Leveson inquiry: Mandelson says treat lobbyist's emails with caution Lord Mandelson said Michel was 'perhaps better at networking than he was dealing with policies' Lord Mandelson gave Jeremy Hunt qualified support at the Leveson inquiry, when the former Labour minister said he should treat controversial emails written by a News Corporation lobbyist about the culture secretary's thinking with caution. Giving evidence, the former business secretary said he was not surprised to learn that references to "JH" in emails written by News Corp's Frédéric Michel to his boss James Murdoch were based on information received from the minister's former special adviser Adam Smith. Mandelson was asked by Leveson what he thought of the credibility of Michel's purported updates from Jeremy Hunt including advance warning of what he was due to say about the bid in parliament. He replied. I think it would be fair to approach this and some of the communications that took place with some scepticism. The Labour veteran was initially reluctant to answer questions about the modus operandi of Michel, because he had once worked with him at New Labour thinktank, the Policy Network, in the early part of the last decade. "I am in a difficult position because he left my thinktank by mutual consent," Mandelson said. When pressed he said Michel was "perhaps better at networking than he was dealing with policies" and "might have been suited to public relations than lobbying." Hunt's special adviser Adam Smith resigned last month after James Murdoch released to the Leveson inquiry last month 163 pages of almost daily updates from the culture secretary's office on the BSkyB bid. Hunt said the "volume and tone" of Smith's contact with Michel in the context of the £8bn bid was inappropriate. Mandelson, though, did take aim at Hunt over the conduct of Smith. He said if a special adviser had been caught in such a close relationship with a corporate lobbyist when he was a secretary of state "they would have been taken out and shot." He blamed inexperience of Hunt and Smith to ensure "inappropriate contact" had happened. Over a three hours of evidence Mandelson discussed the Labour party's links with News International, its former chief executives Rebekah Brooks and Les Hinton and the conversation he had with Brooks when the Sun dumped Labour and switched political allegiance to the Tories in September 2009. He said Brown had taken their Labour's Lost It frontpage splash, which announced the decision, "too personally" but confirmed he had phoned Brooks to tell her she and her Sun colleagues were a bunch of "chumps." He also confirmed Brooks came to him to see if he could get arch Murdoch critic Tom Watson removed from the culture and media select committee investigating phone hacking in 2009. She would come to me to complain that Tom Watson or whoever it was, members of the culture, media and sport select committee, were hounding them. Couldn't they be pulled away, pulled off," he told the inquiry," he said. Mandelson said he did not enjoy a social relationship with Brooks - he wasn't for instance invited to her wedding in June 2009. But he added he considered Rupert Murdoch's daughter Elisabeth a friend. He joined her in Corfu for one leg of her 40th birthday celebrations which also took in Santorini where David Cameron flew to meet Rupert Murdoch. The former minister was unable to confirm or deny whether a disputed conversation between Gordon Brown and Rupert Murdoch took place in the autumn of 2009 after the Sun's switch to the Conservatives, but said that he met the media mogul the following spring over dinner and said that "he was quite agitated" because he felt Labour had declared war on News Corp.