MPs squabble over their own phone hacking report

The education select committee reported earlier, but it is the report of another select committee that will get all the attention today. The culture, media and sport select committee has just delivered its verdict on the phone hacking scandal, naming names and apportioning blame — or at least in theory it has. In practice, ‘its verdict’ may be stretching it a bit. During the press conference just now, the individual members of the committee could barely put up a united front at all.

There are the parts of the report that they all agree upon: that the former News International employees Les Hinton, Tom Crone and Colin Myler misled the committee in their testimony, for instance. And then there are the parts that they disagree upon among themselves. The most vexatious of these appears to be an amendment, submitted by Tom Watson, to the effect that ‘Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company.’