Horse adds light relief to hacking saga - Sky News Australia

Updated: 05:31, Saturday March 3, 2012

It was a gift horse to British cartoonists.

News that the Metropolitan Police had loaned a retired horse named Raisa to former News International chief Rebekah Brooks and her horse-trainer husband Charlie provided light relief this week during Britain's phone hacking and bribery scandal.

Police have insisted it was not a gift horse to Brooks - who has since resigned her top media job and been arrested and questioned in the scandal - but the topic has proved irresistible to British media.

Investigative journalists dove into the question on everyone's mind: Was British Prime Minister David Cameron, a good friend of Brooks, taken for a ride by the former chief executive of Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers? Had Cameron himself ridden the horse?

'Since I have been prime minister I think I have been on a horse once and it wasn't that one,' Cameron said on television on Thursday.

The Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell depicted Murdoch riding Cameron, with Rebekah Brooks' severed head also on the prime minister's back. Daily Telegraph cartoonist Matt had a horse testifying at the UK Leveson's inquiry, admitting, 'Yes, sugar lumps did change hands.'

Whether Brooks' custody of the horse was improper, it touches on serious issues: the relationship between the Murdoch papers and the British police, allegedly including bribery of officers and favouritism by the force; and the papers' relationship with Cameron.

Murdoch leaped into the fray earlier in the week, tweeting: 'Now they are complaining about R Brooks saving an old horse from the glue factory!'

It has long been known that the prime minister was on friendly terms with Brooks, his neighbour in the tiny Cotswold town of Chipping Norton. Her husband and Cameron were friends as students at the elite Eton College.

Cameron has faced uncomfortable questions about hiring Andy Coulson, like Brooks a former editor of the defunct Murdoch tabloid News of the World, as his communications director. Both Coulson and Brooks have been arrested, though not charged, in the continuing police investigation of phone hacking at the newspaper.

The horse saga competed with the week's more significant developments.

- Murdoch launched The Sun on Sunday newspaper to replace the News of the World.

- Sue Akers, leading the police investigation of bribery of public officials, told Justice Brian Leveson's media ethics inquiry that there appeared to be a culture of illegal payments at The Sun.

- James Murdoch resigned as chairman of News International, which runs the British papers.

The horse, then 22 years old, was taken in by Brooks in 2008, when she was editor of The Sun and she was responsible for paying for the horse's care.

Police said Rebekah Brooks' representative asked them to take the horse back two years later, 'due to the horse no longer being ridden'. However, the department's policy is that horses are retired to private quarters on condition that no one rides them.

'The saga of the horse may seem trivial, ' said Tom Watson, a member of Parliament who has aggressively pursued allegations about criminality at Murdoch's papers. '(But) it's further evidence of the intensely close relationship between executives at News International and the Metropolitan Police.'