Once in a while in death, you learn something about life. So it was this morning at the gracious church of St Martin’s in The Field’s on a rare sunny corner of London’s Trafalgar Square.

We who report, retrieve, investigate, edit, disseminate, and pontificate, came together to remember Marie Colvin. The Church – huge as it is, was packed – perhaps six or seven hundred deep. A black and white pre-eye patch Marie gazed down upon us, replicated both sides of the high altar.

In thinking about her death in Syria as she bent down to retrieve the shoes she  had discarded at the door of a house in Homs – discarded out of respect for those who lived there – we thought about her unique and indefatigable journalism, her laughter, and her constant disregard for her editors’ orders in the pursuit of the stories she wanted to cover. We thought about the serendipity of death in our ranks. She who had survived so much, she who had taken so many risks. But Syria’s persistent bloody civil war proved one dangerous choice too far and claimed her life.

Why her, why not another of us? All of us make snap judgements – to travel down that road – to engage with those troops – to fly on that plane, and we live. But sitting in the church this morning surrounded by some of the very best of British journalism, I felt overwhelmed by a sense of what is good about our trade. So much bad has flowed from the scandal that has gushed across Lord Leveson’s desk, in and out of assorted police stations, back pockets and the rest, that one begins to feel tarred with the same brush.

And we are not and she was not. We are the servants of the people – their eyes and ears, and what we do is of profound value to understanding the world in which we live. Amid the democratisation of information, we are the tribunes. Sometimes we fail to recognise the pivotal role we play and the responsibility that flows from it.

As the choir offered a sumptuous ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and the organist pumped the full organ’s strength to fill every vault of the church with Widor’s Toccata in F, I felt both challenged and uplifted. Uplifted whilst remembering the death of a colleague?  Strange, but somehow it is true. Marie Colvin set us a standard to aspire to. And the challenge is to go out and find greater integrity, greater humanity, greater truths. And in that moment I feel everyone present was at least for a time committed to doing so.

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Not the hacking of Millie Dowler‘s phone. Not even the allegation that someone may even have deleted several of her messages. No, today’s charges by the CPS against Rebekah and Charlie Brooks, the current head of security at News International, and others, are allegations of cover-up.

The charges are about an alleged conspiracy last year to remove or conceal documents, computers and so on – not the vast ramifications of the alleged hacking crimes that have so filled the web, the newscasts and the papers for the past several years. Obviously, legal proceedings will now take their course, and the Brooks have already released a statement deploring the “weak and unjust” action by the CPS.

As a general point, it is interesting, isn’t it, that it can be what happened after a legal issue is raised that then triggers consequences as significant, if not more so, than the original allegation.

I am minded of what may be learned from the lessons of Watergate, one of the most extreme examples. A small break-in at an apartment in Washington’s Watergate complex, orchestrated by Republican operatives. The fundamentals of the case were not about trying to steal the Democrat’s secrets, but about the cover-up that followed.

Alas the man who might have talked about it all most eloquently was Chuck Colson, one of the conspirators, and the “hatchet man” for Richard Nixon. But I’m afraid he died last month. Colson? Sounds familiar? Where have we heard that name before? Ah, that’s Coulson… Quite another story.

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A Martian checking in on Earth News for the first time since 2008 might well wonder whether our global banking history is repeating itself.

One of the world’s gold-plated banks goes rogue, the eurozone in crisis, and the bond market experiences a collective nervous breakdown.

It doesn’t take a Martian to work out that maybe all but nothing has been learned from the financial meltdown of 2008. Indeed, stop more or less anyone on any European street, or any American street, and they will tell you nothing’s been done to address the ingredients of the 2008 crisis.

JPMorgan: a tempest no longer in a teapot?

JPMorgan: not just any bank

The ‘tempest in a teapot’ at JPMorgan – first spotted by other traders and financial experts four weeks ago – involves all the stupidity and miscalculation that described the elements of the 2008 banking crisis. When a bank anticipates $17bn in profits in 2012, a $2bn loss may not sound too bad. But JPMorgan isn’t just any bank.

