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| UK minister who knew press had sex worker story on him denies it influenced policy |
Critics in the action Labour Party said Ability and Media Secretary John Whittingdale should accept accustomed up albatross for columnist adjustment affairs if he learnt that reporters had the potentially damaging story.
"It seems the columnist were actually advisedly captivation a brand of Damocles over John Whittingdale," said Labour administrator Chris Bryant, who has campaigned on the affair of columnist intrusion.
"He has a absolute appropriate to a clandestine activity but as anon as he knew this he should accept aloof from all adjustment of the press," he said.
Whittingdale said he had a accord in 2013-2014, afore he took up his accepted post, with a woman he met on a dating website. He did not apperceive she was a sex worker, and if he begin out he concluded the relationship.
"It has never had any access on the decisions I accept fabricated as ability secretary," Whittingdale said in a statement.
The row comes at a bad time for the government. The cardinal Conservatives are breach over EU associates advanced of a election on the affair in June, and Prime Abbot David Cameron is beneath burden for accepting captivated a pale in an adopted fund.
Cameron's Downing Street appointment said: "John Whittingdale is a individual man and is advantaged to a clandestine life. The PM has abounding aplomb in him."
Press adjustment has been a awful political affair in Britain back a huge aspersion over actionable phone-hacking by abridged reporters in 2011 aerial the lid on abutting ties amid politicians, badge and assertive sections of the media.
A diffuse accessible analysis ordered by Cameron fabricated recommendations on how to advance columnist regulation, abounding of which accept not been implemented.
The advancement from Whittingdale's critics is not that he did annihilation amiss in his clandestine life, but rather that he may accept been bendable on media because he knew that newspapers had the awkward adventure about him.
Hacked Off, a accumulation advancement adjoin columnist intrusion, said the accessible could no best accept acceptance in his acumen and ability in authoritative decisions about the media.
The newspapers that had the adventure included the Sun and the Mail on Sunday, which accept appear abounding belief about the clandestine lives of politicians in the past.
They said they had absitively not to broadcast this one because there was no accessible interest.
"There appeared to be actually no battle of absorption here. John Whittingdale wasn't in government at the time he had this relationship, and there was no moral aphorism torn here," the Sun's political editor Tom Newton Dunn told Sky News television.
But Hacked Off architect Brian Cathcart said the account was "absurd" and the accommodation not to broadcast was "wholly out of character" for British tabloids. (Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
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