Testifying, Murdoch Cites a "Cover-Up" in Phone Hacking Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Rupert Murdoch with his wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, after Mr. Murdoch testified in London on Thursday in an inquiry into newspaper practices. LONDON - Rupert Murdoch criticized many different people for many different things in a morning of scrappy and often blunt testimony before a judicial panel here on Thursday. But in the most explosive criticism of all, he unexpectedly accused at least one former employee of presiding over a "cover-up" of phone hacking and other dubious practices at The News of the World tabloid. "I do blame one or two people," he said, adding that he did not want to name them because "for all I know they may be arrested," and then proceeded to make it fairly obvious whom he meant, anyway. One was the now-defunct newspaper's longtime chief lawyer, Tom Crone; the other appeared to be Colin Myler, its final editor. Mr. Murdoch said that as the newspaper's proprietor, he bore ultimate responsibility for the hacking scandal that spurred him to shut The News of the World down last summer. But he said he had been "shielded" from the truth by his obfuscating employees. "There is no question in my mind maybe even the editor - but certainly beyond that, someone - took charge of a cover-up which we were victim to," he declared. The person I'm thinking of was a friend of the journalists and a drinking pal and a clever lawyer. Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone could not have been thrilled to hear that their former boss, chairman of the News Corporation media empire, seemed to be hanging them out to dry. "His assertion that I "took charge of a cover-up" in relation to phone hacking is a shameful lie, " Mr. Crone, longtime legal manager of News International, News Corporation's British newspaper arm, said in a statement. But his former employees were not the only ones Mr. Murdoch laid into on Thursday, in concluding testimony that touched on hacking, newspaper regulation, whether he uses his papers to advance his commercial interests (no, he said) and how a common way to secure a subject's cooperation, in his view, is for a "journalist to do a favor in return for a favor back." The targets of his disapproval included The News of the World itself; people he said impeded the phone hacking investigation; and people whose assessments of his hands-on newspaper approach were read aloud to him by Robert Jay, chief lawyer for the inquiry, in an effort to determine how involved Mr. Murdoch was in the paper's news operations (not very, he said). There was Andrew Neil, a former Times of London editor, who Mr. Murdoch said did not know "the first thing he's talking about." There was a former housekeeper of Mr. Murdoch's, who once leaked a story about him and whom Mr. Murdoch called "a very strange bird." There was John Major, a former Conservative prime minister whom Mr. Murdoch called bitter and unpopular, and the former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, who he said had not always behaved rationally. David Yelland, a former editor of the Murdoch-owned Sun tabloid, wrote a "very strange autobiography," Mr. Murdoch said, and was drunk on the job. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police Department's seizure of phone hacking evidence, Mr. Murdoch declared, thwarted The News of the World's initial efforts to investigate itself. As for Harbottle & Lewis, an outside law firm hired by News International, Mr. Murdoch said it failed to inform him that "hey, you've got some big problems." Mr. Murdoch implicitly criticized even his longtime friend Les Hinton, former chief executive of News International, saying it was Mr. Hinton who made the bad decision to hire Mr. Myler as News of the World editor and faulting him as having failed to press Mr. Myler to find out "what the hell was going on." Employing a version of the "one rogue reporter" defense that News Corporation initially used in dismissing the phone hacking allegations, Mr. Murdoch used a "one rogue newspaper" defense, saying that The News of the World was an "aberration" and that he would have "closed it years before" if its readers had not liked it so much. Mr. Murdoch said he was guilty of "not paying enough attention to The News of the World at any time I was in charge of it" and that he was sorry his company had been "far too defensive" and "disrespectful" of Parliament. Even as their onetime proprietor was disassociating himself from the newspaper he owned for 31 years, former News of the World employees were expressing disbelief at what Hayley Barlow, a former News of the World publicist, called his "black sheep strategy." "Is this the same man who once stormed into our editorial conference after we had won a raft of industry awards, fawning all over NOTW execs," Ms. Barlow asked on Twitter, saying he had praised the "great paper," and "great journalists." Another former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing a severance package, said of Mr. Murdoch: "He will say whatever he thinks is the best thing to say at a given moment." Mr. Myler, the editor Mr. Murdoch accused of participating in the cover-up with Mr. Crone, is now editor of The New York Daily News, rival of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. Mr. Myler did not respond to e-mails or phone messages to his office seeking a comment. He and Mr. Crone told a parliamentary committee last summer that in 2008, they told Mr. Murdoch's son James of allegations that phone hacking might be widespread at The News of the World. James Murdoch has consistently maintained that the pair did no such thing and that he knew nothing about it. Speaking of Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Crone said: "It is perhaps no coincidence that the two people he has identified in relation to his cover-up allegations are the same two people who pointed out that his son's evidence to the parliamentary select committee last year was inaccurate."