The shock of revelation

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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