Downing Street today insisted any Christmas meeting between David Cameron and James Murdoch would have no impact on the government's handling of News Corp's bid to take full control of BSkyB.
The prime minister's spokesman said Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, would decide "alone" whether to refer to the Competition Commission News Corp's bid to buy the 61% of BSkyB it does not own.
Downing Street, which was shaken on Friday by Andy Coulson's resignation, faces renewed questions about its links with News Corp after the Independent disclosed today that James Murdoch met the prime minister for dinner over Christmas at the Oxfordshire home of the News International chief executive, Rebekah Brooks. The dinner with Murdoch, the Europe and Asia chairman of News Corp, took place days after Cameron stripped Vince Cable of his powers over media takeovers and handed them to Hunt.
The Guardian revealed last week that Cameron had been a guest of Brooks over the Christmas period. A Downing Street source denied last week that the meeting had taken place on Christmas Day, but declined to confirm or deny whether the prime minister had met Brooks over the Christmas period.
Today the prime minister's spokesman declined to confirm whether Cameron had met James Murdoch or whether he would speak to his father, Rupert, the News Corp chairman and chief executive, at the Davos World Economic Forum this weekend. The spokesman said: "Clearly, the prime minister does meet with people from the media from time to time. That is not at all unusual for prime ministers."
Downing Street said Hunt would abide by the law, which says he has to decide on his own, in a quasi-judicial capacity and without reference to other ministers, whether to refer the BSkyB bid. It is understood that Ofcom has recommended that the bid should be referred.
The Downing Street spokesman said: "On the bid process ... the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt is considering the report and he makes the decision in a quasi-judicial role. It is his decision alone."
Asked how any meeting with James Murdoch might affect the decision, the spokesman added: "It would have no bearing on that decision, which is a decision taken by Jeremy Hunt and Jeremy Hunt alone."
Downing Street faced pressure on another front after Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat climate change secretary, accused the Metropolitan police of failing to investigate phone-hacking allegations properly. Coulson resigned as the Downing Street director of communications on Friday after he said the renewed allegations about phone hacking during his time as editor of the News of the World were making his job in No 10 impossible.
Coulson resigned as News of the World editor in 2007 after the jailing of the paper's former royal editor and a private investigator over illegal phone hacking. Coulson has always denied knowledge of wrongdoing and blamed a "rogue reporter".
Huhne cast doubt on that defence and accused the Met of reacting to his calls for a full inquiry last year by "scurrying back to Scotland Yard" and dismissing the idea in an afternoon. "We know the police were not keen on the subject, because when I called for a very clear review of this, the police scurried back into Scotland Yard, spent less than a day reviewing it, and popped out in time for the six o'clock news to say they had discovered no further evidence," he told BBC1's The Politics Show on Sunday.
Asked about Huhne's comments, the prime minister's spokesman said today: "The position at the present time is that the Crown Prosecution Service are carrying out an assessment of the information that is held by the Metropolitan police. That process is under way and it is up to the CPS to make a decision on their assessment. The prime minister's position is that if there are allegations of illegal behaviour, then those allegations need to be taken very seriously, but in all cases it is a matter for the police and the CPS."
The spokesman said any complaints about the Met's handling of allegations should be made to the force's commissioner and to the Metropolitan Police Authority.
