Last year I wrote that the Leveson inquiry would suit Jeremy Hunt rather well. He had appointed Lord Justice Leveson, a judge with little previous experience of media law to sit alongside a remarkably undistinguished panel of assessors. They would inflict more blows on the battered cause of freedom of speech, I thought. But they would steer well clear of the corrupt relationship between Rupert Murdoch and successive governments, which had allowed his hacks to believe that the law of the land did not apply to them.
I underestimated Murdoch’s titanic self-pity. The old American definition of an honest politician is that ‘once he’s bought, he stays bought’. The same does not apply to the Dirty Digger. Hunt is the latest in a long line of ministers to find that you can’t buy Murdoch. You can only hire him.
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