Somehow, Boris, Rupert and Alistair snatched victory in the needle match between decent journalism and tabloid toadies

I’m indebted to The Slog’s peripatetic media correspondent Dietrich von Ausland for reminding me about the foreign ownership thing in relation to Leveson. I did in fact spend much of last week – once the Judge had succumbed to pressure published his four volumes of memoirs – trying to persuade hacks, MPs and opinion leaders of my acquaintance that the complete absence of the issue from his conclusions was a might fishy. I didn’t have a lot of success, and something tells me that this might have had a lot to do with the fact that most of them were Tory MPs or hacks – and themselves owned by foreign proprietors in one way or another.

In the end, it fell to the indomitable Harold Evans in the Guardian to get the subject upfront and out there. Being across the Pond these days, Harry can be as forthright as he likes; it was a terrific piece that made me think we should’ve eschewed the expensive enquiry route and simply asked him what to do eighteen months ago.

All up, and the obvious arm-twisting considered, it seems to me that enquiritus has once again been hijacked by the governing Establishment to confuse, pacify and then hoodwink the public – most of whom don’t give a stuff about press regulation in the first place. The Conservative Party wants to maintain their press’s ability to write distracting bollocks about nonentities, and the Lablib axis of censorship wants to torpedo the Rightist scrivener’s ability to pick holes in their single-minded liberal intolerance.

I think they’ll both wind up with a lot of what they want, but I want to return to the extra-time hijacking of the original Leveson agenda that took place, and point up if I can just how breathtaking the heist was…..and how phenomenally successful.

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We wandered into the Leveson saga because a tabloid from the Newscorp stable (the News of the World) had been caught over and over again by dedicated Leftie luvvies hacking their phones and using the private contents to write salacious stories about their tedious private lives. Ordinary Brits hoover up any old cobblers about celeb lives, and are therefore (I’d imagine) heavily against stopping the hacking of famous phones, on the grounds that all the juicy bits will now dry up.

Hardly anyone gave a monkey’s about Hackgate until the depraved Screws newsroom made the fatal error of hacking a dead child’s phone. After that the game was up, and Murdoch himself was forced to parade about making insincere apologies while pretending his brain had gone to sleep some time during 2003. He told the CM&S committee that answering their questions was “the most humble day of my life” – banging the table very hard to make his point. And then he gave evidence that was a transparent act of amnesiac lies from start to finish.

From Day One of the revelations about phone-hacking, Boris Johnson denied any truth to it, declared it to be victimisation of the Murdoch press, and afterwards failed to apologise to a single victim when it soon transpired he was talking out of his capacious bum.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the reasons we went through the circus formerly known as Leveson: to ensure that an organisation run by gangsters might be removed from our culture, and the various morons up to the same lark on tabloids of all shades would be discouraged from ever doing it again.

For a while there towards the end of the first half, it really looked as though the monstrous conspiracy between police, Newscorp, Number Ten and the Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt was going to be made plain. But somehow, it didn’t happen: most of the cops, pols and hacks involved variously perjured, toadied and dissembled their way through it – and got clean away with a disgraceful extra-Parliamentary plot to dismantle the BBC and replace it with Sky. Their total success in doing this can be measured by the fact that Leveson, unbelievably, declared in his report that Hunt had not in any way been biased during his handling of the Newscorp bid for BSkyB.

But it was still 1-0 to the White Hats when, with four minutes left, Newscorp latched onto a story going nowhere in the minority media about Jimmy Savile, and turned it into a full-frontal assault on the Beeb. The lucky bounce was turned into a spectacular scissor-kicked own goal when some spotty teenagers on the Newsnight team got confused between Alistair and Jimmie McAlpine. From then on, it took nothing more than a sidefoot in from four feet out by veteran Morris Johnbull in the 93rd minute to ensure victory for the Black Hats….whose collusion in the dastardly deeds of Murdochania had precipitated Leveson in the first place. Enter late substitutes Lord McAlpine and Andrew Greed to declare before the world that the real problem was Twitter….followed by a Johnbull clincher at the final whistle backing up his point in the equally ‘spotless’ Maily Telegraph.

That’s the narrative, but I still find it hard to unpick precisely how we were 1-0 up in the 86th minute, yet lost 3-1 just seven minutes later. The bottom line for the decent British citizen is this: Newscorp emerges largely untarnished, corrupt governance has been entirely covered up, and irreverent anti-British elements remain free to stroll in and buy up any title they fancy in order to promote their batty and unelected views.There is a reasonable chance that, with pushing from the Liblab axis plus some wrong-headed Tory perverts defecting in favour of press-gagging, the end result of this search for Justice will be the triumph of police graft and powerful paedophiles.

Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan may see this as a victory, but I’m damned if I do.