Ethics and morality in business, the media and politics can be a bit like the gold market: every now and then, there’s a rally by the blokes in the white hats. This seems to be happening at the moment.

We start with the unelected drunk and former Managing Director of Radio Luxemburg currently pretending to be President of Europe. Mr Jean-Claude Juncker – a bullying crook who watched his beloved EU rape Cyprus on the grounds of it being a tax haven – was rather miffed two years ago when the ECB turned round and said “No let’s have a look at Luxemburg”….which is, of course, a real haven of tax evasion. Juncker than rang up Big Sister Geli the Fridge Magnet, and the whole thing quietly dissipated: like Lord Mandelson’s odd relationships with paedo-pimps, Russian aluminium importers, and boys in Hungary. And Mario Draghi’s role in Monte Del Peishe. And Christine Lagarde’s relations with billionaire UMP donors. And so on.

But now, a deluge of documents have come to light detailing his home country’s role as a haven for hundreds of globalist corporate evaders. No the pressure is on Juncker, who was Luxembourg’s prime minister from 1995 until last year, to explain how adjacent he might have been to all this grubby behaviour.

“It is ridiculous to claim this was going on unbeknownst to Juncker — he was in charge,” Egide Thein, a former director of the Luxembourg Economic Development Bureau, a government body, said in a telephone interview. “Tax evasion was a willful policy of the Luxembourg government, which always justified this by saying it was not its job to act as a tax man for foreign countries.”

It’s an interesting defence, and one that puts me in mind of the Swiss and gold fillings, but there you are: it is at least a little more credible than Charlie Brook’s defence that he threw his laptop in a wheelie bin (when the cops raided the Redtop Residence) because he’s mad.

And talking of Rebekah Brooks, one or two things about life beyond 16 million zapped emails are beginning to give law enforcement officers pause for thought. It seems her first action on taking over the News of the World in 2000 was to hire a Special Investigations Unit. Into this went Mazher Mahmood, then Glenn Mulcaire….both chaps now in the spotlight (and in on case, prison) for phone hacking.

Mahmood started out life as, um, a phone hacker at Southern Investigations. Last Friday, Theresa May announced a judge-led public inquiry into the murder of Daniel Morgan, who was found with an axe embedded in his head in a South London car park in 1987. As Peter Jukes writes:

‘The panel of experts will examine not only the police corruption that sabotaged five successive police investigations and caused the subsequent murder trial to collapse, but also the “connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media and corruption involved in the linkages between them.”’

Before hiring jailbirds and acquitted murderers, Becky was being trained by Piers Morgan at the Mirror. Trinity Mirror, the police say, are now being “very cooperative” with the Hackgate detectives. But Piers in in the clear, because he nevr hacked Heather Mills-McCartney’s mobile…and never played Paul singing to her on the message tape at a Christmas Party. Of course he didn’t.

Words like rope, neck, noose and tightening spring to mind.

At the Weekend Slog: NVEs and EDOs and other forms of fascism