Murdoch's newspaper under investigation in Britain

decided to publish the nekkid pictures

It's a ballsy move

Edis on Charge 7 "prosecuting say..... material police would have wanted were cleared out of Brooks' country home and taken to NI offices"

Brooks conspired with her assistant Cheryl Carter to remove her journalist notebooks from the archive and they have disappeared.

Jury are told on the Friday before the No TW closed Rebekah Brooks' PA, Cheryl Carter removed her journalistic notebooks from an archive.

Edis: she did something similar with husband Charles, Mark Hanna, head of security and others, clearing computers out of her country home.

Edis: "Material was collected from their London flat and taken to the same place.' (NI offices at Thomas More Square

Edis "This was material in possession of CEO of the company.... and would have been relevant to police inquiry."

Mr Edis: "That is a classic case of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, the prosecution say."

Edis "This was discovered as a result of an accident which was rather bad luck for the conspirators."

The jury are told Mrs Brooks' notebooks have never been found.

Mr Edis says Rebekah Brooks, Cheryl Carter, Charles Brooks and Mark Hanna are charged with the perverting the course of justice charge.

BREAKING: Miskiw, Thurlbeck, Weatherup - News Editors have all pleaded guilty to count one

Glenn Mulcaire has pleaded guilty to hacking phone of Milly Dowler, Crown tell jury.

Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup - No W staffers have pleaded guilty to phone hacking conspiracy we can now reveal

Edis "That explains why you're not trying anyone in that first count list... and this is proof of a conspiracy"

Edis: Greg Miskiw, Neville Thurlbeck and James Weatherup, NOTW newsdesk Editors, have also pleaded guilty to hacking conspiracy

Three No W news editors have admitted phone hacking, say Crown - Miskiw, Thurlbeck and Weatherup.

Jury told that private investigator Glenn Muclaire has pleaded guilty this year to hacking phones, so he doesn't appear at this trial.

One of the joys of cricket as a spectator sport is that, every so often, you get to see people in a role for which they are not at all well suited. This is rare in professional sport where, in general, all participants are doing something they're so unthinkably good at, displaying such unimaginable levels of skill, that onlookers' attempts at empathy for the players' specific aims and problems are rendered absurd. Very few of us haranguing Andy Murray for an errant backhand from the comfort of our living rooms do so without a slight twinkle of self-mockery. But that's not always needed with cricket, because bowlers have to bat.

Some bowlers are very good at batting but others are really not. Many are not nearly good enough to do so professionally and a rare few, despite all the practice they put in, display less aptitude than an average member of the public. And yet they sometimes have to face top-class professional bowling. This can be brilliantly funny and nail-bitingly dramatic and occasionally, in a way even HBO hasn't mastered, a combination of the two. When a team is in a tight spot and a gangly fast bowler is required to score some runs, or conserve his wicket, in the face of an opposing fast bowler's most ferocious deliveries, it's like a slapstick comedy, an exhilarating thriller with an everyman protagonist, and a classic episode of The Generation Game combined. It makes for enthralling viewing.

Another entertaining figure flailing against a pace attack with no observable hand-eye co-ordination is the Earl of Cardigan. The 60-year-old aristocrat is currently living on benefits in a lodge on his family estate, of which he is struggling to regain control. He's just had a baby with his second wife, but his daughter by his first marriage has a restraining order out on him and he's also not in contact with his son – "which is a great sadness to me," he says. But his main concern is to stop his estate's trustees from selling Tottenham House, the ancestral home. "We built it in 1820 and have owned the dirt it was built on since the Normans… It is my job to hand it on to the next generation" – if they deign to get back in touch.

As 31st hereditary warden of Savernake Forest, this is a role Cardigan was born to – but sadly only in the literal not the idiomatic sense, as he seems to be useless at it. It's difficult to be sure, since the aristocracy are so assiduous in compensating for the material advantages their children receive by giving them psyche-wreckingly unpleasant upbringings, but one can't help suspecting that the current earl has played a good hand rather poorly over the last few decades. Still, you can't question his sincerity.

