Tom A. Watson

I have to say obviously it is not illegal for people to go to dinner and to socialise and take hospitality off members of the media organisations, but it was the scale and the timing and the frequency of contact that I thought was shocking.

And obviously, with hindsight now, now knowing what went on in the company, it would have been absolutely appropriate back then for us to have the chief executive of the company, most senior person in the United Kingdom, come and answer for the policy they were pursuing. And we ducked that, and frankly that's a failure of Parliament.

You know, fate intervened. I went on to the DCMS committee to have a quieter life before the phone hacking scandal broke, and then ended up investigating the company that had libelled me previously when I was a minister.

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