he tangled relationship between British politicians and the media was dramatically revealed last week. Giving evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into press ethics, the outspoken journalist, Kelvin MacKenzie, said that at the height of the currency exchange crisis in 1992, he was telephoned by the Prime Minister, John Major, at night.

"We had seen interest rates rise all day," MacKenzie, who was then editor of The Sun, recalled, "It reached 15% or something ridiculous." Making a very credible imitation of Major's tinny voice, he continued, "Major called me up and said to me, 'I'm just calling you up, Kelvin, to find out how the story is going to play in the paper tomorrow'. On that basis, I simply replied that 'I've got a buck of s**t on my desk, Prime Minister, and I'm going to pour it all over you'."

MacKenzie also told the hearing that during his editorship of The Sun, he would meet the serving prime minister twice a year, and might see Cabinet ministers between six and ten times a year. "The purpose of it was for them to explain their views and what geniuses they were to you," MacKenzie said, "I was always astonished that a PM would want to meet a tabloid journalist with one (secondary school qualification), and wondered where the equivalence was in that discussion."

Occasionally, however, the worm turned. MacKenzie said Rupert Murdoch told him that when, in 2009, The Sun switched allegiance to the Tory Party, Prime Minister Gordon Brown telephoned Murdoch and 'roared' at him for '20 minutes', ending his tirade 'You are trying to destroy me and my party. I will destroy you and your company'.

Mounting a stout defence of Britain's tabloids, MacKenzie said, "There is a tremendous amount of snobbery involved in journalism. If you had Tony Blair's mobile number, hacked into it and discovered that he was circumventing the Cabinet in order to go to war in Iraq and publish it in The Sun, you get six months in jail. If you publish it in The Guardian, you get a Pulitzer."

MacKenzie said that during his 13-year editorship of The Sun he "took the view that most things should be published". In a robust response to a question about his approach to ethics in journalism, MacKenzie said: "It's very hard to know what standards are when you're trying to discover truth. There is no certainty in journalism in the same way there's no certainty in the legal world. There are time constraints and sometimes you literally get something wrong. It's so hard in life, in law, in the press, to get things correct." Some commentators view his remarks as a swipe at the Inquiry, which MacKenzie has previously termed 'ludicrous'.

MacKenzie also revealed the nature of the relationship between his then proprietor, Rupert Murdoch and his editors. In his witness statement, he said: "I was never put under any commercial pressure by my management or owner when running The Sun. In fact the reverse. Rupert Murdoch often felt the paper had gone too far under my editorship."

MacKenzie recalled how Murdoch erupted in fury when he found out The Sun was to pay £1 million in damages to Elton John after a false story in 1987, which claimed the singer had hired rent boys. Murdoch promptly rang MacKenzie and subjected him to "40-minutes of non-stop abuse". "It wasn't so much the money, it was more the shadow it cast over the paper," MacKenzie said.

The Leveson Inquiry was established by David Cameron last year after it emerged that the News of the World had hacked into the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler, after she went missing in March 2002.

The Guardian in reporting the hacking, claimed that NoW had given Milly's parents false hope she was still alive by deleting her messages. The public outrage that followed this claim resulted in the Murdoch's closing down NoW, Britain's largest selling newspaper.

But, in a twist, Scotland Yard detectives said last month it was "unlikely" News International staff had erased messages from the schoolgirl's phone. MacKenzie told the Inquiry, "Had that been The Sun, it would have come very, very close to being shut down had they got that story wrong. The Guardian sticks the story on page 10 and they get away with it."

Lord Leveson said he was "just about to receive" a review about how the messages came to be deleted carried out by police. But, he added: "I can make it clear, however, that whatever the outcome of this new evidence I have no intention of suggesting that as a result this inquiry is no longer justified."