But the latest IoS Hackgate revelation comes ahead of next week’s Leveson gangbang

On the front page of today’s Sunday Times is a piece about the EU allowing Turkey to benefit from its welfare benefits. I ran the story here at The Slog just over three weeks ago. Nice of the MSM (Murdoch Sh*ite Media) to credit me, not, but the Newscaught excuse would probably be that their story was really about Turkish rights to UK welfare benefits. In other words, the added value of the ST piece was to remind everyone that Britain is in the EU.

The Murdoch Chimes also got Chris Grayling to give them a tough-guy quote (he doesn’t return my calls) which is the predictably laughable drivel Ministers trot out until Brussels just goes ahead and does it anyway. Grayling said he would be taking “a very firm view”, and he was “not happy”, and would be “going through the Courts to stop it”.

Bollocks.

James Hanning and Jane Merrick’s IoS piece, by contrast, keeps the pressure up on the denialists still convinced that David Cameron is quite nice really, and all this nonsense about being in Murdoch’s pocket is just a lot of “Left-wing piffle” as the new London Mayor suggested last year.

The Downing Street tactic (once Newscorp fixer Frédéric Michel was caught inside Jeremy Hunt’s bottom) was to smear Michel as “a fantasist”, in a not dissimilar rmanner to that in which Hunt himself crapped all over a special adviser in order to save his own scrawny neck the week before. But the IoS scoop shows pretty clearly that Frederic Mitty was arranging meetings between Murdoch Board members and the Cameron-Hague-Osborne Troika as long ago as 2009 – in preparation for talks about the BSkyB bid – when the Coalition was still just a nightmare in the back of Steve Hilton’s blue-skying mind.

Cameron’s spin merchants meanwhile (remember Dave’s promise that he would bring spin to an end?) plastered his comeback strategy all over the British press this weekend, thus clinically missing the point that the guy’s credibility problem with the electorate is a much bigger one than that he has with the 1922 Committee. This is only going to get worse as the Death Row of former Cameron mates pitches up at Leveson this coming week – led by former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, and Mr Cameron’s ex-communications chief, Andy Coulson.