Ken Clarke: Tories had deal with Rupert Murdoch for 2010 election

David Cameron may have done “some sort of a deal” with Rupert Murdoch to win the Sun’s support for the Conservatives in the 2010 general election, Ken Clarke, the former justice secretary, has claimed.

“Quite how David Cameron got the Sun out of the hands of Gordon Brown I shall never know,” Clarke said. “Rupert would never let Tony [Blair – Brown’s predecessor] down because Tony had backed the Iraq war. Maybe it was some sort of a deal. David would not tell me what it was. Suddenly we got the Murdoch empire on our side.”

The Sun switched its support to the Conservatives in 2010 after backing Labour in the previous three general elections.

Clarke made the comments in an interview with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as part of its investigation into 21st Century Fox’s proposed takeover of Sky.

He said that within a few weeks of winning the general election in 2010 he had a meeting with Rebekah Brooks – then the chief executive of Murdoch’s News International, the owner of the Sun and the Times – in which she “described herself as running the government now in partnership with David Cameron” and said she wanted the government to buy prison ships.

“I found myself having an extraordinary meeting with Rebekah who was instructing me on criminal justice policy from now on, as I think she had instructed my predecessor, so far as I could see, judging from the numbers of people we had in prison and the growth of rather exotic sentences,” Clarke told the CMA.

“She wanted me to buy prison ships because she did accept that the capacity of the prisons was getting rather strained, putting it mildly. She really was solemnly telling me that we had got to have prison ships because she had got some more campaigns coming, which is one of her specialities.

“I regarded this as a very amusing conversation and took not the slightest notice. As long as I was justice secretary, we would not have any of this.”

Clarke said that appointing Andy Coulson, the former editor of the Murdoch-owned News of the World, as Cameron’s director of communications “was part of the deal [with Murdoch] I assume” and that it was “absurd” to think that Murdoch’s newspapers were not influential.

Clarke previously referred to his meeting with Brooks in his memoirs last year. In the book, called Kind of Blue, Clarke said he never had a meeting with Brooks again.

He was interviewed by the CMA alongside Ed Miliband, the former Labour leader, Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, and the Labour peers Lord Puttnam and Lord Falconer. The cross-party group of politicians are long-term opponents of Murdoch and Fox’s proposed £11.7bn takeover of Sky.

Clarke dismissed the idea that Sky News would not become like Fox News – more partisan – if the deal went through. He described Fox News as one of the “ultimate examples of savagely political American television”, adding: “The idea that we allow the owner of Fox News to buy Sky News, assuming he will resist the temptation and be a changed man who will carry on running according to British broadcasting standards, entirely impartial. Believe that, you believe anything.”

Cameron has always denied he did a deal with Murdoch to win the support of his newspapers. He told the Leveson inquiry in 2012: “There was no overt deal for support, there was no covert deal, no nods and winks. There was a Conservative politician, me, trying to win over newspapers, trying to win over television, trying to win over proprietors – but not trading policies for that support.”

Fox and News UK, the successor organisation to News International, declined to comment.