Murdochismo

Watching the Parliamentary Committee grilling the Murdochistas was short on drama or revelation and shows just how feeble our political institutions are even when faced with the shadow of yesterday's wealth and power. Most of the committee just cannot forget how to tug their forlocks.

Great press (and related media) barons are not new in Britain. What is new about Murdoch is he exists in a post Berlusconi era. Billionaire Berlusconi tore down the tattered Italian establishment, riddled as it was with the old corruption. Forza Italia and the cry of the common man put him on top of the mouldering heap of Italian politics. Berlusconi's new corruption brazenly fashioned its venality on the ashes of the old.

Billionaire Murdoch was not powerful enough to tear down the British establishment. The owner of the Times got further in his efforts than the owner of Harrods. Who can forget the tampax prince? But a mass current, like the US T Party, whose engine room was the unresolved racism of a civil war, was not available in Britain. So Murdoch left for the land of the free. The US establishment understood cavalier, racist, self-aggrandising, old, white men. Only the sharp practice, the winner takes all, the down and dirty legacy remained in Britain while Murdoch was welcomed into all of America's top clubs.

And in Britain Murdoch let loose his epigones and their sharpies - blessed for a decade by the paralysed awe of top politicians and policemen.

There was a sizeable corner of England that was forever Murdoch - to be made three times larger than the BBC if he had got his hands on all of BSkyB. But it was not everything. The British establishment still had room to breath.

What has now broken the Murdochistas? After all most of the scandals about Murdoch have been known for years. In the end what brought them down was another sort of anti-establishment radicalism. One that started with distrust and then rage at the banks, then anger with the the politicians, peppered by a student and youth upheaval and the sights and sounds of the Arab rebellion. Young people are tired of Big Brother scandals and celebrity high jinks, and do not now, and never will, read the Sun. What brought them down was a weak government without a firm social base, that looks like a public school boy lobby for the interests of the rich. Murdoch has found himself not as the outsider, the radical, the leader of change against the dusty ways of the old school. He has instead become a symbol of them. He is the feral wing of a dubious establishment. His radical solutions turn into the tragedy of old peoples' homes that close because they cannot turn a profit.

The popular opprobrium the Murdoch faces is not a result of his distinction from the establishment of the great and the good. It is that he has become one of its increasingly despised pillars - together with the top politicians and policemen that he has corrupted.