Public-interest piety is the real threat to a free press

For me the only useful fact to emerge from the otherwise immensely tedious Leveson inquiry was this: that messages on the phone of Milly Dowler were not erased by News of the World journalists.

Of course, it would have been a much, much better story if they had been. Eavesdropping on the phone messages of a murdered schoolgirl may be creepy and unpleasant but it is essentially a victimless crime.