Leveson Inquiry: Gordon Brown denies aggressive call to Rebekah Brooks The former prime minister told the Leveson Inquiry into media ethics that he was led to believe by Rupert Murdoch that the then News International chief executive would say sorry for a slew of damaging stories about his handling of Afghanistan. But when he made the telephone call Mrs Brooks instead told him she had a taped conversation of him apologising to the furious bereaved mother of a soldier about a condolence letter he had sent her that was littered with mistakes. Mr Brown also repeated previous denials that he had "declared war" on the Murdoch empire after it decided to switch support to the Conservatives ahead of the last general election. He said the conversation where he was "alleged to have acted in an unbalanced way" as well as threatening Mr Murdoch "never took place." I'm shocked and surprised that it should be suggested even when there is no evidence of such a conversation. The Inquiry was told all telephone conversations with newspaper proprietors would have gone through the Downing Street switchboard, not on mobile phones. "I would not have known Rupert Murdoch's phone number," he added. Mr Brown spoke to Mr Murdoch on November 10, 2009, over The Sun's coverage of Afghanistan and also sent him a follow-up email later that day. He told the Inquiry the newspaper had published a story criticising him for not bowing at the Cenotaph as well as an article about a letter he sent to Jacqui Janes, whose 20-year-old son Jamie, a Grenadier Guardsman, was killed by an explosion. Mrs Janes had accused him of being "disrespectful" because the message began "Dear Mrs James" and appeared to contain other spelling errors and a visible correction to her son Jamie's name. Mr Brown has suffered with eyesight problems since a rugby accident in his youth He said he had phoned the media mogul about the coverage but insisted there was "no reference" to the shift in The Sun's political allegiance during the Labour party conference the previous month. "He asked me would I phone Mrs Brooks, would I have a phone call with her where she would, he hinted, want to apologise for what had happened and I said I saw no point in phoning her," he said. But he eventually agreed to make the call "out of respect" for Mr Murdoch. Mrs Brooks went on to tell him she had a tape of a conversation he had with Mrs Janes that the newspaper was planning to publish. "I didn't get the sense there was an apology coming from The Sun and I decided there was no point in continuing the conversation," he added. Mrs Brooks told the inquiry last month the tone of the conversation was "quite aggressive." She added: "The fact that it resulted in such an extraordinarily aggressive conversation shows that it doesn't happen all the time. I remember it very clearly from the nature of it. Lord Justice Leveson told Mr Brown that he would have been "rather irritated" if he had called someone expecting an apology only to be told further negative stories were to come. But Mr Brown insisted "when you are dealing with some of these issues you tend to be calmer." "I don't think I was aggressive," he added. Mr Brown said the Press must be made to separate out fact from opinion and criticised the way he had been portrayed as not caring about British troops. "I still feel to this day that huge damage was done to the war effort by the suggestion we just didn't care about what was happening to the troops," he said. The Sun's political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, hit back at Mr Brown's claims about its coverage of the war, tweeting: "Fact for Gordon Brown - Sun has printed the word 'Afghanistan' 4,692 times since May 2010." Mr Brown went on to deny that he had designed policies to please the Daily Mail, whose editor, Paul Dacre, he is said to have been close to. "I didn't see Mr Dacre that much," he told the hearing. Mr Dacre and I disagree about many things on politics. He, like me, believes there should be an ethical basis for any political system. He was personally very kind, as Rupert Murdoch could be personally very kind... but, to be honest, I had no support from the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail was totally against the Labour Party. On almost every issue except the euro, the paper was "wholly against us and they wanted to see a Conservative government," he stressed. He denied his sceptical stance on 24-hour gambling and his backing for the reclassification of cannabis were attempts to appease the paper. "These are views that I held personally and I held them quite strongly," he said. But the inquiry learned that he had had seven breakfasts with Mr Dacre between September 2007 and February 2010, as well as one dinner where guests included the Mail editor, then News International chairman Les Hinton and Telegraph Media Group chief executive Murdoch MacLennan. At the meal on September 10 2007, the men discussed what Mr Dacre saw as a "truly frightening amendment" to the Data Protection Act, the hearing was told. Resisting the implication that he had caved in to lobbying by the press figures on the subject, Mr Brown said he had already made up his mind that there should be a public interest defence in the law and "felt very strongly about this myself." And he had not attempted to replace the system of self-regulation of the Press with statutory regulation because "we had no mandate for that," he said. Asked whether his aides were involved in using the media to force or attempt to force the resignation of former prime minister Tony Blair, Mr Brown replied: "I would hope not. I've got no evidence of that. He also denied instructing his special advisers to conduct off- the-record press briefings and instructing his aide Charlie Whelan to brief against then chancellor Alistair Darling. "Nobody in my position would have instructed any briefing against a senior minister and Alistair Darling was a friend of mine as well as a colleague," he said. He told the inquiry he did not recall being forewarned by a number of senior political colleagues about Damian McBride, his aide who resigned in 2009 over emails said to feature ideas for potential smear stories about senior Conservatives.