News International has today called the suggestion Rupert Murdoch struck a secret deal with Margaret Thatcher “a flight from reality”.Speaking at the Leveson Inquiry, Rhodri Davies QC, representing the company, said an opening statement to module 3 of the inquiry, examining the relationship between politicians and the press, unfairly represented the former prime minister’s relationship with Murdoch.Last Thursday Robert Jay QC, inquiry counsel, suggested Murdoch had suffered from “selective amnesia” when recalling a meeting with Thatcher before his purchase of the Times newspapers in 1981. He said the true intentions of the meeting are “capable of bearing on Mr Murdoch's integrity".Davies said: “It is quite wrong to do, as Mr Jay did last week, to muddy the definition and the boundaries to the point where no difference is seen between a newspaper supporting a politician it agrees with and respects, and a corrupt deal between the two.“That amounts to saying that it is sinister. Indeed, at the heart of the problem for Mr Murdoch and the Sun and Mr Dacre and the Daily Mail is to support through their pages politicians whose views they agree with.“But that is exactly what they are meant to do and are expected to do as agents of a free press in a democracy, the problem comes not when they support politicians they agree with but if they prostitute their papers to support politicians they don’t agree with in exchange for favours.”He said Jay QC’s description of a note of the meeting taken by Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary at the time, as "carefully constructed" was unjustified and Ingham “would have to be positively dishonest if a deal was admitted from the record”.He said the suggestion Murdoch had enlisted the support of Thatcher by striking a deal for political support suffered from a "complete lack of evidence in it's favour".He added: "The documentary record demonstrates conclusively that there was no express deal and no implied deal either. To call this thesis speculation is to use too dignified a term.”“There is no basis for Mr Jay’s delayed airing the doubt over [Murdoch’s] credibility. That suggestion had no place in Mr Jay’s opening for module three.“The base for what follows in News International’s success in the United Kingdom is not a stolen transaction but a proper acquisition and one that saved the papers from closure, or perhaps, from Mr [Robert] Maxwell.”