Hard Pressed

Supreme Leader Rupert and his slightly foxed red-top Rebekah Brooks are once again suffering harassment over their little misadventures in the phone-hacking trade, with Zac Goldsmith and several real people lining up to sue the most scumbag rag of them all, the Falklands and Hillsborough Sun. This is all the more vindictive in that the Murdoch empire has thoroughly demonstrated its innocence: partly by paying people large sums of money not to ask questions, and partly by denouncing Brooks as a hopeless incompetent who didn't bother to check on how her hacks were obtaining their information. Perhaps, since it was after all the free and fearless British press, she and the Mirror's equally discreet Piers Morgan simply assumed that all the stories were made up. In any case, given the National Johnson's background in scumbag journalism, albeit for chickenfeed six-figure wages, it now seems possible that his whine about politically motivated lawyers may have had some resonance beyond merely asserting the moral superiority of race-baiting and refugee-bashing over the empty legalism of civilised behaviour.