There are some good comments under the story in the Mail, plenty of Mail readers seem to be looking down their noses at the NOTW refering to it as the gutter press. Given that the Mail has lifted lots of stories from the NOTW I'm not really sure that the Mail really is in a position to take the high moral ground.

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www.newshuddlines.blogspot.com

You're right, of course, about Ford being tied into binding agreements. I just found the tone of their statement - distancing themselves from NOTW while sucking up to News International - somewhat revolting.

I don't buy the bit about Rupe's loyality, though. Brooks isn't family and is becoming a serious embarrassment. Advertiser boycotts work - mobile phone companies aren't going to fall over themselves to place ads in News of the World for a while.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

What would be outstanding now is if someone can produce something that shows Rupert himself was in on it - a proper "A Few Good Men" moment. Incredibly unlikely I know, but hey.

If it goes criminal, I wonder if Brooks could be persuaded to sell out her sugar uncle in exchange for a let off?

Rupert will be fine. Look at how much shit Fox News gets away with all the time.

Domestically, however, Kelvin McKenzie's piece in the Guardian the other day is looking somewhat poorly-timed now. I suspect he's going to be in for some questions as the fallout from this spreads to other NI senior staff, past and present.

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Soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentity

Newsnight looks good for this.

And trains too for those of us from the Thomas thread.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Breaking on BBC News channel, emails concerning Coulson sent to the police.

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"Even when you're a super-computer with an IQ of 2000 it's brown trousers time."

Reclaiming "methinks" for the nation

Latest blog post - 2011 - a review (updated 07/10)

Robert Peston reporting NI have handed over emails detailing payments to police, and implicate Andy Coulson.

Which makes this look a bit silly:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyy ... s-officer/

I didn't say she is family, I said she is "family" and Murdoch treats them as one and the same. She has been brawling in the street, presided over management reshuffles that have cost them dozens of millions, lurched from one ill-conceived digital strategy to another and has been sitting on this particular powder keg for years now (do you seriously think that all the options have not already been explored at 6am Sunday meetings in Wapping with the lawyers and will have already have a strategy worked out where there will be an unwritten but implicitly agreed red-line that denotes where enough is enough?)

Whether Phones 4U decides to pull for a while is irrelevant. They would be the only losers in that particular game; they only spend money there because for every pound they invest, they make x more back and it has nothing to do with "support" or otherwise. Yes, the weasel words of Ford are nauseating but I didn't see their money flooding wholesale out of the sun after Hillsborough, the star after their EDL shenanigans or The Mirror after Abu Ghraib (not) 2.0

What is far more relevant is how this will sit with NI's position not just within government circles but upon the wider benches of both houses. If various Select Committees and The House Of Lords get a sniff that they have been humiliated and had the piss taken out of them in the investigations thus far, then there will be hell to pay.

And that problem short-circuits straight back to Cameron; he can not afford to lose their tutelage and he certainly won't be wanting to gift the liberals an 89th minute penalty whereby they might salvage some of their evapourating support by standing up for the parents of murdered children in the face of a rapacious press and while the tories are sitting on their hands.

If Coulson gets away with this (and he must be feeling the heat), he and Madame Guillotine will make such a lovely couple.

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Brigate di Transizione

I actually missed your reference to "the family", which is my fault for reading your post while doing some writing at the same time.

I still think that Brooks is expendable. She's not a Murdoch and the ageing paterfamilias will have an eye on passing his legacy on to the next generation.

My guess is that we'll both be proved right - Brooks will be jettisonned to save face, then quietly brought back when the heat cools off.

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"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
Voltaire

The thing which I'm most interested by is that this hasn't yet stopped. And who is next in line in the chain of command in this sorry saga?

First, it was Coulson.
Now, it is Brooks.
Next? James Murdoch. And if it gets to that stage then things will get interesting indeed...

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"Even when you're a super-computer with an IQ of 2000 it's brown trousers time."

Reclaiming "methinks" for the nation

Latest blog post - 2011 - a review (updated 07/10)

Philip Hammond has just said this is nothing to do with the BSkyB takeover.

Interesting. So Cameron is nailing his colours to Murdoch's mast whilst the ship is, by the hour, coming under increasing fire. I wonder if he knows something that we don't, or is he just being a dick again?

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

Agreed. And then watch the tide roar back out to reveal the Blockwarts like Hardy, Milner, Anderson plus all those auditors who signed off the accounts which included all these payments. My oh my, this will keep the good folk of India busy for years fishing out all those emails from the data farm where they are currently being stored.

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Brigate di Transizione

I always understood that James had been sent off to Digital TV (As Michael Corleone was to Sicily) to keep him relatively clean.

PCC Chair dying on her arse:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-14033043

You've revealed nothing.
Yes, I have.
What?
I revealed we were lied to.

Which she didn't reveal.