Well You've Got to Really, Haven't You

It is virtually impossible at the moment not to have formed some view on the Murdoch press scandal, even if it's only that you wish it would go away.

Mr R Murdoch, Mr J Murdoch and several other Murdoch name bearers almost certainly are adherents of the 'please go away' view of things and, to begin with, I was too. I thought at first that the story was just one of those storms in a tea cup, where journalists get terribly excited about issues that are just about other journalists and not of much concern to people outside the journalist tribe.

Of course, my view has changed now - fuelled by various recent revelations, but also by the performance of Paul McMullan, the News of the World's former features editor, on this clip on You Tube:

"What better source of getting to the truth is there than listening to someone's messages?" I mean really. McMullan's pathetic defence of the carryings on at his paper rests on a grasping, envious argument about it being legitimate to expose every detail of the lives of people, if they are rich or have more than one house or sometimes 'parade' down red carpets.

As I listened to McMullan spout his  pernicious nonsense, I was reminded of the aspects of public life in Britain that seemed to me to be new and horrid, when I returned there for a few years in 2006 - a collective meanness, a tendency to jeering and sneering and a fondness for witnessing humiliation were among those.

I had thought that one of the causes of those changes might have been the British public's profound disappointment when, after being whipped into a frenzy of romantic excitement, they discovered that the 1982 wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer had not been the fairytale they'd been told it was but, largely, a fraud. Now I began to see that, even if fertile ground was provided by the public disillusion that resulted from that event, it was only because certain (Murdochean) forces decided to exploit that disillusion for their own ends that attitudes in Britain had descended as far as they had. Now those forces were being exposed at last, I realised. And that began to give me hope.

For it does seem to me that a great deal of the tawdry vulgarisation of British life - where lack of talent and skill is worshipped so much that it is rewarded by wealth and fame (why do those weird little characters, Ant and Dec, whose role I've never quite fathomed, spring automatically to mind at this point, along with the woman who wears pink, loves horses and has enormous breasts, [actually a gargoyle parade of others is now making its way through my head, but I won't name all the grotesques who have been thrust into my consciousness by Murdoch and his gang {and they are lodged there, even though I've never bought one of their filthy papers}]) - arose originally from News Corporation's ferocious obsession with feeding the public appetite for gossip and spectacle and disgrace.

If therefore News Corporation is exposed as having been engaged in foul behaviour in order to do that, perhaps the public, recoiling in horror and disgust at the means by which their swill has been fetched for them, will lose its appetite for this kind of distraction at last.The former readers of the News of the World may glance at themselves for a moment after this and ask themselves why they actually want this stuff - and, indeed, this way of life. Then, hurray, we may return to the England of duty and honour and restraint that I remember from childhood. But possibly I'm being a little too optimistic.

(And tomorrow, if you're interested, I'll tell you why I've felt sorry for Mr Rupert Murdoch for the last 20 years - and I still do.)