Tessa Jowell has denied failing to help police with phone hacking prosecutions.The former Culture Secretary said police informed her voicemail messages had been illegally intercepted in 2006, when she was on holiday with family and friends, and her “offers of further help were declined”.Previously the inquiry heard Jowell had resisted helping officers with prosecuting private investigator Glenn Mulcaire and News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman. In February, DCS Keith Surtees, an investigating officer on Operation Caryatid, said in a witness statement: “One of these victims was Tessa Jowell. All of the potential victims declined to assist us with the prosecution.”Jowell told the inquiry: “I was a Secretary of State and a privy councillor. It would have been absolutely incumbent on me, were I asked to cooperate with an inquiry, to agree to. My principal private secretary, who is a civil servant, confirmed my willingness to help.”“I was deeply shocked when I read Keith Surtees’ evidence, because it is completely untrue. And I completely understand that his memory may be faulty and I think that the way the transcript reads seems to imply a lack of accuracy in his recollection, but I would want the inquiry to be absolutely clear that had I been asked at that time to provide a witness statement, I would have provided it."Pressed by Neil Garnham QC, acting for the Metropolitan Police, the MP said she had been shocked and upset by the information but had asked what she could do to help with the investigation.Jowell said she did not realise her phone had been hacked before the police contacted her, but admitted she “adopted a permanent stance as if you are being followed, as if someone is watching or listening” after a series of intimate stories appeared in the press. She said the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard and the Sunday Times were among papers who printed these articles and promised to submit examples to the inquiry.She added: “It was as if my closest friends had simply rung up the newspapers and said this is what she is thinking.”Jowell was originally told her voicemail had been accessed on ”28 or 29 occasions” but said she has discovered it was a higher figure.Jowell, Culture Secretary from 2001 to 2007, said Tony Blair had assured her no deal had been made with Rupert Murdoch over cross-media ownership. Jowell and Patricia Hewitt, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, oversaw the Communications Act, which affected policy on media plurality and regulation.She told the inquiry: "The prime minister's instincts were more deregulatory than mine, he pushed me further than I would have gone myself in exploring deregulatory options.”Lord Puttnam, head of a joint committee examining the original Bill, pushed for a public interest test to ensure takeover bids did not affect media plurality. Jowell dismissed Puttnam’s claims, made in 2005, that he had been misled over newspapers’ lobbying of the government.Asked about Operation Motorman – investigating the illegal obtaining of data by private investigator Steve Whittamore for several national newspapers – Jowell said her office was not responsible for the Data Protection Act and any attempt to oversee the Press Complaints Commission would have been seen as government interference in the press.She said: “The PCC is independently funded and self-regulatory. Had my department at that time established a unit who were concerned with overseeing the behaviour of the press would immediately have been seen as a step to undermine self-regulation.”The MP was asked about her friendships with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and the couple Matthew Freud and Elisabeth Murdoch. She said social events, including those held by Freud, “work on the basis that all parties know the rules, accept the rules and observe the rules in practice” but denied extending favours to friends in the media.