better safe than sorry.

But that’s OK, because Elisabeth has seriously heavy hands-on experience of running things at BSkyB, and would be an eminently credible management as well as creative figure at the post-takeover company.

She moved with her first husband to England when Rupert Murdoch was running BSkyB himself following the fire-sale Newscorp rescue in 1990. The respected New Zealander Sam Chisholm was brought in to manage the day-to-day operations and expand the subscriber base, with Elisabeth Murdoch as his second-in-command and de facto right hand.

In 2001, Elisabeth fell out with Sam and left to set up Shine. But her success creatively there, and managerially at BSkyB, has – thanks to the vagaries of fate – rendered her a powerful weapon for Rupert…and a solid defence for Jeremy Hunt’s eventual decision, to let the deal go ahead whatever that might be.

However, it also transpires that Ms Murdoch herself has a secret weapon – her second husband Matthew Freud, son of the late Clement Freud. For he too is a familiar figure guaranteed to put the Prime Minister at ease.

In the Commons  register of interests for 2008, David Cameron disclosed that on 16 August, a private plane provided by Matthew Freud took his wife, Samantha, and two of their children from Farnborough to Istanbul.

David Cameron then interrupted that holiday to dine on an Adriatic yacht with…..Rupert Murdoch.

Elisabeth’s reappearance is doubly valuable given the near-certainty that another BSkyB frontperson Rebekah Brooks will probably also be getting a call quite soon from Akers of the Yard about her mobile phone activities while editor of  The Sun. Rebekah was born Wade, but she is now Brooks. Her husband Charlie Brooks knew David Cameron….at Eton.

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What only last May must have seemed like a shiny elite is increasingly beginning to look like a grubby clique. The Slog’s opinion remains that, through a combination of arrogance and stupidity, Prime Minister David Cameron is already tainted by his association with this inbred and apparently ruthless group. But there are some in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party who believe that coming events are almost certain to render their leader just as guilty as Clive Goodman, the News of the World’s original ‘lone’ Royal mobile phone hacker.