Mr Blair said The Sun and the Daily Mail were the most powerful newspapers.

"The Sun particularly because it is prepared to shift, it makes it all the more important," he added.

"Once they are against you that's it. It's full frontal, day in, day out, basically a lifetime commitment."

Mr Blair also said the lines between news and comment had become too blurred.

He said the problem he faced as a political leader was the press became partisan in its news coverage, and told the inquiry "it becomes all the more important to try to prevent yourself becoming an object of attack".

Asked whether he had got too close to News International, he replied: "Yes."

But he described it as a working relationship and denied that it equated to "cosiness".

He said: "We were dealing with very powerful people who had a big impact on the political system.

"The big impact was hugely intensified and multiplied by the fact that if they were against you they were absolutely out, all out, against you, and that's the issue in my view."

The closeness was not the problem, he argued, rather the "imbalance that comes into it".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/relationship-between-media-and-politicians-inevitable-says-tony-blair-7793097.html

Former British prime minister Tony Blair has told the UK's Leveson inquiry into media ethics that he made a strategic decision while he was in office not to fight against the power of the press.

In testimony to the inquiry overnight, Mr Blair said Britain's press was the best in the world, but he conceded his Labour government was guilty of ascribing too much power to it.

He cast himself as a politician facing the choice between being torn apart by what he once described as the media's "feral beasts", and getting his policies implemented.

Mr Blair, who is godfather to one of News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch's children, was asked about his close relationship with the media baron whose Sun tabloid gave him its backing.

He said he did not take on the press during his 10-year reign because it was too big a challenge for his government.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-29/blair-chose-not-to-fight-murdoch-press/4038378?WT.svl=news0

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Watching Blair explain his position on this issue is a joy to the senses. From his cultivated lips, the bullshit smells of roses and the crap is a river of honey... Yes, Blair did not give Murdoch — "who did not lobby him on media policies" — all that he could have had... and at times the government policies went against Murdoch... Brilliant... The art of deception at its best, shown here by the master of fudge.  

Several things need to be considered here: Murdoch was doing Blair's bidding on the war on Iraq because war is good business if you're a news baron. All that had to happen — as in Dubya's America — was for the press to be fed titbits by the goons and suddenly these crumbs inflated like tall soufflés cooked by Murdoch the baker.

I will leave other learned scribes to unpick the Blair bullshit point by point... I have my own life to run and I don't get paid to go back yet again and explain — as I have done many times before, on this site — how deception works, including running small contrary policies in order to get bigger doozies through...

Ah... just let me say this: Blair DID NOT have to fight the Murdoch press... ("Blair chose not to fight Murdoch press") And the Leveson inquiry is not about "fighting" the Murdoch Press... it is about corruption and corrupt methods of gathering news and about sleeping in bed with politicians... Mind you it's possible, but unlikely, that Blair did not notice that Murdoch was sleeping next to him under the same doona... Sorry... for the non-Aussies a "doona" is a "duvet"...

Tony Blair has been invited to draw up proposals on how to regulate the press in future. In an unusual end to more than four hours of testimony, Lord Justice Leveson asked the former Prime Minister to join a select group of witnesses who will help guide his thinking in writing his final report.

The request will dismay those who believe Mr Blair is still too close to the Murdoch empire, as well as newspaper groups who feel he harbours grudges over the treatment he received while in office.

Mr Blair claimed:

* He had an entirely professional "working" relationship with Rupert Murdoch and said there was "nothing odd" about him ringing the Australian proprietor three times immediately before the Iraq war to brief him on the invasion. He said his relationship with Mr Murdoch only changed after he left Downing Street and "I got to know him". He denied he had become godfather to one of Mr Murdoch's children, Grace, "on the basis of my relationship in office".

* Mr Murdoch did not lobby him directly over media policy when he was Prime Minister.

* The anti-European views of Mr Murdoch and News International did not affect government policy. "Europe was the major thing that he and I used to row about," he said. "I believed in what I was doing, I didn't need him or anyone else to tell me what to do."

* His director of media, Alastair Campbell, and ally Peter Mandelson did not bully journalists – a suggestion greeted with laughter in Fleet Street.