David Cameron concedes error in hiring aide linked to hacking

Prime Minister David Cameron told a special session of Parliament on Wednesday that he regretted hiring a onetime editor of the News of the World as his chief communications deputy and that he would make a “profound apology” if his former aide is shown to have lied about his role in Britain’s growing phone-hacking scandal.

The hiring of Andy Coulson has become a major political test and source of discomfort for Cameron, who brought the erstwhile tabloid editor into the heart of his operations at No. 10 Downing St. after taking office as prime minister in May of last year.

Opposition lawmakers have been hammering with some success at Cameron’s judgment in employing a man who was forced to quit as the News of the World’s editor in 2007, when one of his reporters went to jail for hacking into the cellphones of aides to the royal family. Coulson, who resigned as Cameron’s aide in January, was arrested last week by police in a renewed probe into hacking at the now-defunct tabloid.

Cameron said Wednesday that he had hired Coulson after receiving assurances from him of his innocence. But for the first time, the British leader also said he would not have taken on Coulson if he had known then what he knows now about how pervasive illegal news-gathering tactics apparently were at the News of the World.

“If it turns out I’ve been lied to, that would be a moment for a profound apology, and in that event, I can tell you, I will not fall short,” Cameron said in a noisy session at the House of Commons. “With 20/20 hindsight and all that has followed, I would not have offered [Coulson] the job … but you don’t make decisions in hindsight. You make them in the present.”

Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition Labor Party, scoffed at those remarks and urged Cameron to apologize now for his “catastrophic error of judgment.”

“It’s not about hindsight.... It’s about all the information and warnings that the prime minister ignored,” Miliband said, referring to reservations expressed about Coulson to Cameron by other senior politicians, including his own deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, who sat stony-faced during the exchange in Parliament.

Cameron’s decision to hire Coulson has highlighted the close ties between government officials and journalists from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire in Britain.

Records released by Cameron’s office show that he has met executives from News International, the British division of Murdoch’s News Corp., nearly twice a month on average since becoming premier, far more often than with representatives of any other news organization.

Murdoch, in London since July 10 to deal personally with the scandal engulfing his global media empire, left Britain on Wednesday, one day after he and his son James appeared before a parliamentary committee to answer questions about the hacking allegations.

During the hearing, it emerged that News Corp. has been paying the legal expenses of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator suspected of hacking into the cellphones of potentially thousands of people, including a 13-year-old girl who was kidnapped and killed in 2002.

On Wednesday, News Corp. said it would no longer pay those fees, after Murdoch agreed with lawmakers that the arrangement was distasteful and should be ended.

But the company received more bad news with the release of a scathing report by Parliament’s committee on home affairs, which concluded that News International had willfully obstructed Scotland Yard’s original inquiry into wrongdoing at the News of the World in 2005 and 2006, when Coulson was the tabloid’s editor.

The report also blamed the police for conducting a halfhearted investigation and failing to examine a mound of evidence seized from Mulcaire that suggested phone hacking was widely practiced at the paper.

Scotland Yard has been accused of going easy on the News of the World in order to preserve its relationship with the paper and encourage flattering coverage.

In the House of Commons, Cameron said a judicial inquiry into the scandal would be launched soon and that the first part of its mission — to examine the often-cozy ties between the news media, politicians and police — would be completed within a year.

Cameron also denied having any “inappropriate” conversations with News International executives about News Corp.’s controversial bid to buy BSkyB, Britain’s largest satellite TV company. News Corp. withdrew the bid last week as a result of the public outcry over the hacking scandal.

henry.chu@latimes.com