Former PM launches stinging attack in Commons

London: For more than a year, Gordon Brown has been virtually invisible in the House of Commons.

But Thursday, in a rare appearance, he broke his silence with a righteous fury, launching a sustained attack upon Rupert Murdoch's newspapers and their actions.

In the House of Commons, the former prime minister spoke out against the News Corp founder and his besieged clan, accusing them of systematic criminality, collusion with ‘the underworld' and the abuse of the vulnerable.

In only his second Commons speech since leaving Downing Street, Brown also sought to portray David Cameron and the Conservatives as willing helpers of Murdoch, and perhaps even complicit in his retainers' wrongdoing.

On the day that Murdoch had to abandon his bid for full control of BSkyB, Brown set out to compound the agonies of the media magnate and end his influence in public life forever. Speaking for more than half an hour to a packed Commons, Brown's condemnation of the media verged on the apoplectic, displaying a passion and anger he rarely exposed while in office.

‘Gutter to the sewer'

"In their behaviour towards those without a voice of their own, News International descended from the gutter to the sewer," he declared. "The tragedy is that they let the rats out of the sewer."

Brown is the son of the manse, his father a Church of Scotland minister, the man who gave him the much-mocked moral compass that guided his ill-fated premiership.

Thursday, he made no mention of his faith or his background, but there was no need. The sense of righteous fury Brown projected, and his denunciation of New International's sins, made clear where on the moral and spiritual scale he located himself and his newly-declared enemies.

Journalists and others working for Murdoch hacked phones, ‘blagged' financial records, infiltrated email accounts, invaded privacy, violated trust and exploited grief, he said.

And for that, he would execute great vengeance upon them. "Many, many wholly innocent men, women and children who at their darkest hour, at the most vulnerable moment of their lives, with no one and nowhere to turn, found their properly private lives, their private losses, their private sorrows, treated as the public property of News International," he said.

‘Bought and sold'

"Their private and innermost feelings and their private tears were bought and sold by News International for commercial gain."

He and his family were among the victims, he said, referring to claims — strongly disputed — that The Sun illegally accessed the medical records of his infant son. Because of that experience, he said, he had amassed, "a great deal of evidence," about News International and its misdemeanours.

Because of the company, the last decade of British politics was scarred by a, "lethal combination of illegality, of collusion and of cover-up," he said, laying much of the blame at his successor's feet.

Earlier, Cameron completed his own break with News International. The Prime Minister abandoned his former communications chief, Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor saying if he wasfound to have been involved in wrongdoing, he must, "face the full force of the law."

He also said Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive should quit, a departure now widely expected next week following her questioning by a Commons committee.

— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London, 2011