I have spoken with a close contact who worked in the upper echelon of the bank. He tells me that there has been a ‘cultural breakdown’ at the bank, not by a lone ‘rogue trader’ but by the entire team in the trusted department in which the losses occurred.

JPMorgan, largely spared in the 2008 crisis, has sported more than a century of ‘gold plated’ behavioural reputation. Not any more.

Greek tragedy

And all this against a backdrop of the Greek shambles and the vulnerability of the eurozone that it exposes. Beware Greeks bearing splits, the democratic crisis in the country, the uncertainty over its membership of the euro threaten banking and currency stability well beyond the eurozone, including our own here in Britain.

This is a dangerous time. We have become inured to financial scare stories. But this is no longer a scare, it is a fact. It might be wise for us all to tune in, and hang on to our hats, or should that read back pockets?

“She’ll do you down the line, Jon”. My editor was talking about the remarkable Claire Lomas who had just crossed the finishing line of the London marathon sixteen days after the rest. ‘Down the line’ means I sit in the studio and she’s piped in on a video link from a truck. You never get to make eye contact or get to feel the atmosphere of meeting someone and talking to them properly.

So I told him I’d get on my bike and get down to the Mall outside Buckingham Palace and speak to her in the spot of her exceptional triumph.

Once in a while you sense the arrival of a truly remarkable human being. That time dawned on the Mall yesterday. For all the tragedy of a horse riding career cut brutally short by a disastrous crash with her horse five years ago, Claire Lomas is a bonny, smiling, optimistic, no nonsense woman.

She was sitting on her stool besieged by well wishers and photographers. On her lap a box full of marathon medals donated by other runners,  peeved that she had not been allowed one herself, for taking too long.

I started with a naïve question – having seen her upright and animated, I asked her how far she could walk normally. “Not at all”, she replied casually – “I can’t walk at all, I cannot even stand up unaided, I’m paralysed from the chest down”.

She was still in her bionic suit and I asked her to walk for me. Suddenly there, discretely, was Dan her husband standing behind her as a kind of eternal safety harness. Hands at the ready should she ever topple. He’d had his hands outstretched, steadying her from behind for the entire 26.2 mile marathon effort.

I risked asking Claire if she thought she could ever walk even better than she does with the bionic suit. “I am sure one day I shall walk again unaided – I don’t know how, but one day!”

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Five years ago Claire Lomas was a top-rated event jumper. But one day her horse bolted and she smashed into a tree. She was left paralysed from the chest down. She would never walk again. Except she has.

Today she finally crossed the marathon finishing line outside Buckingham Palace, having walked the route over 16 days in a bionic suit.

She cannot walk naturally, but with enormous physical effort and coordination she is able to tip her upper body so that her legs connect with powered support in her trousers and enable her, with crutches, to walk.

She managed a mile and a half a day. It was a staggering achievement, and I had the huge privilege of going down to the Mall to talk with her. You will be inspired and uplifted by what she told me.

A tremendous air of excitement here in Paris. Even before getting here, it was clear that French society is profoundly different from our own.

St Pancras International, boarding the Eurostar, all the staff are French. Every one of them that I encountered was going to vote, either in the London Borough of Camden or in Kensington.

There are, they claimed, 100,000 French voters in London, and they all expect to queue, as they did in the first round of the French presidential elections, for several hours.

But it’s not just France that’s voting today, but Greece and Serbia. The Serb election is interesting because it is the first in which the independence of Kosovo does not seem to have been an issue.

Greece foreshadows an unprecedented event in which the two parties that have dominated Greek politics for as long as anyone can remember, both look likely to be ground to electoral dust.

The extremes – the Communists and the extreme right wing – are likely to generate together 15-20 per cent of the poll, and a myriad small parties together are likely to produce a pretty anarchic outcome. An outcome that could send shockwaves through the eurozone and see Greece’s own departure from it.

Here in France, you have a straight right-left contest for the presidency, and plenty of personality to boot. And yet everyone you talk to here thinks nothing too much will change.

That’s not the view of the eurozonistas encamped in Frankfurt, who fear that if Mr Hollande wins he will follow up on his word to try to renegotiate the processes for reforming the eurozone itself.

On the lighter side, if he does win, Mr Hollande will become the first president of any country to be called by the name of another.

We shall be live in Paris, Athens and London tonight, and we’re on at 6.30. I don’t usually ask you to join us when I’m blogging, but today I do. It’s a moment of history for all our tomorrows.

Whilst politicians wrangle about how to reform the House of Lords, nothing exposes the urgency of reforms to the House of Commons more than the Murdoch report by the Commons Select Committee on Culture Media and Sport. 

One of the most hard hitting reports of recent times, resulting from one of the intensive investigations will result in almost no Parliamentary action. Not because, on essential elements, there was a split on the Committee, but because even where there was no dissent – in finding that the Committee had in effect been lied to – there is no current consequence of worth.

MPs can open the window on wrongdoing, but they can do all but nothing when they find it. Exposing it has little direct effect. Indeed the share price of the Murdoch entity – News Corp’s share price reflected this, closing up 0.9 per cent at $19.79 in the immediate aftermath of the Committee’s report. Publish and be exonerated seems to be the mantra that flows from what happened in the Commons yesterday.

So far, Commons reforms have centered on reducing the absurdly large number of MPs from 650 to 600 at the next election. Many regard even the latter number as too large. Power is centered in the executive. Most individuals winning election to Parliament aspire to Ministerial careers. Consequently “holding the executive to account” is seen by many as a “second class” activity. 

In the US where the Executive is separated from the Legislature, holding the Executive to account is perceived to be the highest form of politics. Indeed the fear is that MPs hold back in investigating the Executive precisely because they are themselves jockeying to join it.

Powerless MPs probing vast multi-national businesses with a direct access to newspapers have remained eternally vulnerable to lies and worse. It emerged that the very Select Committee that investigated the Murdoch Empire had itself been subjected to attempts to smear the private lives of the MPs carrying out the investigation.

Hence the call by a number of MPs for such investigative bodies to be armed with the power of subpoena and the giving of evidence on oath.

Even now, the legal experts that flank the Speaker in the Commons are trawling the statutes for punishments that are fit for the misdemeanor of “misleading the House”. Will they find a cell in the Tower of London? As of last night the speculation centered on an arcane provision that allows for the detention of offenders “within Parliament”.

The Murdoch Empire operatives have done parliament a favor. They have exposed the antiquity and weakness of our own political system, and its inability to bring miscreants to book. To resort to the word MPs themselves coined of Rupert Murdoch – it is “unfit” for purpose. But don’t hold your breath against anything being done about it.

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You could not have written it – from the tragic and mysterious body in the bag; to the hidden paths of influence in the body politic.  News is almost becoming an exaggerated parody of life. Is it the social network that has exploded private Britain and secret Britain into the centre of our news consumption?

Although the digital age has played a part, not least by email, I suspect the widespread understanding of the utterly troubled economic times in which we live is beginning to weaken the glue that keeps lids shut and windows fogged. But it is something else too.

Just as we begin to assume the inquest into the spook-strewn circumstance of Gareth Williams’s death will end inconclusively; so we are confronted by the coziness of the office contacts between the Ministry of Culture and the Murdoch empire. The shock lies less in the revelation than in the fact that any of it is revealed at all. Might the death of Gareth Williams once have been concealed from the public, perhaps through the use of a D-Notice?  Were we allowed to watch the Denning Inquiry into the Profumo affair, live on television 50 years ago? Fifty years ago, D-Notices flew without even the affected news hounds knowing of them. Fifty years ago, our live television was dark when it came to national inquiries.

The government went for exposure when it came to address hacking in the Murdochs’ News of the World. Yesterday we saw the opening fusillades of their aggressive defensive warfare. Today, Rupert.

Read more: Will Murdochs’ evidence embarrass politicians?

So is that hush-hush secret life of complicity at the top over? From China to America it remains the stuff of the public-private interface. The revolving door that, for example, in the UK has led from the Secret Service to the boardroom of one of the world’s biggest oil companies is not stilled. The traffic of secret influence at the top is the stuff of tyranny and democracy alike.

What David Cameron has done, intentionally or otherwise, is to open a window with a focus and access perhaps unseen since Watergate.  Did anyone advise against it? Perhaps. Where will it lead? We do not know. But I suspect already that it is one of the most important developments in Britain’s public life in a generation.

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It wasn’t quite gamekeeper-turned-poacher, but there was something bizarre about appearing in front of MPs to be questioned about one of my passions – cycling.

The transport select committee has been examining cycle safety in the light of The Times campaign following the desperate damage inflicted upon one of its young star reporters by a turning truck – she is still in a coma six months on.

I appeared with the editor of the Times, James Harding, and with a cycle activist, the vice-president of CTC.

It was hard to divine where the committee is going. They didn’t seem to like the idea of compulsion when it comes to making provision for cyclists. I was asked whether new urban developments should be compelled to make provision for cycle ways. I said yes.

We talked about training motorists – including interacting with cyclists as part of the driving test. We also talked about improving training for cyclists.

But above all, it was accepted that amid the vast surge in cycling in Britain, the present situation is now beyond dangerous.

We asked for leadership in the government – one minister whose sole job was to be responsible for all cycling matters. We wanted a joined-up cycle strategy, and expenditure on infrastructure which would eventually save money in terms of health, education and environment.

I can’t say that anything’s going to change overnight. But it certainly felt like the first time in a long time that the political and media classes had put cycling anywhere near the top of the nation’s priorities.

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It’s not often you want to start the day with far right French nationalist’s words ringing in your ears. But Marine Le Pen’s words after winning nearly one in five French votes in the presidential election have an eerie ring.

Ms Le Pen spoke of a people fed up with the “two main parties”; fed up too with paying the price for the “misperformance of the banks” with which she says successive governments have been in league with; fed up too, with immigration.

Does Bradford West speak of this? Hard to tell. But love him or hate him, the nature of George Galloway’s victory has not been seen in 50 years. Ms Le Pen’s 18 per cent in France is also without modern precedent. Both votes speak of discontent with the status quo.

Read more: Hollande edges Sarkozy in French election first round

But think too of Scotland. The wholesale demolition of the “two main parties” and their replacement by a nationalist party which was once as far out on the fringes of life as once was Ms Le Pen’s National Front.

If you add in the vote of the hard left in France – 11 per cent –  the two extremes in France polled together more than each of the other two main parties – 29 per cent to Hollande’s 28 per cent, and Sarkozy’s 27 per cent. Something is happening here and it is happening in a country very much more like Britain than Greece is.

Speaking of Greece, watch the case that Greek lawyers are taking to the International Criminal Court charging the “the two main parties” with genocide. I’m not suggesting the case has a cat’s chance, but it reflects the nationwide desperation in Greece with austerity, deprivation, and widespread emigration. Greece has a general election all too dangerously soon.

Sterling perhaps gives us a sense of detachment. Our borrowing rates on the markets are good. But our austerity regime also risks alienation. The belief, right or wrong, that “we the people” are paying the bankers’ price is widespread.

Strangely, the novelty of coalition politics may be disguising what is going on beneath the surface. We can hardly determine what is really happening by analysing one Galloway.

But the political classes in Europe are in trouble. France tells us the extremes are in play. No one knows what Greece will tell us. What will the Local elections in the UK tell us? Anything?  As the membership of the UK’s political parties plummets, is London happy with a Mayoral choice that comes down to “the two main parties”? Don’t yet hold your breath for a Green or Independent breakthrough.

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