The posh don't have a monopoly on ill-fitting roles: I don't think Paul Dacre is particularly posh and Rupert Murdoch, being Australian, is off the whole posh/not posh graph. Yet this unlikely pair are the most prominent in a band of have-a-go heroes who are charged with protecting Britain's ancient principle of freedom of speech. They could hardly be worse suited to the task. They're extremely controversial, somewhat shadowy figures and few believe they would act out of anything other than ruthless self-interest. Now, obviously, their self-interest and the public interest aren't necessarily in conflict merely because they have been on numerous occasions in the past. But that's a delicate argument to make and neither is renowned for his diplomacy.

Fun though their crackpot quest sounds, the situation is potentially grave. All three main political parties have collaborated with a pressure group that campaigns against press intrusion on a form of regulation that is underpinned by parliamentary authority – their proposed royal charter could only be amended by two-thirds majorities in both houses – which means by politicians. It would definitely be giving politicians power over the press, maybe only in a small way, but certainly in an unprecedented way. And most of the press hate it.

"Well, they would, wouldn't they," you might say. "But there's a cross-party consensus in favour of it: all the politicians like it." Well, they would, wouldn't they, is my response. The press's own pitch of an alternative charter was turned down by a subcommittee of the privy council (the medieval body that deals with charters and privies and dragons and the like). This particular subcommittee consisted solely of seven coalition ministers – so the plan was stopped by seven advocates of the alternative plan, seven government politicians. If that's how regulation of the press is to be conducted from now on, we all need to start shitting ourselves.

There's a general feeling that something had to be done about all the phone hacking and harassment but, as Ian Hislop said recently, things have been done: "They closed down the biggest newspaper in the country. Scores of people have been arrested… lots of people are being prosecuted. It's a big result." And the main issue that people were shocked by – phone hacking – was already illegal. The police failure to enforce that law shouldn't really have any bearing on the regulation of what the press is permitted to print.

The trouble is that the press, particularly the tabloid press, has made itself so loathed that they're difficult people to defend or sympathise with. Many of them deserved a comeuppance, so it's easy to focus on the nasty people having a nasty time and ignore the potentially disastrous collateral damage to our ancient freedom to say, write and print what we like without any permission or official sanction.

Murdoch and Dacre are bowlers desperately wielding bats, the last people the cause of freedom should be relying on. It would be fun to watch if I didn't care so much about the result. They're the worst possible poster boys for a free press but that doesn't mean they're wrong about this and we mustn't be distracted into seeing the debate tribally: "Whose gang are you in – the Daily Mail's or Milly Dowler's?" Many of the people currently deriving a living from the tabloid industry may well deserve ruin, but their unmerited prosperity is a price worth paying for the continued function of an accountable democracy.

Dear David

I've been a big fan over the years, I've enjoyed your witty asides, acerbic observations, character acting and voiceovers. In fact, despite your ubiquity, you are consistently well above average. I never normally criticise fellow entertainers unless a) I respect them and b) they come out with ill-informed and superficial dross on a serious issue. I'm afraid that on this occasion you qualify.

Now I know we shouldn't expect forensic attention to detail from your column, as it is supposed to entertain as well as inform. As someone fairly experienced in comedy myself, I understand that you can make a few generalisations, exploiting the odd prejudice here and there for comic effect, but last week your cricketing anecdote and subsequent musings weren't up there with your most rib-tickling stuff. So I can only assume it's, er, what you actually think.

You hobble yourself from the outset by challenging something which no one is proposing: silencing Paul Dacre. No one is saying that, not Leveson, not Hacked Off, not the Royal Charter.

"Press freedom is essential for us," you say. Wow, you're really going out on a limb! No one disagrees: it's like saying you're anti-cancer. You seem to have bought into the reductive polarisation of a debate that most of the press frame in their own interests.

Leveson himself said that though parts of the press had "wreaked havoc with the lives of innocent people", this should not mean press freedom should be "jeopardised or that the press should be delivered into the arms of the state". To suggest it, he added, was to "grossly misrepresent" what had been happening over the 16 months of the inquiry.

Your description of Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre as "have-a-go heroes… charged with protecting Britain's ancient principle of freedom of speech" is laughable. They are protecting their freedom to profiteer by any means necessary.

