News International’s William Lewis, BBC’s Robert Peston, and the alleged act of theft which aimed to bring down Vince Cable

Rewind to December 2010, and you will recall the furore which greeted the revelation by the BBC’s Robert Peston that Lib Dem business secretary Vince Cable had been secretly taped by undercover Telegraph hacks “declaring war” on Rupert Murdoch and his bid for BSkyB.

Vince was almost forced to resign, responsibility for handling the bid was handed over to a Murdoch-friendly Tory, and the Telegraph was embarrassed by the implication that they had censored the story in order to avoid assisting media rival News International.

A report in today’s New York Times sheds a new and extraordinary light on that sequence of events, and suggests that:

    * The Telegraph was not sitting on the Cable/BSkyB scoop, but was all set to run it as a follow-up to the paper’s initial story focusing on Vince’s forthright views on the Coalition;

    * Telegraph executives were so furious that their exclusive had been stolen by the BBC from under their noses that they hired security firm Kroll to investigate the source of the leak;
    * Kroll, according to the Telegraph, “concluded that the removal of the recording was, in all probability, an act of theft orchestrated by an external organization”;
    * The NYT reports carefully that ‘Kroll found circumstantial evidence that Mr. [William] Lewis and Mr. [Jim] Robinson were behind the episode, according to a summary of its work, though it stressed in its report that investigators had not found direct proof of the link.’
    * William Lewis (pictured right, with Robert Peston) is a former Telegraph editor who left the Group acrimoniously and subsequently joined News International as general manager; Mr Robinson was head of the technical support desk at the Telegraph, and was hired by News International the month after the Cable scoop on ‘unusually favourable terms’, according to Kroll: ‘The two celebrated the appointment over pints at a pub.
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    * William Lewis has known the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston for two decades, and was hired by him for the Financial Times in 1994. Their close friendship has already attracted significant controversy about whether Mr Peston’s insider track stories in recent weeks have been crafted to shift attention away from News International.


NEWS BY:http://www.libdemvoice.org/news-internationals-william-lewis-bbcs-robert-peston-and-the-alleged-act-of-theft-which-aimed-to-bring-down-vince-cable-24823.html