Toby Young, in this week’s Spectator, relates that Paul Staines (the well-known Tory blogger Guido Fawkes) said to him at last week’s Spectator party, “I gave up defending anything years ago. You only get attacked for it.” They were talking about Young’s expectation that he would suffer for defending Rupert Murdoch as he has done over recent weeks and proceeded to do again in the Spectator article which followed. Of Young’s defence more presently; at this point I will simply say that I agree with every word of it: indeed, my wife, drawing my attention to his piece, said that Young must have been hacking our phone: “He’s quoted you more or less verbatim” (the bit about hacking our phone was a joke). I, too, think that it’s about time we got things into perspective by remembering what we all owe Murdoch, as well as the dangers our indebtedness has over the years brought in terms of his growing and now excessive political influence (hugely inflated by the eager subservience of Tony Blair). There is, of course, much to be said against the whole Murdoch phenomenon as it has come to operate over recent years, and most of it has been obsessively rehearsed by his enemies, who have whipped up the British public into (to quote Macaulay) “one of its periodical fits of morality”, than which, he said, "we know no spectacle so ridiculous". But this isn’t simply ridiculous: it’s sinister – this isn’t just the public in a fit of morality: it’s the public whipped up into a lynch mob, the public in a fit not just of morality but of vengeful frenzy, in which nothing will satisfy the tricoteuses but the heads of all concerned, and the driving out of Murdoch himself from anything to do with our media. Already, there is talk by little Miliband – who is relishing his big moment (let him; it won’t last) – of the “dismantling” of the Murdoch “empire”: you’d think it was the Congress of Vienna, with Murdoch expelled to Elba, and the country at last emerging from a Murdoch-inspired political servitude into a new golden age. Well, before I go any further, and for the sake of balance, let me quote a journalist I respect, Charles Moore, hardly a bloodstained Jacobin, on the death of the News of the World. I have stated my own view that the death of the New of the World, despite the fact that I myself woudn’t have it in the house, was a tragic event (as the death of any newspaper always is): in the same issue of the Spectator as Toby Young’s defence, Charles Moore expresses his own view on the death of the News of the World, in words which I have to admit are difficult to argue against, words which will no doubt resonate with many of my readers: