How many Premiership football clubs balance their budget? English football has become a hollow mess. It’s always been corrupt. Murdoch just made everyone a lot richer, and made football cost a lot more to enjoy.

Yet Cameron has hired as his media expert the man who was supposedly in charge of the journalists committing all this wrong doing.. Does not say much for his judgement, but then we all new that.

Sorry the Tory trolls can’t see the hypocrisy here but then Tories aren’t too consistent on issues of sleaze. The reason this story is going nowhere is because most of the press including the BBC is now completely in the tank for Cameron. In addition most newspapers are up to the same tricks so don’t want to get into a shouting match with Murdoch.

He joined PRWeek in January 2007, having previously worked on the GuardianUnlimited website and the social policy magazines Inside Housing and Children Now.

A keen politico, David started his career at BBC News Online during the 2001 general election

Look at that long list of right wing publications!

If only we could get a promising (or even spotty) youth on a work experience gig, we could get them to trawl through Smithson’s blog looking for all the comments praising Fox news as more impartial than the BBC – there must be hundreds…

That’s a relief!

We can all stop worrying about serious breaches of privacy by a newspaper (worse than the State) because Mike Smithson (who he?) says it’s all “rather overblown”!

I’ll rest easy tonight, then.

Ehh yeah, and that story was written based on what, other than the writer’s imagination? Nice try though Tim J.

Eh? I don’t really understand what this is supposed to mean. If you’re referring to Coulson’s involvement in the NOTW scandal, when he was involved with the NOTW he wasn’t employed by the Tories. And, as you said yourself with regard to the McBride scandal, the Tories per se aren’t really implicated in this story. Hence, attempts to make this story about Cameron and the Tories are little more than partisan attacks. To be expected, obviously, but also to be dismissed. If you have an intelligible rebuttal, I’d be interested to read it.

Mike Smithson (no Tory) seems to think the whole thing was rather overblown.

It certainly doesn’t seem to have taken off in the way some people thought it would.

Ehh yeah, and that story was written based on what, other than the writer’s imagination? Nice try though Tim J.

When Tories try to defend NI over the phone-tapping saga they are, in effect, saying : ‘Leave the arbitrary power of surveillance wielded by my political allies alone.’

I think it’s a wider story than phone-tapping. The NOTW broke the law in pursuit of a good story (or a series of good stories, defined in tabloid terms). When is this acceptable? If the answer is never, then the expense claims, Jonathan Aitken’s perjury, and, ironically, the Guardian’s own expose of the NOTW should never have been published.

The Guardian obtained court papers that had been sealed pursuant to a court order (a Tomlin order). That’s arguably in contempt of court, which carries an unlimited jail term. If it is never acceptable for a newspaper to break the law in pursuit of a story, that applies to worthy stories as much as filth. If you’re arguing that, in effect, it’s OK for newspapers to break the law in pursuit of stories provided they’re against the Tories/Rupert Murdoch, then you’re arguing precisely the point you criticise the Tories for.

I’d take the analogy further. In both cases, the issue is arbitrary power – the ability of people in high places to treat you as they think fit rather than according to appropriate rules. The police (wrongly) took the decision in the legal case of Austin to indicate that they can impose kettles on protestors as and when they like. This led directly to the disastrous policing of the G20 protests. When Tories try to defend NI over the phone-tapping saga they are, in effect, saying : ‘Leave the arbitrary power of surveillance wielded by my political allies alone.’

Arbitrary power is an evil whoever wields it – financial elites, parliamentarians, police officers, or News International.

This arse-kissing piece of utter nonsense was written because Tory Home blog is desperate for that endorsement of its wholly decrepit Party from the Sun newspaper.

Absolutely desperate.

Wow. I… wow.

Can people like you not get into your head that this is not actually a partisan issue?

It is to laugh.

Another Labour insider said that senior party figures had been thrashing out a strategy to target Coulson since the news emerged yesterday. The source said the aim was have Coulson ‘wounded, but still there’.

This is certainly being used as a partisan issue, as in Sunny’s ‘Tories caught in compromising positions’ above. I thought we’d established (read Jackie Ashley today for example) that Coulson is a non-ideological professional, brought in to do a job for the Tories. What he did or didn’t know before he joined the Conservative team is of no consequence to the Tory party. As Sunny himself ought to think if he has any consistency in his opinions.

I am often dragged to matches on family occasions, despite not giving a toss about football, & really could do with a drop to help me pretend I’m somewhere else

The wikileaks editorial has already been shredded on its own comments page. It is also a gigantically stupid point-missing exercise from someone who doesn’t seem to have actually read what really went on and who was targetted (Gwyneth Paltrow is hardly the UK political elite now, is she?)

Can people like you not get into your head that this is not actually a partisan issue? It’s between people who hate the amount of influence Murdoch has over UK public life, and think it unhealthy for the country, and people who think it’s fine, usually because they’re hoping to get him to ‘help’ them.

And I struggle to think of a stupider piece *ever* than Montgomery’s. He knows literally nothing worth knowing about football for a start.

“The Guardian’s coverage is disproportionate. It is moral opportunism. It is the worst kind of snobbery. It is an excuse to mention tabloid stories in a broadsheet. And it is dangerous. The result be will a publishing climate and probably legislation aimed at keeping the British public in the dark. The implicit lionization of nanny journalism by the Guardian is shameful.”

Hope you’ve got your oxygen mask on Sunny – that’s a very high horse you’re riding.

Any nice chats with Tom Watson recently?