Former minister describes deal involved appointment by prime minister David Cameron of Andy Coulson, former News of the World editor, to position at No 10

“Quite how David Cameron got the Sun out of the hands of Gordon Brown I shall never know,” Clarke said. “Rupert would never let Tony [Blair – Brown’s predecessor] down because Tony had backed the Iraq war. Maybe it was some sort of a deal. David would not tell me what it was. Suddenly we got the Murdoch empire on our side.”
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Clarke made the comments in an interview with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) as part of its investigation into 21st Century Fox’s proposed takeover of Sky.

He said that within a few weeks of winning the general election in 2010 he had a meeting with Rebekah Brooks – then the chief executive of Murdoch’s News International, the owner of the Sun and the Times – in which she “described herself as running the government now in partnership with David Cameron” and said she wanted the government to buy prison ships.
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Clarke said that appointing Andy Coulson, the former editor of the Murdoch-owned News of the World, as Cameron’s director of communications “was part of the deal [with Murdoch] I assume” and that it was “absurd” to think that Murdoch’s newspapers were not influential.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/23/ken-clarke-cameron-had-deal-with-murdoch-for-2010-election