Hacked Off, by contrast, isn't trying to please shareholders: no one is paying me to write this, David, we just don't like bullies. If Murdoch and Dacre on their white chargers with you in the background (probably a pikeman) were really about freedom of speech they would have covered the hacking scandal, which had celebrity, royals, politicians, criminals, conspiracy, murder victims – everything their papers love to cover. If they believed in freedom of speech they would have covered the inquiry into their own industry with a soupçon of balance instead of leading the great former Sunday Times editor, Sir Harry Evans, to say last week that "the exaggerations of some papers comparing Britain to Zimbabwe are so ridiculous, so self-interested as to destroy the very freedom of speech they claim to protect". Guess how many papers reported this? None.

You astonishingly describe the search for effective accountability by our democratically elected representatives and a judge-led inquiry (amazing that your long piece fails to mention Leveson once) as a "crackpot quest". The "quest" is not state regulation but yet another chance for self-regulation with an independent inspection body to make sure it is not the Press Complaints Commission all over again, which I'm sure you will agree, David, was rubbish.

You need a law to set it up, just like with the Judicial Appointments Commission which appoints judges and is totally independent. To satisfy the press's demand that there should not be a new press law, the prime minister imposed a Royal Charter. But this one can only be changed via a two-thirds majority vote in both Houses of Parliament. This prevents future governments watering things down to suck up to Dacre, Murdoch and Co. Sounds good to me.

You moan about seven privy councillors rejecting the press's own charter – which was the son of the PCC, business as usual. The government, supported by the opposition, along with most of the country (as demonstrated by successive polls) rejected it. Critical analysis of their dodgy proposal was never rebutted by any of their massed ranks of lawyers or lobbyists.

You see, when you get into the nitty-gritty of what they won't agree to, it all falls apart. Oh, and four of those privy councillors were Tories. Stephen Fry described their disposition best when he tweeted after the PM's response to Leveson: "It would seem David Cameron's address is no longer Number 10 Downing Street: it's now Flat 2, Rupert Murdoch's arse."

Let me give you an example of what the rubbish part of the press don't like about the very modest Royal Charter: equal prominence of apologies. Let's just suppose you read a headline, something really awful about you like, "David Mitchell likes to have sex with animals… small ones… a lot." (I know it's a bit annoying but multiply your irritation by a thousand and you may get a taste of what it was like to be Bristol landlord Chris Jefferies, who was accused – without a shred of evidence – of murdering Joanna Yeates.) Now let's say that you can demonstrate quite swiftly that the headline is untrue through personal testimonies (I would vouch for you) and CCTV footage. How would you feel if, after the paper did a mea culpa, they printed the correction/apology in a one-inch column on page 16? Happy? Or really, really happy? OK, now imagine you've been accused of pickpocketing the dead on a football field after a disaster. Just to sell more newspapers. Not so funny now is it?

There was a litany of abusive, exploitative behaviour heard by Leveson, of innocent people being monstered, none of which could remotely be described as being in the public interest. This goes way beyond the hacking scandal which took years to be uncovered, because even though it was widespread and known to be illegal, it was tolerated. Ditto the Motorman data-theft blagging scandal, where the personal details – including bank accounts– of thousands of people were illegally obtained and sold to the press.

You say "the failure of the police shouldn't have any bearing on the regulation of what the press is permitted to print". Regulation is not about what the press is permitted to print. It is proper enforcement of the industry's own code of practice. As Leveson's report said: "The board should not have the power to prevent publication of any material, by anyone, at any time." Have you not read it? Or are you just repeating something someone else has said?

You fail to point to a single line in the whole of Leveson or of the charter that would prevent investigative or public interest journalism. Or a single witness at Leveson arguing that it should. Or a single politician wanting to do so. Because there is none.

David, if your article were a schoolboy's essay, it would score highly for style. But it would be covered in red ink with frequent use of the word "sloppy", finishing with: "See me."

Barkey: The United Kingdom: Where the only people allowed to spy on you are the government.

Rupert Murdoch probably maintained enough distance that pinning anything on him would be almost impossible. All he had to do is not talk about what exactly he wants done, just in general terms: If he said: "Do some digging" that can mean anything he says it does: BLAM! Reasonable doubt. It's the same problem the police have pinning anything on big crime bosses. Or the same reason we've never found a written order from Hitler for the Holocaust; all you need to do is make what you want done in a general way clear and let the subordinates interpret it in the way you want.