Campell: British press has become ‘putrid’

ALISTAIR CAMPBELL, media chief to former prime minister Tony Blair, told the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics that the country’s newspapers were “putrid” and that a member of Blair’s inner circle had her phone hacked.

Alastair Campbell, who was Blair’s spokesman between 1997 and 2003 including the start of the Iraq war, said police had told him that he too featured in the notes of an investigator employed by the News of the World.

Campbell, a former reporter at the Daily Mirror, said he defended the need for a free press but some parts of British journalism were not worth defending.