Tony Blair gave his special ‘lucky pants’ to newspaper executive Rebekah Brooks to try and swing the odds in her favour just days before her arrest in connection with the phone hacking scandal, a court has heard.
In an email to James Murdoch, the then News International executive chairman Brooks recounted the key points of a telephone conversation with the former Prime Minister where he has advised her to:
“1) Form an ‘independent unit’ made up of a mixture of your friends and mine and instruct them to find everybody innocent of everything.
2) Make it clear that despite being innocent you have learnt some lessons or something and will implement something or other at some point
3) I am sending you my special lucky pants. Put them on and keep them on until this all blows over. If things get really tough, pull them over your head.”
Mr Blair’s office issued a statement later, saying: “This was Mr Blair simply giving informal advice over the phone and offering Ms Brooks the loan of a perfectly normal pair of undercrackers. There is absolutely nothing lucky or magic about this particular pair of shreddies and the fact that Mr Blair wore them throughout the majority of the Iraq war and Hutton inquiry is purely coincidental.”
Brooks denies all charges of journalism. The case continues.
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