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.

You can follow Jon on Twitter @jonsnowC4

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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Beyond your immediate work colleagues, your immediate family and or lovers, can you think of anyone you might have seen 26 times… or even 16 times in the past year? It’s tough to think of anyone. Sadly in these frenetic times one sees even one’s best friend far less frequently. Today I shall have a fast lunch with my best friend from university. Alas I have seen him fewer than six times since the coalition came to power.

Maybe the release of the lists of ministerial meetings with top level News International operatives needs putting into context. How often did they meet BAE Systems, or Tesco, or John Lewis, or M&S? Hard to imagine any minister meeting any of them anything like as often. And Labour’s figures in their 13 years in power will be no better.

We have always laughed up our sleeves at US corporate/political corruption. We have sniggered at Berlusconi’s antics in Italy. We have rarely inspected our own activities. Many thought it all much cleaner here and if it happened, it was generally elegantly laundered through the honours system so that no one much noticed. We were wrong, and wrong perhaps not to ask.

We have basked in the “Ministerial Code” which keeps all these things spotless…except can anyone remember the last time that a cabinet secretary ruled that the “code” had been broken?

Don’t expect anything quick from all this. We now have no fewer than 10 different inquiries under way, let alone the ongoing criminal investigation. In some cases it will be years before they report.

In the meantime, we must trust the oxygen of publicity. Will a  single minister dare to meet a single major Murdoch empire figure again? Will a single minister even raise the phone to one, let alone drop a letter or an email to one. Transparency, the watchful eye, the informed mind may, for now, serve to protect us from further compromise.

Now, how many times have I seen Granny in the past 12 months?

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Flush with just about all the bad news any of us can absorb, I made my way last night to see the Tate Modern’s vast blockbuster Miro show. Entering the building with friends I felt the cares of the world slip away and prepared to indulge my soul. And what an indulging!

The first room displays beautifully observed realist painting of his childhood home in Barcelona. I say realist, but something surreal begins to emerge in each. Then the deluge, the explosion into what he became famous for – full blown, at times angry, radical, surrealism. It kicks off with ‘Dog Barking at the Moon’ with a ladder disappearing into the black.

Suddenly I was back. Although Miro was addressing the repression of Catalan identity, the seed bed of the Civil war to come – war, exile, fascism, suffering were all in his pallet. Yet somehow now Miro was speaking to our present day.

Norway, Somalia, Murdoch, and Winehouse… somehow the turmoil of each is there on the walls of Tate Modern. At one point, there is a great sweep of some fifty lithographs depicting toothy ogres, dictators and their innocent victims. The monstrous massacre of young people on a Norwegian island; the suffering of nomadic Somalis in the Horn of Africa; the consequences of unaccountable power that has wormed its way into all public life; the death of a single talented tortured soul. All reach out from a time when Miro was struggling with fascism at home and abroad. Having fled fascist Spain for sublime Paris, he is, all too soon, forced to flee Nazi storm troopers for restless rebellion back home in his beloved Catalonia.

Maybe this is what art does – exercises our present emotions with the consequences of other times experienced by the artist’s head and eye.

But Miro finds vast canvasses of peace too. A wonderful run of three vast rich blue canvases. Followed by another triptych of huge white-based canvases representing “Hope of a Condemned Man”. For the old student rebel, his burnt, holed, placard canvases from 1968 have a particular resonance.

You find what you find in a show like this. But I emerged somehow reassured and purged of the thought that this is in any way the worst of times. It is not. Today’s vile behaviours are aberrant. In Miro’s heyday tyranny was the norm.

Catch it before Miro, Miro is off the wall – an exhibition of his work on this scale will not come again in our time.

@jonsnowC4

In his own words, his integrity is intact. So did he fall or was he pushed? The resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson is the biggest and most definitive moment yet in a scandal that has so far claimed two CEOs, two editors and a fair number of  News International employees.

In amongst all the heat of tribute, charge and counter charge, are the words of the Mayor Boris Johnson who in paying tribute to the Met Chief touched the subject that dared not speak its name. The Mayor suggested in a late night interview that one benefit of what had happened was that a window could now be opened upon the the central question of whether close police links with the News of the World played any part in closing down any of the varied police investigations into the hacking affair.

Those links extend back at least a decade. John Stevens was the Metropolitan Police Commissioner (2000 – 2005) during the crucial early phase of the phone hacking matter. Upon retirement he went to the Lords and was hired as a  columnist for the News of the World. Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman resigned in 2007 and became a columnist of the News of the World’s sister paper, the Times.

The Mayor has raised the question surrounding police/News International relationships and influence. But there is now another even bigger issue in play. How did the politicians’ relationships with News International impact both on the police, and on the hacking investigation? The nature of these complex, tripartite, and largely unseen relations now lie at the heart of the judge led inquiry, the police inquiry, and the MPs’ Select Committee investigations.

Largely forgotten, connected to all this there is the still unresolved murder of a private investigator, Daniel Morgan who was murdered in South London in 1987. Five Metropolitan Police inquiries have targeted personnel in both the Metropolitan Police force itself and individuals linked with the News of the World. They have resulted in a number of attempted trials, all of which have had to be abandoned.

With each passing day the scale and reach of this scandal does indeed describe Britain’s Watergate. Many argue that Watergate changed very little in America, beyond the removal of the President himself. Will that prove to be the story here too?

