Ex-PM Brown faces press ethics inquiry

British ex-premier Gordon Brown and finance minister George Osborne faced a grilling on Monday by the press ethics inquiry sparked by the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch's News of the World.

Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is due to appear at the Leveson Inquiry on Thursday, in a week of intense scrutiny of the ties between both of Britain's main political parties and Murdoch's News Corp empire.

Brown, Labour prime minister between 2007 and 2010, was asked in early questioning about a story printed by the Murdoch-owned Sun in 2006 which revealed that his son had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis.