Verbal

It's not only likely he will sell off his UK nationals; he's being pressed to do so by News Corps major shareholders in the US. The Sun is now the only profitable newspaper in the group, and the losses of The Times and The Sunday Times outweigh The Sun's profits.

It looks like Joe Public has taken your advice trousers. Sales of NoW were up - although only to a figure they used to achieve in 2004, and somewhat less than they expected with a print run of 4.5m. The Sun and Times/Sunday Times, however, slumped, while their rivals picked up large numbers. Long may it continue. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/12/sun-times-sales-slump

Sam Vokes comes up every summer on here it seems. I had no idea SWF was so full of sentimentalists.

You've missed one rather important point. It was the investigative journalism of Nick Davies and The Guardian that broke the story in the first place.

There is a wounded self-esteem about the Toryboys on here that they really should get over. This story is bigger than that.

Spelling is okay but meter is all wrong.

Agreed. It's beyond the playground politics of Lab vs Con. This could be Britain's 'Watergate'. Which is why I simply can't buy into this super-conspiracy idea that Murdoch is somehow orchestrating it all.

Yes, it shouldn't happen, even to notorious tax avoiders who somehow are such nobs they nonetheless expect that they should have a strong say in how to run the country. But who exactly does that information identify? No one.

I think you've got this the wrong way round Nick. It was opportunism to expect or hope for favours from Murdoch in return for a quiet or successful political life. Now that NI is no longer behaving as a vindictive state within a state, the real accounting of all the awfulness can and should begin.

The problem trousers is that the assumptions are all yours. If Ed M says something critical of Coulson, it's ssumed by you to be a party-political issue alone. It's that partly - but there IS a wider and legitimate question of parliamentary ethics here. Coulson had already been exposed by The Guardian when Cameron took him on. Even Clegg had the momentary sense to see that at the time. So there are questions to be asked.

I refer your dealership to post no. 495.

Just as the majority of journalists - including the one mainly responsible for breaking this story against the odds - are not hellbent on 'distorting the truth'.

Yes, Parliamentary scrutiny of this whole affair should stop forthwith.

All antique dealers sell crack.

Evidence? Email trail? Anything at all apart from a notorious tax-avoider's say-so?

The Editors are a crappy band. Brown should hang his head in shame.

The answer is pretty obvious. Then, unlike now, NI were a law unto themselves. Anyone who chose to go publicly against them tended to find themselves taken down by yet another one of their scams. Politicians all the way up the tree were running scared of Murdoch. Now they're not.

The rumours thread was untidy. It's important to be tidy - more important than freedom of speech imo.

The revelation about the criminal conspiracy at the heart of NI WAS the 'explosive' element. The Millie Dowler episode was merely one aspect of it. Short memories aside, Davies' original report DID attract a lot of attention - and its wasn't about celebs but about payoffs on an epic scale. Davies, as well as Tom Watson in the HoC, have plugged away at the issue of this conspiracy for years. They weren't so much ignored as repeatedly warned (Watson in particular) that they were in a certain amount of danger if they persisted. Until recently, the balance of threat was always in favour of NI. The Dowler scandal tipped the balance, and continues to do so in ways which no one - least of all Murdoch - can control or predict.

The question of 'why now?' presupposes that The Guardian has only just broken this story. They haven't. Here's a list of Nick Davies' stories on the subject going back two years - not quite far enough, in fact, to include the article he wrote which broke the criminal conspiracy angle in 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/nickdavies

If Murdoch throws his UK toys out of the pram what happens to the prem? The implications of all this for football could get interesting.

Anyone investigating THAT would not have proceeded because they were too busy laughing at the loonytunes mock-Irishman who used to peddle the crap that sent the price through the roof. Not QUITE the same thing, though, is it, trousers?

We're getting into flying saucer territory here, Phil. Ever heard of Occam's Razor? It's a good principle to apply to your arguments because you'd end up discarding all of them, or at least acknowledging how out there they are.

At the very least it's a stretch to argue that Murdoch deliberately orchestrated the utter chaos that has befallen his entire empire in order to play hoopla with the share price of a small-ish bit of it. The idea that he would have thought it worth the trouble to alienate some of the biggest institutional investors in his corporation, and subject his senior employees to prolonged police investigation, political scrutiny and public opprobrium, all in the name of a little bit of share-price skimming, amounts to saying merely that he is guilty of yet one more criminal act (as the manipulation of share prices is). On top of the mountain of accusations and charges that NI now faces as a result of this criminal conspiracy, I'm sure a bit of share-price fraud it's exactly the kind of thing he would think it a good idea to do... It's bonkers.

Go on...