So rollalonga Leveson, next week looks fun.

Some big names, and always good to see the griller grilled a la Paxo, or the weasel’s weasel a la Mandy lobbing light grenades.

And small fry, but important right now are Smith and Michel due later.

The resignation of Adam Smith,  special adviser to embattled culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, has triggered sharp intakes of breath among public affairs directors, the in-house lobbyists of corporate Britain. Emails written by News Corp’s own public affairs director, Frédéric Michel, suggest Mr Hunt got too close to the company as he deliberated whether to wave through its £8.3bn bid to buy the rest of BSkyB.

By making Mr Smith’s hand in its own lobbying all too visible – he figured as a conduit between Mr Hunt and James Murdoch – News Corp has ensured that other companies will find it harder to talk privately to ministers.

So says a big city fat cat firm. So good says I.

Maybe bye bye Hunt, and move the curse of Murdoch closer to Cameron.

Schadenfreude – Rebekah

Sounds Jewish, ho hum,

What bugs is whether the pleasure you feel at her potential tribulations and eventual incarceration is proper. Can a decent English chap derive pleasure from seeing her like a fly in a pitcher plant on the slide of her downfall? Not yet even fully aware. Ho ho!

The cell awaits with some ghastly old dreg farting and illiterate saying “You get the bottom bunk dearie.” Oblivious to any achieved status, another world, I know, I’ve been there, and it’s a shock.

Dial M for Murdoch. TV Series

Tom Watson will be played by a pumped up Hugh Grant in an out of character tough guy (but warm and endearing) in total 21^st century irony.  Hairy Steve Coogan is booked to be his sidekick Martin Hickman in this Bernstein and Woodward makealike of the Pentagon Papers.

“Follow the buggers” the phone tip off sounds slimy from the side of a Wearside mouth, and “Meet me at the Fire Station, this one is gonna burn baby”.

 Who ever lives a safe and comfortable life today and gets their thrill and paranoia from TV dramas should welcome this depiction of the plot unfolding right now at the Royal Courts of Justice. That is from the real world around them.

In his remarkable true tale Tom Watson details from Leveson how fictions like this one, and far more damaging, are created in the gutter (now sewer) press to titillate and sell copies. With less than the tenuous link to reality I present here.

Cue Lord Justice Leveson with mild incredulity p301

“Are these all real headlines?” Peppiat, A Richard Desmond reporter and witness replies

“These are real headlines”

Worthy of Richard Wilson, you cannot believe it!

The slimy tentacles of what is rightly called a Mafia, which my dictionary calls

‘a close-knit or influential group of people who work together and protect one another’s interests or the interests of a particular person’ or ‘a mutually supportive clique.

It is an accurate characterization, and what Watson said to James Murdoch at the end of the Select Committee hearing, apt, as long as you leave Sicilyout of it.

The series and the film will be made eventually, good topic for BskyB or Fox studios but not quite yet.

The book is good, easy to adjust to Watson and Hickman referring to themselves in the third person, a page turner and thriller. If you have followed the saga in The Guardian as some have there is not much new but the actuality of it is arresting, very ‘now’ and still unwinding in spools before our eyes.

Rupert, James, Jeremy Hunt and it seems David Cameron all have to go, out of office for malfeasance if not much worse. Others hopefully “Go to Jail, Go directly to Jail, Do not pass Go!” as is right and proper in a failed bid for Monopoly over us.

Yes, indeed, once again ‘Power Corrupts’, it also induces Collective Selective Amnesia as we heard from Jay QC this week.

Collective selective amnesia.

As it afflicts the Murdochs, Coulson sBrooksand NewsCorps executives.

Collselnesia is perhaps a new diagnosis of intermittent group memory failure, as exemplified by witnesses to Lord Leveson and Commons Select Committees.

It is strangely revealing as the Dark Holes it leaves in the narrative, the lacunae if you will, are composed of Dark Matter. This is, on this earthly plane, stuffed with corrupt foetid matter, lies, rotten undigested material, pallid from the absence of sunlight, but vitally alive in the way piles of maggots are heaving and  busily writhing with a half-life and foul volition all of their own. To be guessed at but only glimpsed and smelled by ordinary honest mortals.

Somewhat like The Black Death, initially suppurating spots and lesions on the body politic, which eventually it will kill.

Burns the poet coined the unforgettable line

“Would some pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursel’s as others see us”

as I remember it.

Cross examiner Jay found it hard going to penetrate the smart and unshakeably thick skinned carapace of Neil Wallis and his illusion of perfectly honourable behaviour with now ex-senior officers of the Yard.

But Leveson deftly defenestrated him with an almost aside remark before breaking off, but actually surely calculated, to do with lack of transparency in those relations:

“We know now there was more than was revealed in the police hospitality records”

Wallis hesitates, sticks with faux-innocence and oblivious to effect it seems,

“Do we?”

From a man under arrest!  Surely due for ‘time’ to reconsider his perspective.

Is it too fanciful to conclude elements within News Corp’s newspaper The Sunday Times have deliberately gone for Cameron as a revenge strike? He has turned his back on them, or worse.

Quite a missile they have launched, even an exocet beneath the waterline.

On top of the Millionaire’s budget comes Donor Dinners at taxpayer provided residences, using them for Party purposes. Tut tut.

OK, expected from the Guardian, but from a Tory paper, well well.

Best fun since Dacre grilling was Jay sweetly arm wrestling the two senior met coppers Hayman and Yates over sins of commission and omission. Too close to NoW and champagne snorting, no active pursuit of evidence of wrongdoing.

Two monkeys see no evil hear no evil.

Henry Porter in The Observer says:”It was a masterclass in forensic examination”.

“The process is polite but remorseless…there could not be a more civilised antidote to Murdoch’s influence”.

So James is departed, only time now before Rupert and the whole malign conspiracy is rolled up.

The reverberations in the US will be fun too “My name is Ozymandias…look on my works..nothing beside remains…”

Funny old service the coppers, recruiting good proletarian lads years ago and some rise up the ranks, unlike all others now with grads five a penny on the dole.

Not all those plodders bulge with all the necessary kit, and lapses ensue, some even innocently. Maybe it was all the boozy dinners.

I thought I heard a plop as Yates was dropped in it, Hayman agreeing there WAS evidence for a review. Well of course there sodding was, thousands of the hacked deserving it and the Guardian and New York Times yelling .

And Yates with his finger plugging the dam saying ‘no evidence’.

LOL at the irony Jay picked up when he said there was evidence his own phone was hacked. Very elastic term to some is ‘evidence’.

Will the long arm of the law mean Yate’s finger prints will not show on the decision not to reopen the inquiry and to leave NOW journos uninterviewed, it now seems, never mind unprosecuted?

Despite PC Plod toiling in the treacle yesterday discussing their first names being on documents confiscated from eventually convicted lawbreaker private investigator Glen Mulcaire.

Can the forensic Mr Jay QC project his long and hairy arm/intellect down the video link to feel his collar and gently hoist him up to where it seems he belongs?