Follow Jon Snow on Twitter: @jonsnowC4

The shock is less the content of the News International disclosures, than the fact that finally any of it has now been disclosed. The Twittersphere is littered with questions today: “Why didn’t you do more? Why didn’t you tell us”. They are questions I ask myself.

It was under Mrs Thatcher’s Premiership that standing in Downing Street, covering another story altogether, I spotted Rupert Murdoch going in by the front door. I saw him again going through the door under John Major and again under Tony Blair. I did not think nothing of it, but I was doing something else. I did not see him going through David Cameron’s front door, because by last year the entrance was more commonly through the back entrance.

So much of the “action”, even the “hysteria” surrounding the Murdochs and News International appeared to be about commercial resentment, and envy. And yet….I, like others worried about a man with quite so much media power having quite so much access to the highest echelons of political power. There was also the developing oddity, that whilst successive governments regulated other markets and prevented the likes of Tescos from getting close to a 40 per cent share of those markets, there appeared to be little resistance to allowing Rupert Murdoch that kind of share of the media market.

We knew too of the police links with News International. A prestigious police officer  would retire and end up with a column in the News of the World – Lord John Stevens, the former  Metropolitan Police Chief, and the former anti-terror boss at Scotland Yard, Andy Hayman. This was more about influence than payments. Although Channel 4  has done some brilliant stuff on elements on what we now know, along with others too, there was less willingness to throw the vast resources that would be required at a wholesale take-apart of the Murdoch empire. Few broadcasters and few newspapers (with the notable exceptions of the Guardian and Private Eye) wanted to take it.

More from Channel 4 News: Has Rupert Murdoch been thinking the unthinkable?

As for payments to the police for information – by papers other than the News of the World, yes we have long known that that went on too. From my experience, it affects almost every force in the land.

The relationship between print and broadcasting has always been tense. We both resent and depend upon each other “out on the street”. But these days, the power of print is reducing so fast, that that tension is becoming less obvious. This is one element in what has happened with News International. Amid the dog-eat-dog world of journalism, despite News International’s vast multinational well connected strength, it has become more possible to risk questioning what is going on.

Thus hindsight provides us with this damning tableau. Media moguls with undue influence at the highest political level (as admitted by David Cameron on Friday) became too close. The police manifested a huge reluctance to investigate the notes of News of the World’s hired sleuth Glen Mulcaire, (admitted by Assistant Commander John Yates over the weekend); and the often dormant complicity of the wider media world beyond. What a fertile garden for weeds to take root. This infernal coalition of failure is precisely why this does indeed represent Britain’s Watergate moment. It may not involve “plumbers”. But it has involved us, we the media ‘gardeners’, and we should have done more to assault the weeds on our patch.

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The sacking of Andy Gray represents a major watershed in our social revolution. I grew up in a world in which sexism was the order of the day. I shudder at the sort of stuff that was commonplace when I was emerging from adolescence.

Watching football on the Kop when I was at uni, the likes of Andy Gray were commonplace, the views too.One swallow doesn’t make a summer – though it may represent a glimpse of spring.

Commerce and advertising have a lot of catching up to do. Will the advertising regulator go where Sky Sports have finally got it together to tread? No one could have been confident that Sky would risk its stand and one suspects there may have been more to its decision to fire Gray than we yet know.

For all the brickbats that have been thrown at the Murdoch empire of late, praise is due for this emblematic outcome. Doubtless the discovery that at least 50 per cent of their viewers in their own poll rejected the commentator’s sexist language will have played a part.

Noticably, Rupert Murdoch himself appears to have cancelled his onward travel to the Davos Economic Forum, according to the FT, to concentrate on his continuing efforts to satisfy ministers on his desire to take over the whole of BSkyB.

What a week it is proving for Murdoch. Coulson and Gray gone, his business bid stalled. But shed no tears. There’s no danger he will need to outstay the 90 days that might prejudice his tax status. He’s on track to secure the takeover according to a well-informed source who called me last night.

You don’t invest in your relations with Downing Street for the four decades in which he has, without tangible results. News Corp is with us to stay, big, and will stay big. You can get the man out of Downing Street but can’t get Downing Street out of the man.

At least we can celebrate a watershed in combating sexism. Whether we can celebrate a similar moment in phone hacking- the jury’s out. Well actually it hasn’t even been summoned… yet.

Is Rupert Murdoch‘s take-over bid for BSkyB going to be resolved in the end by the judges? As the Guardian details contacts between the new minister tasked with making the decision – Jeremy Hunt – and his contacts with James Murdoch after the bid was announced, is it now inevitable that the issue will end in the courts? At first sight, Vince Cable‘s own foot-shooting seemed to indicate that in effect his “war with Murdoch” comment ensured that the bid would now go through. But now that the media is scrutinising every word Mr Hunt has ever made on the matter and now every meeting he may or may not have had with Murdoch elements, methinks I hear m’learned friend knocking at the door.

2011 promises to be a prosperous one for at least one branch of the Bar.

If this turns out to be my final pre-Xmas blog… even my last of 2010, thank you for your intersection; let’s have even more in 2011. But I can’t promise that I wont be blogging again in the next few days, not least because I’m working up to and including Christmas Day.