Cameron defends decision to appoint Hunt David Cameron on Thursday defended his decision to give Jeremy Hunt regulatory oversight of News Corp's proposed bid for British Sky Broadcasting, saying if anyone had given him evidence that the culture secretary was not the right person for the job, he would not have given it to him. The prime minister told the Leveson inquiry he did not believe a private memo from Mr Hunt in November 2010, strongly supportive of the bid and urging him not to let Vince Cable, the business secretary who then had responsibility for the bid, "cave in" to demands from its opponents, was different from Mr Hunt's public statements. That memo was not shown to the Treasury Solicitor before he gave advice about the future of the process the following month after Mr Cable had been recorded by undercover reporters saying he had "declared war on Mr Murdoch" over the bid. Mr Cameron told the Leveson inquiry he had recently had legal advice from the Treasury Solicitor, Paul Jenkins, that even if he had seen the memo, he would still have approved transferring responsibility for the proposed bid's regulatory fate to Mr Hunt's department. The prime minister said the memo did not differ from Mr Hunt's public statements, particularly an interview with the Financial Times in June 2010, on the day the proposed bid was announced. In that interview, Mr Hunt, said: "It does seem to me that News Corp do control Sky already so it is not clear to me that in terms of media plurality there is a substantive change, but I do not want to second guess what regulators might decide." Mr Cameron said Mr Hunt went on to conduct regulation of the bid entirely properly. He said he himself had no inappropriate conversations with James Murdoch, who was leading the proposed bid for News Corp, or Rebekah Brooks, a close friend who was also chief executive of News Corp's UK newspaper group. The inquiry had earlier heard that Mrs Brooks sent the prime minister a highly personal text the night before he made a major speech at the Tory conference before the last election saying "professionally, we are all in this together." Mr Cameron said the text meant that Mrs Brooks and himself, as the leader of the opposition Conservatives, were "pushing the same political agenda." In exchanges with Robert Jay QC, counsel for the inquiry, which sometimes became tense, Mr Cameron said that the inquiry was "slightly" getting into the territory of a "witchcraft trial" by implying wrongdoing in his relationship with the Murdochs. Mr Jay read out the text from October 2009 in which Mrs Brooks said that she wanted him to succeed in his speech not just "as a proud friend," but for professional reasons. She then used the "all in this together" phrase that has been often repeated in Mr Cameron and his party's rhetoric since. Mrs Brooks ended the text: "Speech of your life? Yes, he Cam! The last phrase was apparently a reference either to Barack Obama's electioneering slogan, or the catchphrase of the cartoon character Bob the Builder. But the prime minister told the inquiry that he had done no deal with Mrs Brooks and her employers to weaken the BBC and Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, in return for the support of The Sun and other News International papers. He said: "There was no overt deal. There was no covert deal. There was no nods and winks. He added: "We were trying to win over [media] proprietors, not trading policies for supporters." The coalition's media policies had in fact angered James Murdoch, Mr Cameron said, especially freezing the licence fee that funds the BBC, which the then chief executive of News Corp in Europe wanted to see dismantled. But he said he thought the Leveson inquiry was asking the right questions to get to the bottom of such relationships, which he acknowledged had become too close in the past. Mr Cameron said regulation of the press was currently inadequate and needed to be improved in what he called this "cathartic moment." But he added that this should not be undertaken by politicians alone because they were "interested parties" in the equation. The prime minister said that "an overly close relationship permitted regulation issues to be put on the back-burner." He was referring to a time when newspapers were illegally obtaining information through phone hacking and other illicit means - something uncovered by the information commissioner in 2003 and revealed fully in 2006, but ignored by politicians. Mr Cameron is the last star witness at the inquiry, the investigation that he set up to look into the standards and ethics of the press. The inquiry has been hearing evidence since last November and will be sitting until mid-July, with its report due by the end of October. Asked whether he had any doubts about hiring Andy Coulson as his press director, given that Mr Coulson had resigned as editor of the News of the World after a reporter was prosecuted for phone-hacking, the prime minister said he had received personal assurances from Mr Coulson that he had not known about the hacking. Mr Cameron said Mr Coulson had given the same assurances to parliament, the police and a criminal court in Glasgow. "If I've been lied to...," he said.