Murdoch's Brown smears

Revelations in the Telegraph that the Murdoch empire blather and hacked their way into Gordon Brown's private life.

This story just gets worse and worse.

In the autumn of 2006, Gordon Brown and his wife, Sarah, were struggling to come to terms with the news that one of their children was seriously ill.

Fraser Brown, born four months previously, had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.

That was not all the couple — whose firstborn child died in infancy in 2002 — had to contend with. They were also dealing with the knowledge that The Sun knew of the boy’s condition, and planned to publish.

The woman who broke that news to Mr Brown, who was chancellor at the time, was Rebekah Brooks, who was the newspaper’s editor and is now the News International chief executive at the eye of a growing storm that threatens the media company.