Verbal

You seem to have ever so slightly missed the point.

As Saintsweb's answer to Warren Buffet, it's time for you to invest your mortgage (alright, every last 5p in your jam jar), in News International.

At times like these I can't think of a more important issue.

Quite impressive that the lasting impression of the evidence given by the police to the Select Committee today was that they were a bunch of incompetent, corrupt, lazy, wide boys (and girl). I'm sure that's the message they wanted to convey...

Not by the Competition Commission. The FAPP test is applied by Ofcom, who are now looking into it and presumably waiting to see who ends up in jail. If Murdoch goes the way of Lord Black, as he might after another raft of allegations that have not received any coverage on the all-important Saintsweb, then I think you could be sure that M is not a FAPP.

There's quite a technical argument to be had by referring the bid for BSkyB to the Competition Commission, and it has as much to do with his dominance of the market in television itself as with any influence from other parts of NI. What's at stake, as far as the CC is concerned, is whether Murdoch's owning 100% of BSkyB means he unfairly monopolises rights to sports, movies, etc, to the detriment of competitors. As things stand, whether he owns the papers or not, it's highly questionable he'd pass the competition test. And remember, the usual outcome of a referral to the CC is that the bid fails.

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.