We should be looking for more villains, not the harmless folk who go with the flow

Ed Miliband, I’m told, is agonising over whether to challenge the choice of Lord Leverson as inquiry judge on the Hackgate saga because he attended two parties hosted by a Murdoch. In fact at the moment, anyone who ever accepted Newscorp hospitality is suspect. That would include me, as it happens. I also met Robert Maxwell three times. Perhaps I should be interviewed by Mossad. This is too much micro-paranoia when there are bigger fish to fry: God may well be in the detail, but the Devil very rarely is.

What we are dealing with here is appalling misbehaviour at the core of a rotten elite. We are all attracted to stars, in whatever walk of life. Members of that elite are going to bump into the bad eggs at some point, and short of becoming hermits, there’s very little they can do about it. Ignoring the advice of everyone from the Queen to his wife’s stepmum about a dodgy head of Comms for Number Ten is one thing for a Prime Minister. Going on about somebody having a Murdoch on LinkedIn or Facebook is just silly.

But that’s what politicos and journos with an agenda do: ‘Soames once said hello to Matthew Freud down the Waitrose’ and so forth. What the better journalists and bloggers are still doing is a combination of raising important questions about the folks trying desperately to hide their radioactive light under the nearest handy bushell. The rest is just political mud-slinging.

Sh*t of the Year, for example, must be awarded to the ever-pious Max Clifford, the man who trousered £750,000 of Murdoch hush-money in order to help Newscorp keep the lid on a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. We always knew Max was an arse, but now we know he’s a total see you next Tuesday. However, we’re in that grey area between civil litigation and criminal law here. Legally, Clifford is safe; morally, I’ve made him a target for future reference. (Gordon Taylor is also in the Slog’s black book).

Then there’s Lawrence Abramson, a man who – newly released from his client obligation to silence – needs to explain why he gave Newscorp a clean bill of health on the subject of Royal emails. This whole avenue, to my mind, has the potential to be the Krakatoa that blows away a great many in the Establishment crust. Sleuths are still confused as to why the Palace is coy about this area (and Number Ten even more so) but they will get to the root of it in the end. And there’s nothing more satisfying than getting to the root of a volcano. It’s hard not to mix metaphors sooner or later in this saga.

Neville Thurlbeck is another chap who’s doing reasonably well at evading further questioning. Probably the most unpleasantly amoral muck-raker in the history of tabloid journalism, Nev loops us back into the Land of Plod, where it now emerges that he was a registered police informant (aka grass, slag etc etc) for many years. It’ll be interesting asking Andy Coulson and Andy Hayman about that situation in separate interview rooms . Or not as the case may be, allegedly.

On and on the names go….Piers Morgan, Tony Gallagher, Holly Watt, Tom Baldwin and several others (one a celebrated blogger) who may be entirely innocent, but over whom hangs the grey cloud of doubt. No doubt many of the accused will use the Aitken Sword of Truth to refute all of this outrageous tittle-tattle, but as people they’re not important: what matters is establishing all the directions and methods via which privacy invasion has been used to erode our liberties – and subvert the social, legal, policing and political systems of Britain.

Most of the punters out there still haven’t grasped anything of the helicopter view of Hackgate: they see it as just evidence of what they’d always felt about tabloid hacks…indeed, what Spitting Image was telling them twenty years ago: that they’re pigs luxuriating in the swill of a culture turned bad.

For the rest of us, there can be no rest until all of it is out. Tom Watson is ahead of the wave when he says that email/pc blagging will be bigger still. I know he’s right – as do all those professionally engaged in corporate cyber-security. This is, I suspect, a sector the Royal protection police would dearly love to keep the lid on.

Beyond Newscorp, the broader media, blogosphere, business, financial market, security, military and political Party dimensions of Hackgate have barely been scratched as yet. The Establishment will be hoping that we’re content with a few trophies, topped off by Cameron’s scalp at the denouement. But there can be no satisfactory denouement after Act One: just as with the global economic crisis, there are three acts still to go yet.