Old news

There is one crumb of comfort that Fleet Street can extract from the phone-hacking scandal: its own foibles still create a vastly bigger splash than do those of newer media. This week Facebook investors harangued the company’s chief executive for wearing a hoodie in meetings and Yahoo’s chief executive resigned after a shareholder questioned his claim to hold a computer science degree. But they hardly caused a ripple compared with the news that former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, her husband and five others are to be charged with perverting the course of ­justice.

The hacking inquiry has become like The Mousetrap: a show that never closes. Unlike The Mousetrap, however, it is showing simultaneously in three different West End theatres: the High Court, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Magistrates Court. The proceedings have grown so far out of proportion to the offence that the Whitehall Theatre might be a better location: it has become a farce. As Charles Moore observed recently, it is not so much an inquiry as a daily revue where the rich and powerful insult and expose each other for the public’s entertainment. Or disgust.

Between being set up last July and the end of January — at which time the inquiry itself had only sat for 35 days — the Leveson inquiry had already cost the taxpayer nearly £2 million. Operation Weeting, the police inquiry in which 90 officers are involved, will cost £40 million, more than is spent each year by the Metropolitan Police investigating child abuse. The previous excesses of Britain’s ­compensation culture have been wildly exceeded, with hundreds of thousands of pounds being paid to individual victims. The saga has confirmed the reputation of English civil law as a machine for channelling large quantities of money to those who are already rich, while doing little for ordinary people.